 My name is Oli Rohomeki, I'm from MFA Finland. I have a question, a comment slash question to David. I worked for years and years in and on Afghanistan. And I really liked your discussion about the legitimacy trap. Could it speak quite well to the situation there? I mean, despite the billions and billions of dollars and euros into Afghanistan, it's not the place is falling apart essentially. But I mean, it's not about the lack of investment in infra, in clinics and schools and what have you. It is about the lack of accountability and particularly legitimacy in terms of justice. And that's exactly the point because the Taliban are gaining ground because their way of thinking and justice resonates. It's based on Shari and local customary law and it resonates with the population, at least in parts of the place. So can you maybe elaborate a bit more on the sort of, yeah, legitimacy trap and particularly the issues around justice, issues if you have researched on that file. Thanks. Thank you. My name is Liz, I work for DFID and I'm an economist. So naturally I'm going to ask about data. Can you comment on how new innovative data collection or generation methods are opening up opportunities for research in fragile states? And what data sources have you found the most useful in your research and in your opinion, where's the sort of most promising future supply of data coming from for these questions? Thank you. Thanks very much to all three speakers for sharing your work with us. I had a question for you David, more of a suggestion than a question. So it struck me as you were presenting some of your results that you had quite a high level of heterogeneity in your findings. And it occurred to me that this is a very valuable exercise to find out what are the determinants of fragility and how do certain countries escape them. But I wondered whether there was possibly heterogeneity within each of the types that you were looking at. So instead of attempting a grand theory, look this in middle range theory that there may in fact be multiple reasons, perhaps you've already thought about this, multiple reasons why some countries do escape from the fragility trap and others do not within that category. And similarly why some countries stay stuck, their reasons may be different within that category as well. Thanks. I'm Johanik Opponen from the University of Helsinki. And I must say that I have some doubts about the analytical value of the whole concept and category of fragile states and fragility. I understand that they are a useful concept for donors who want to know which are those places that are dangerous or that are getting dangerous to us, not only to themselves but also to us which are going to cause problems. So where do you have to put some more effort and resources in? But as we have seen even in this lesson, I think we have these agreements which other countries can be considered as fragile and all I think they are very different among themselves. And as although I'm not quite sure, I did get the point about this political settlement framework which what is so particularly radically new in it because it's about power relations anyway. And certainly I think it's a valid argument that aid is something which brings in resources but university call rents and which then are accessed differently by different actors, both elite actors and other actors in those countries. But my question is that what is the point of pouring aid in countries where government which always access some part of the aid is rather part of the problem than part of the solution. I mean countries like South Sudan, Eritrea and of course Afghanistan. Thank you. Hi, my name is Maria Mekli, I'm from Saferglobe. I actually have a question to Yusia Oyala. This Somalia example is of course really, really interesting. At the same time having development actors working in conjunction with the government is sort of stepping on the toes of crisis management and potentially other UN actors which are also focused on developing government structures. I would like to ask you where you think the special benefits were in this kind of collaboration or was it just that you had this window of opportunity to act here? So I have a question, especially for Helena, but maybe David also wants to comment. I think there's an interesting conversation between your two presentations on Mozambique and Angola and your interpretation. Are you interpreting the cases the same way? Would you agree with what David is finding in his categorization? What's your reaction to his interpretation? On the question of Afghanistan, as you know the special investigator of the United States has gone in and drawn the same conclusion that you have. And it's actually a quite stunning result when you consider the amount of money that's been allocated just by the United States alone that they are now recognizing that their efforts to bring some long-term stability this country have for the better lack of a word failed. And the Taliban now controls more territory now than ever before since the so-called global war on terror began almost 17 years ago. So when your largest aid donor is coming to the same conclusion that the rest of us have known for some time I think there's a sobering, and it's also unfortunate that we have a government in the case of the United States that seems to want to re-engage that country with a small, lightly armed military capability rather than rethink the problem. If you ask me personally why