Following a tumultuous year around the globe, Cameroon, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Venezuela are among the countries that have fallen furthest down the Fragile States Index (FSI), an annual ranking carried out by The Fund for Peace and published with The New Humanitarian (formerly IRIN News).
Catch up with the livestream of the event which took place on Wednesday, 10 April at the Graduate Institute’s Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP), and listen to a discussion on the findings of the 15th FSI and its relevance to the humanitarian sector. The event, jointly convened between the Graduate Institute, The New Humanitarian, and Fund for Peace, featured a briefing on the FSI and its findings for 2019 and a panel discussion on the changing humanitarian focus on fragile states and the role of the media in chronicling the immediate and long-term impact of social, political, and economic pressures on lives and livelihoods around the world.
You can also find out more with our special report: Tipping points 2019 | Lessons from fragility. To offer a more nuanced sense of what the rankings may indicate, this accompanied reporting provides an on-the ground look at what “most fragile” means to citizens in a country like Yemen – many of whom also live in the midst of what the UN deems “the worst” humanitarian crisis in the world.
Watch the livestream of the event here:
About the Fragile States Index
The FSI annually highlights the current trends in social, economic and political pressures that affect all states, but can strain some beyond their capacity to cope. Linking robust social science with modern technology, the FSI is unique in its integration of quantitative data with data produced using content-analysis software, processing information from millions of publicly available documents. The result is an empirically-based, comprehensive ranking of the pressures experienced by 178 nations. The Index is used by policy makers, civil society, academics, journalists, investors, and businesses around the world.
