Policy Brief

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The return of international war and rising deficits in state legitimacy: IDOS Constellations of State Fragility 3.0

Bonn: German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.23661/ipb33.2025

The international context is changing profoundly, owing to rising autocratisation and the return of international war. These transformations also impact the long-standing problem of state fragility.
The IDOS Constellations of State Fragility (CSF) provides a differentiated model to measure state fragility along the three dimensions of authority, capacity and legitimacy. Rather than aggregating scores in these dimensions on a one-dimensional scale, the CSF identifies eight constellations of how deficits in these three dimensions occur jointly in reality. The CSF was launched in 2018 and was recently updated for the second time, now covering the period 2005 to 2024.
In this Policy Brief, we pursue three objectives. First, we briefly present the CSF model. Second, we describe the methodological adjustments of the 2025 update. This includes the use of a new measure for “battle-related deaths” – one indicator to assess the state’s monopoly on the use of force (authority). The modification became necessary due to a real-world development: the return of international war and, in particular, Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine. Third, we elaborate on the main empirical trend that emerges from the 2025 update: the global rise of deficits in the legitimacy dimension, reflected in the increase of “illiberal functioning” and “low legitimacy” states. This development is in line with wider autocratisation trends. We derive the following recommendations for policy and policy-related research:
• Use multidimensional models to assess state fragility. Foreign and development policymakers as well as academics should employ multidimensional approaches to conceptualise and measure state fragility. Not only are such models better suited for adequately capturing the complexity of state fragility, but they also provide better starting points for designing tailored policy interventions sensitive to context.
• Acknowledge that deficits in the legitimacy dimension are also rising in Europe. Rather than considering state fragility a phenomenon limited to the Global South, German and European policy-makers would be well advised to acknowledge that deficits in the legitimacy dimension are also growing in Europe, including countries of the European Union (EU). Studying developments in the Global South and mutual learning with Southern policy-makers and civil society actors may contribute to enhanced resilience in Europe as well.
• Explore the relationship between state fragility and international war. Future research should explore how international war and state fragility are related, including investigating the relationship between internal fragility dimensions and vulnerabilities to external shocks, and whether defence capabilities matter in determining whether and to what extent a state is fragile.
• Explore and address the relationship between state fragility and autocratisation. Investigating how state fragility and autocratisation are interrelated is a promising research agenda. This comprises exploring whether and how changes in fragility patterns and autocratisation trends are correlated as well as under what conditions autocratisation acts as a driver of state fragility by prompting violent resistance. Foreign and develop-ment policymakers could build on the findings to design coherent policy interventions.

Dr Sebastian Ziaja is Team Lead for Survey Data Curation at GESIS (Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) in Cologne.