What measures are used to assess if a country or state is fragile?

What measures are used to assess if a country or state is fragile? And is that the best term to use?

Defining fragility is problematic, especially as it may be in the eye of the beholder: a well-known critique of the adjacent concept of ‘state failure’.

You can define state fragility as a set of warning signs over potential state failure, with consequences including low and/or rapidly declining human security.

One way to define state failure is by concentrating on the role of the state, and comparing it with a norm: what does a strong state look like?

Another way is to consider state functions, and whether they are being, or can still be, carried out. What do people look to a state to deliver, and are those things still available? Is there security of livelihood and employment? Are there reasonable expectations of impartial law enforcement and settlement of disputes? Some sense that community needs and perceptions will, somehow, be registered in decision-making processes? (Further reading along these lines: Ghani, A, et al., "An Agenda for State-Building in the Twenty-First Century," The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 30(1) 2006 pp.110-7).

Apply these two approaches to perhaps the most familiar case of state failure – Somalia – and you might come to different conclusions. Before the Ethiopian invasion of 2006, the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) had gained de facto jurisdiction over a rapidly growing territory, for a variety of reasons including their efficiency at settling, by sharia law, some of the many long-running property disputes besetting the country: a legacy of the repeated displacements endured by Somali families over many years.

The internationally recognised government, the TFG, set out to oppose the UIC, and requested Ethiopian intervention, backed by US weapons supplies and logistical support. That plunged the country into a renewed civil war, which smoulders on to this day.

Are the people, the west knows as ‘pirates’, evidence of state failure, or of an effort to exact some kind of justice? Foreign ships took advantage of the laxity of state control over Somalia’s coastal waters to dump toxic chemicals and plunder fishing grounds. Local livelihoods and food security took a hit. You could say they’re now being ‘taxed’.

And throughout all this, Somaliland, in the north of the country, has been running many of its own affairs with reasonable success.
Another way to conceive of a situation where there is not a single, central authority exerting unambiguous control over everything that happens in a given territory is denoted by the term pioneered by colleagues at the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, at the University of Queensland: ‘hybridity’.

See for instance Volker Boege, Anne Brown, Kevin Clements and Anna Nolan
On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States: What is Failing – States in the Global South or Research and Politics in the West?

Taken together, the UIC, TFG and Somaliland could have been defined as a hybrid political order, and helped to build up arrangements for sharing responsibilities. Instead, this possibility became a casualty of the ‘war on terrorism’.