The Government Assistance Center

The international community needs to take a new approach regarding assistance and development ventures for fragile states. Few would quarrel with the view that current methods are incredibly expensive, wasteful, susceptible to corruption and less than effective in the long run. Much is written about the necessity of Security Sector Reform, Disaster Response, and Humanitarian Assistance as the means to lifting struggling states out of the pit of despair. However, the vast majority of the literature only numbs the reader with laundry lists of goals, considerations, and requirements; little is written on how to organize the assistance effort. There is also a large assumption, not borne out by practice, that cooperation and coordination among states, among organizations, and even among domestic agencies are frictionless if they all share a common goal.