Exiting the Fragility Trap

David Carment is a political scientist and professor of international affairs at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, and Fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute (CGAI). He is also the editor of the Canadian Foreign Policy Journal. His research interests include the international dimensions of ethnic conflict including diaspora, early warning, peacekeeping, conflict prevention, and Canadian foreign policy analysis.Yiagadeesen Samy is an economist and the director of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University. He has published widely on issues related to international and development economics, and his current research interests include state fragility, aid effectiveness, domestic resource mobilization, and income inequality, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa and small, developing island states.

"This is an important and original work. Given the evergreen interest in the topic and the countries discussed, it is likely to be widely cited and discussed. It both effectively engages in intellectual brush-clearing within a tangled and overgrown field and links its more streamlined conceptual developments to well-developed case studies that hew closely to the theory." "One of this book's many strengths is how Carment and Samy elucidate and convey both analytical and empirical information without relying on jargon, thus making the volume accessible to a wide range of scholars and practitioners. Furthermore, their use of a vast trove of data is expert and original, allowing them to beautifully achieve their primary task: explaining the nature of state fragility, how it is experienced, and how it may be overcome." "In this volume, David Carment and Yiagadeesen Samy, building on their previous extensive research, offer new insights into the dynamics that ensnare countries in fragility traps and suggest strategies for exiting those traps. This excellently researched book and the authors' accessible writing style make it of keen interest and relevance for the academic research and foreign policy communities alike." "Carment and Samy offer a theoretically innovative and empirically rich analysis of the fragility trap. Their insights are a welcome contribution to scholarship on fragile states and, critically, to policy making." "A lot of research has focused on the causes and correlates of state fragility. This book provides new and important insight into transitions toward resilience. Drawing on cross-national data and case studies, there is so much here to enrich debate, including key implications for policy."