WHENCE STATES FORM, WHY STATES FAIL AND HOW STATES CAN RE-BUILD: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CRISES OF ‘STATES OF FRAGILITIES’ IN AFRICA

Abstract

The inter-state system is increasingly evolving into a global village of sort in the light of the ever widening gap of social inequalities between countries of the North and the South with its attendant spike in human miseries across the South. This has been occasioned by failing states capacities to deliver needed political goods for their citizenry, as especially rife in Africa in the recent time. Reasons for these trends are manifold and have been aptly captured by the current discourse on the crises of state fragilities in Africa in attempts to establish several causal linkages between multiple externalities and endogenous factors. This paper posits that, both external and endogenous factors are all complicit in the slide towards fragilities by African states. A plausible explanandum here seemingly will be that, ‘whence states form, why states fail, and how states can re-build’ are all stage-processes linked dialectically to their potentials to rebound or slide back into fragilities, failures or eventual collapse. The paper argues that, a state must already be weakened internally in its constitutive framework before other externalities can aggravate its slide into fragilities and eventual collapse. Therefore, the paper avers that, potentialities for such malaises are logically situated at the roots of state origins. Spike in numbers of state fragilities undoubtedly presents us with perhaps one of the most fundamental of all sundry strategic challenges to prospects for sustainable global peace and security in the 21^st century. The paper highlights the strategic imports of these ominous trends and attempts to thinker out possible pragmatic responses to counter them in order to reposition African and indeed the global community on a better stand-plank so as to promote our shared ethos of a common humanity.