While poverty, disease and lack of economic opportunity do not lead directly to conflict, crime or terrorism, they create conditions that are hostile to peace and stability, and they can leave fragile countries vulnerable to conflict, criminal networks, terrorists, illegal arms dealers, and other destabilizing forces.

By helping countries fight poverty, build roads, educate children, prevent health crises, create jobs and spur economic growth, development assistance can help improve lives and decrease countries’ vulnerability to conflict, criminal networks, or other destabilizing forces.

Infectious diseases can travel across borders as easily as people and products. By supporting global development efforts, we help prevent health crises and protect our own health as well.

More than three-quarters (78%) of Americans favor helping poor countries develop their economies as a way to reduce the threat of terrorism.

Fragile, weak or collapsed states challenge U.S. national security interests through:

• Illicit networks: Terrorist and criminal networks target weak states for their porous borders and minimal law enforcement. Without a functioning government, Somalia has become a safe haven for members of Al-Qaeda. Relatively new countries such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have become conduits for the trade of illicit light weapons and drugs.
• Spillover effects: The collapse of a government often spawns a wider regional conflict and spreads instability. The activities of Liberia’s former president sparked civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone, and fanned the flames of conflict in West Africa from Guinea to Cote d’Ivoire.

Development assistance from the U.S. helps to jump-start economic growth and promote reform in a number of ways:

• Improved education helps strengthen civil society, democracy, and political stability, allowing people to learn about their rights and acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to exercise them.
• Expanding global trade can help improve the lives of working people around the world by spurring economic growth, creating jobs, reducing prices, increasing the variety of goods for consumers, increasing incomes,and helping countries acquire new technologies. All of these in turn can help to enhance global stability.
• “State building” supports long-term economic, social, and political development.

State building is creating and strengthening the institutions necessary to support long-term economic, social, and political development. In the U.S. we often take these institutions for granted, but in many countries they are weak or absent. State institutions include:

• Legislatures, like the U.S. Congress, to make laws
• Judicial systems, like the U.S. federal and state court systems, to interpret laws
• Executive agencies, such as the Departments of the Treasury, Education, Transportation, and many others, to administer the laws which control the domestic economy, education, trade, and diplomacy, for example.
• Police and military forces to provide security

Development cannot easily take place when state institutions are precariously weak or have failed altogether. A glance at recent headlines provides a powerful demonstration of why state building (or the lack of it) matters:

• Afghanistan has spiraled into a country known for Al-Qaeda terrorists and drug smugglers and produces nearly three-quarters of the world’s heroin supply.
• Haiti, after the fall of its president in 2004, is attempting to build a working government and protect basic human rights at the same time as it tries to escape from the worst levels of poverty in the Western hemisphere.
• Liberia is engaged in post-conflict reconstruction after removing its dictatorial ruler in 2003. The country was left in shambles and incited conflict throughout West Africa.

A number of actions could be taken to improve state building in the world. They could include American commitment to:

• Promote broad-based development and poverty reduction: U.S. development assistance would be more effective if it were complemented by more open trade with developing countries, wider and deeper debt relief, and greater support for foreign direct investment.
• Prepare for and seize potential opportunities: Moments of transition out of conflict or into democracy present opportunities to help a weak state grow stronger or to halt a slide toward failure. The U.S. has acted decisively to seize opportunities for positive change. Examples are this were its actions to:
• Fund post-conflict reconstruction: After the peace agreement in 1996, the U.S. provided about 25% of the reconstruction assistance given to Bosnia and Herzegovina, funding programs ranging from repairing war-damaged infrastructure to promoting independent forms of media.
• Contribute to peace and reconciliation: When the civil war ended in Sierra Leone in 2000, the U.S. helped place the country on a path to peace by contributing to democracy and governance programs, the UN mission there, and the creation of a war crimes tribunal.