the mission there has not succeeded, I think in large parts a function of our inability to get a regional solution in place. To recognize that Iran, Pakistan, and even Russia and the neighboring Central Asian satellite states are all important to finding a lasting solution to Afghanistan, particularly Pakistan's obvious willingness to provide safe haven. For the better part of the entire time that the West was occupying Afghanistan, the Taliban were free to go where they wished. And this was rather sad in that this goes to my core point about the failure to engage Pakistan and Yemen in ways that would have actually been meaningful to resurrect or redirect these countries away from fragility. In the case of Yemen you have a situation where the dialogue with Yemen was the global war on terror. Initially reluctant to engage in that alliance with the United States and paid the price. As we know many foreign fighters returned with the incursion of the United States into Afghanistan back into Yemen as well as from Iraq. And then Salah saw the light and decided yes I will dialogue the United States on the global war on terror. This while he was essentially providing safe haven to the al-Qaida operatives in his own cabinet. So one has to appreciate the regional dimensions before coming to any conclusion about Afghanistan. In the case of legitimacy it's a sad reality that a government that is considered more legitimate in the eyes of the people is the one that we consider to be our opponent or our adversary. Many ridiculed the idea of mediating with the Taliban 10 years ago in 2008 prior to the surge but that perhaps precisely what needed to be done. Many laugh still that the idea of Iran being an essential partner in finding a regional solution to Afghanistan largely because the larger global machinations at play here. So I think long-term solution for Afghanistan rests partly with our own assessment of the realities that are as uncomfortable as they may be. With respect to legitimacy this is a runs across all cases whether they are in the trap or not. And I would encourage you to review our working paper on the wider website where we unpack that a little bit more. The core thing is whether or not the Taliban can deliver on-service delivery. All the things that are obviously important to the population will matter. Education being one of them in ways that may not make us feel comfortable. But core things will ultimately determine the success of the leadership there. A government that chooses to rule solely through coercion cannot last in perpetuity. There has to be some kind of abiding social contract that we give you and we take but you also take and we give. And there has to be that agreement and let's see how that plays out. And the question of data, we collect our own data but I think it goes to the bigger question that was asked just after that. Actually no, it was the fourth question on whether fragility is a conceptually useful tool. I would reverse that question and say what is the evidence showing us? We could call them banana countries. We could call them anything you want. We don't have to use the word fragility. But list after list that is showing database after database that is comprising information on the SDGs if you want are showing the same thing. Now there are variations but they're showing that there are certain number of countries despite the amount of aid that is being given to them are not moving out. So regardless of whether you find the idea of fragility conceptually useful, it's a reality that there are countries that are on the receiving end of aid and are not absorbing or allocating it in a way that was intended. More problematically I think in the case of many of these countries they are speaking the dialogue or the language of the aid community without effecting change. This is the problem of isomorphic mimicry. When I read that quote from the last presentation I thought the next sentence in that quote was you're being played or you're being fooled by the city state or the central national apparatus. That there are things going on at the local level that the center doesn't want you to know about or they're at odds with the dialogue that is going at the local regional level. Because essentially that's where aid is distributed and there are brokers, donor aid brokers if you will at the local level who use aid money in the way that was not intended. And basically that was a message to the aid community stay out. So there is an issue here that you need to figure out. You can't ignore it. Country after country is showing up on this list. So on to the question of data. Yes, I mean we can pull on different data. I would personally go at a more local level. I would pull at data that it's not pan national but rather sub regional and I would draw on more individual survey data as well as household survey data. But this frankly this is a discussion we had 10 years ago. And DFID was one of the leaders in this dialogue. So I would encourage you to go back and look at the crisis states research that DFID funded through the London School of Economics which was in place for five, six years maybe longer for all the data collection that was done by them. So on the conceptual definition issue we could spend a lot of time deciding which countries should be on that list. But when we draw the conclusion that there are certain countries that are always appearing on a variety of different lists we've got an empirical issue here