BY J.J. MESSNER Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, commented in a March 19 interview on Meet the Press,
Category Archives: Analysis
“To the American People” – Why Foreign Aid and Development Spending is Good for America
- 22 March 2017
Remembering Nigeria’s Women and Girls on International Women’s Day
- 08 March 2017
BY PATRICIA TAFT AND HANNAH BLYTH As we come together to celebrate International Women’s Day, we are reminded there are still many areas of the world where women and children face violence and insecurity. In Nigeria, sexual abuse and violence perpetrated against women and children remains prevalent in communities throughout the country.
Fragile States Index 2016: The Book
- 27 June 2016
BY J.J. MESSNER, NATE HAKEN ET AL. The Fragile States Index, produced by The Fund for Peace, is a critical tool in highlighting not only the normal pressures that all states experience, but also in identifying when those pressures are pushing a state towards the brink of failure. By highlighting pertinent issues in weak and […]
Europe’s Refugee Crisis Underscores Global Interconnectedness
- 27 June 2016
BY J.J. MESSNER As the civil war in Syria enters its sixth year, its effects continue to wreak havoc not only on its own war-ravaged population, but also upon countries farther afield. In the 2016 Fragile States Index, Syria was again one of the most worsened countries year-on-year, catapulting them into the list of the […]
Underlying Concerns Create a Worrying Outlook for Britain Beyond Brexit
- 24 June 2016
BY J.J. MESSNER As the dust settles on the historic Brexit vote and its effects, it is easy to focus on the near term, visible side effects. Even in the unlikely event that Britain manages to negotiate an association deal that is as good as being in the European Union, it will now no longer […]
Insurgency Defectors: Dangers and Deradicalization Processes
- 27 January 2016
BY SARAH SILVERMAN The continuous contemporary news cycle alerts us daily to the mass violence and destruction carried out by radical and extreme violent insurgent groups, and the far reaching flow on effects. Groups such as the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) in the Middle East, Boko Haram in West Africa, and al-Shabab in East Africa, […]
Kenya and Nigeria Struggle with Increasing Numbers of Internally Displaced
- 13 August 2015
BY SARAH SILVERMAN As a result of ongoing and deep-seated conflicts – particularly those in the Middle East and Africa — internal displacement is at the highest level the world has ever seen. With over 11 million newly internally displaced persons (IDPs) in 2014, there were a reported 38 million IDPs globally by the end […]
Greek Life: Understanding the Ramifications of State Fragility
- 12 August 2015
BY LOGAN CUTHBERT The term “Grexit” [1] has become a mainstay of political and economic discourse in recent times, becoming a necessary shorthand for one of the most significant challenges facing Europe in recent decades. The Grexit example demonstrates a number of important concepts: first, that in our highly globalized world, the struggles of one […]
Sparkling Finnish: Sustainable Scandinavia
- 17 June 2015
BY HANNAH BLYTH AND J.J. MESSNER Every year, the most stable end of the Fragile States Index appears to tell a familiar story. Since the Fund for Peace began assessing all major countries in 2006, Scandinavia has held a near-monopoly on the least fragile end of the Index.
Looking Beneath the Total Score: United States
- 17 June 2015
BY NATE HAKEN As the United States heads into a heated political campaign season, candidates are beginning to frame their take on the social, economic, and political track the country is on and what they would do to calibrate those trajectories. Certainly, to listen to pundits you might suppose that the U.S. is either going […]