By Robert B Zoellick
Robert B Zoellick is the President of the World Bank Group
Afghanistan. Bosnia. Haiti. Liberia. Rwanda. Sierra Leone. Southern Sudan. Timor Leste. Iraq. Although each is different, they have all struggled to move beyond conflict and fragility to secure development. Paul Collier’s book The Bottom Billion highlighted their recurrent cycles of dangers. Not one low income country coping with fragility or conflict has yet achieved a single Millennium Development Goal.
These countries stir our shared interests and values. They have called on soldiers and monies from countries that have then struggled to counter violence that overflows the borders of fragile states, because conflicts feed on narcotics, piracy, and gender violence, and leave refugees and broken infrastructure in their wake. Their territories can become breeding grounds for far-reaching networks of violent radicals and organized crime.
Yet as we are now seeing again in the Middle East and North Africa, violence in the 21st Century differs from 20th Century patterns of
