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Since the academic year 2005-6, Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, the Bobst Center for Peace & Justice, and the National Academy for Public Administration have worked together to build practical and scholarly knowledge about institution building in post-conflict settings and fragile states. 

The “Institutions for Fragile States” partnership is a response to demand for problem-focused knowledge and practical “lessons,” as well as more general understanding of the organizational designs, recruitment procedures, and management practices that yield accountable and capable government in volatile political settings. 

The subject matter is important in academic circles, as well as in the policy world. To borrow the words of our colleague Robert Bates, at Harvard, “for the past decade the challenge has been to understand war and violence, but the path-breaking and important work in the next decade will be dedicated to problems of state formation, particularly the origins of the rule of law.” The Institutions for Fragile States program teams up with Oxford University and other research centers to launch research on these themes.