regardless of whether you agree with fragility or not. Ones that are not necessarily poor. Ones that are middle income countries. Ones that are not necessarily driven by conflict. Ones that have gotten over conflict but remain mired. So let's look at that evidence and then talk about why we think that commonality exists which leads me to Omar's obviously very difficult question. Because you basically say why did we do something different and I think methodologically he's right. We should have compared within cases and there are obviously nuances and differences within cases. Our desire here was to determine whether the commonalities perhaps not from a stringent methodological perspective were robust enough that we could draw some conclusions about why types of states experience exit or stay trapped. I agree entirely that those commonalities are often stretched a bit and one has to make the case especially in those that have moved in and out. I believe there's consensus and within our results on why states stay trapped and why they have exited but on the in and out cases like Amali or Laos draw a slightly different conclusion. And I will probably also focus on the question on data which is kind of one of my favorite issues. And to my mind this opens a number of interesting questions and links again to the differences in the type of work that we do. And it's ultimately also a methodological question and a question that is contingent upon the type of research questions that we are pursuing. And I spouse and make part of a tradition that uses historically grounded comparative political economy. Whereas I think most of the participants in the seminar and in the conference are more comfortable and used to a greater extent. Large data set and correlation analysis and that obviously kind of like you know leads to very different questions and very different interpretations. So as David was saying well there's simply things that are so much reiterated in the data and in the comparative analysis that clearly point to issues that demand some sort of explanation. And I would we won't have time for this but I would kind of like the question back to David in terms of perhaps I didn't quite get it in your presentation. But it'd be really interesting to if you could tell us a bit more how is it that these proxies of fragility are constructed because it isn't how do we measure that fragility that some of the discrepancies in the way we explain these clusters or grouping some of countries may reside. And yeah I think you sort of like touched on it but certain proxies are clearly not subtle enough to pick up as he said inter regional and sub regional differences, growth and poverty. It's also an issue of the unit of analysis most of us doing you're not speaking about countries where as we know that these policies are so fragmented and where things work very very differently at different sub regional levels. So that also being the case and I will take the provocation of Rachel's provocation on why is it that we seem to have becoming to a different understanding of Mozambique in that contrast with Angola. And I would say here that there's a number of things that explain why we're coming to a different interpretation. On the one hand, you guys are doing a multi country comparison of a large database and that kind of like stresses other features of that comparison, whereas we did a two case comparison of, you know, so so kind of like the insights come from that contrast of the two countries. And there's also an issue right around timing because in your case your data sets stretched to 2014, which is kind of like the beginning of where in our case we start to see an unraveling of certain dynamics. So I would leave it there for now and again happy to keep on talking about these issues. Okay, thanks. I'm responding to the question on the special benefits of having FCA in the Somali case and the this comment. Somehow I think that there was a long process before this request came that at least in this case the minister was clearly not shopping around, you know, asking from different people and different actors for support, but it was very targeted. And once again, complementing to the whole case that if our job is to support the duty better, the government or push them towards human rights, push them and support them towards accountability. And now we were in a situation where there was a clear accountability gap in the process that was on paper. It was perfect that now it's not the very weak government with the very weak legitimacy, but there was a plan to have 135 of the elders of the clan representatives making these crucial decisions on power. The parliament, for example, and constitution. So, yes, it's, I would say that from the minister's perspective this was, and from ours too, it was an action to add for the legitimacy, whole credibility of the process that was there. And I think there was an added value for FCA. It was a special for us what we had done before. And it, you know, it would have been difficult for me to think now that the request would have gone to other actors. It was so targeted. But then we come again to this that is it replicable? Can this be done again? If it's such a, you know, delicate balance between different competences and history, organizational history and organizational mandates and funding. Again, MFA Finland here coming to support. It's very fragile the whole setting of doing such an operation and it was successful this time.