States of fragility: stabilisation and its implications for humanitarian action

Stabilization includes a combination of military, humanitarian, political and economic activities to control, contain and manage areas affected by armed conflict and complex emergencies. This paper explores the evolution of international stabilization efforts and their significance for humanitarian action. It uses case studies from Afghanistan, Colombia, Haiti, Somalia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste to scrutinize the nature and evolution of stabilization efforts in different country settings. The paper explores the evolution and content of ‘stabilization’ as a discourse and set of policies, and the challenges of translating these into practice. It considers the relationship between ‘stabilization’ and international humanitarian action.

The analysis finds that:

• Stabilization agendas are exerting a powerful influence over Western foreign policy towards fragile states and over United Nations engagement in these contexts
• The focus of international policy discussions is on experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq which obscures the much wider geographical and historical reach and significance of stabilization
• Humanitarian actors are hardly involved in the stabilization discourse despite the political and security conditions shaping humanitarian crises and responses to them
• If stabilization encompasses a combination of military, humanitarian, political and economic instruments, it exhibits a much broader transformative, geographical and historical scope
• International interventions to security threats posed by weak and fragile states involve ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ military and civilian interventions leading to the securitization of North–South relations
• Humanitarian actors are concerned about the growing engagement of the military in humanitarian activities which this paper says represents a fundamental challenge.
  

The paper highlights the following implications:

• Many humanitarian actors are involved in activities that overlap with aspects of stabilization like recovery, peace-building, development and human-rights work
• Any coherence between these spheres will be contingent on whether humanitarians trust the stabilization efforts
• If Western governments prioritize security objectives over human welfare, humanitarian actors will resist although this will be tempered by their continuing financial reliance on the donor governments pushing the stabilization
• Humanitarian action might be compromised or co-opted by competing political and security objectives which is why humanitarians remain diffident, defensive and hostile
• It is important to look beyond Afghanistan and Iraq because these interventions will not offer precedents for future international stabilization interventions
• The nature of stabilization may change, but powerful states’ political and strategic interest in ‘stabilizing’ weaker states and contexts affected by war is likely to persist.