Edited by Prof Dr Timo Kivimäki and Dr Rana Jawad (University of Bath), this Special Issue, published in MDPI Social Sciences journal, looks at the conceptual, theoretical and causal/constitutive interaction between state fragility and conflict as well as between state fragility and lack of human development. It focuses on the MENA region, paying particular attention to the role of social policies and the political contexts that underpins them.
The introductory article of the Special Issue explores how state fragility in the MENA region predicts developmental grievances and violence as it does in the rest of the world. However, the MENA region is unique as its problems have become more internationalised and the region is intervened militarily by outsiders more than other regions. Conflict and developmental grievances in the MENA region are much more related to problems of political legitimacy than in the rest of the world. The impact of economic reliance on commodity and raw material trade is also much more complicated in the MENA region than in the rest of the world. This Special Issue consists of articles focused on different aspects of these generic or MENA-specific factors in the fragility–grievance–conflict triangle.