Research Data

Constellations of State Fragility (3.0)

Ziaja, Sebastian
Research Data (2025)

Bonn: German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13358880
Open access

Constellations of State Fragility provides an empirical typology of states from a fragility perspective. It uses global data from 2005-2024 to identify typical constellations of state fragility. We conceptualize fragility as constituted of deficiencies in three dimensions: authority, capacity and legitimacy. This update to version 3.0 makes two major changes compared to version 2.0: A data update, consisting of the inclusion of data for the years 2021-2024, extending the overall period covered to 2005-2024; a modification of how the battle deaths indicator is calculated: now only battle deaths occurring in the country’s own territory are considered to increase validity; a modification of the indicator measuring school enrolment rates: we move from net to gross enrolment, due to lack of recent data for net enrolment; the replacement of the indicator measuring human rights: the ‘Human rights protection scores’ by Christopher Fariss is replaced by the ‘Physical violence index’ provided by Varieties of Democracy) due to lack of recent data for the Human rights protection scores, and minor changes for the years 2005-2020 deriving from original data updates provided by data providers. Based on these new data, new estimates of the nature of constellations of fragility. This results in the same eight typical constellations of state fragility that were identified by v2.

About the IDOS authors

Further IDOS experts