“Nexus” is one of those words that is somewhat easy to define, but then expands to present more difficult conceptual challenges. Stemming from the Latin nectere meaning “to bind,” a nexus is a connection or link, a causal connection, or a connected series or set of relationships. A spider web is a kind of nexus. A hub-and-spoke airline route map is a visual presentation of an airline’s operations, but when expanded to incorporate its airline partners it presents a network, or nexus of possible flights that bind the world together. The Internet of Things is an engineered nexus intended to make the fabric of the world around us smarter and more responsive, merging the digital and physical universes. A nexus then, can be seen as a network of connections between disparate ideas, processes, or objects that can present an almost infinite number of possible linkages and relations. A nexus, with its interrelated connections implies strength, but like a spider web also might serve as a trap.
In December 2006 Kofi Annan, in his remarks as outgoing United Nations Secretary-General, stressed that “there can be no security without development, and no development without security.” Although at one level Annan’s earnest assertion can be viewed as nothing more than a rather empty truism, the notion of a linkage or nexus between drivers of conflict and efforts towards development has come to govern much of recent thinking about how insecurity and development are inextricably linked, and often in vicious rather than virtuous circles. What was initially presented as a two-pillared security-development nexus has now expanded to include a third, humanitarian pillar. It is to be emphasized, however, that humanitarian relief, development programming, and peacebuilding are neither stand-alone nor serial processes: all are required at the same time. Equally, however, humanitarian support, development assistance, and issues of security each represent distinct discursive and institutional elements of the international system. That they have different orientations or imperatives makes them particularly difficult to juxtapose or align. Rather than pillars of consolidated effort, they too often become silos of ill-coordinated action.
The 2016 United Nations-convened World Humanitarian Summit endorsed the triadic relationship between humanitarianism, development, and security, pledging new ways of working to “steadfastly advance” an ambitious Agenda for Humanity, itself a key contribution to the global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. These overlapping agendas also form an aspirational kind of nexus, although they also can be seen as a matryoshka, with various international agreements and initiatives nesting, or perhaps embedded, within each other as part of our global nexus of states, international organizations, and the norms and networks of agreements that govern our interconnected world.
While the faddish use of the term nexus helps us to both visualize and understand complex relationships, there is a danger that the term will become little more than shorthand for “complicated.” Indeed, another phrase often attached to particular examples of the humanitarian, development, and peace nexus – think Afghanistan, or the Sahel, or the Tigray region of Ethiopia – is “wicked problem.” Such intractable problems, with complicated origins and a host of drivers, are problems that are difficult to impossible to solve for any number of reasons, including the numbers of people, opinions and political perspectives involved; historical embeddedness, including longstanding enmity among different groups; the scale of economic and other resources required to begin to address such problems; and incomplete or contradictory knowledge or perceptions; as well as the densely interconnected nature of component issues or challenges.
Hence, while the idea of a nexus helps us to conceptualize or visualize an issue or a problem, it is less helpful in determining where to begin in addressing a single problem or a group of interconnected issues, or in identifying which measures might be the easiest to implement first; or selecting those that might have the greatest impact in either breaking a logjam of negative influences or launching the kind of efforts that could result in desired or necessary change. It thus is imperative to carefully study the spider web of connections to understand which strands are “load bearing” and which are directly connected to specific aspects of the overall problem. Deconstructing the complex interrelationships in the humanitarian, development, and security nexus, then, is a first step towards providing the kind of reasoned diagnosis that will facilitate the identification of effective policy choices. In other words, simply plotting a nexus is insufficient to initiate or bring about change, for the nexus is nothing more than the blueprint or architecture for policy action.
The policy framework adopted by the Agenda for Humanity includes seven issue areas, 32 core commitments, five core responsibilities, and 24 proposed shifts or changes in direction. Schematically, this set of commitments and forward-looking plans presents its own nexus. But where to start? And, perhaps more importantly, is there indeed sufficient political will across the community of nations to begin to implement such an ambitious framework? In addition, determining the best mix or balance of humanitarian, development, and security-driven approaches, and how they are sequenced or integrated is crucial. Choosing a nexus approach should never be a reason not to deliver timely humanitarian relief when and where needed, nor a reason to emphasize security or to scale back development assistance or otherwise prioritize one pillar over another in that under a nexus approach, the three areas of endeavour should be mutually reinforcing.
In relation to my research on fragile or failed states, addressing the problems of fragility includes many of these same nexus-like challenges. Fragile states face a host of problems, including lack of legitimacy or effective authority, limited state capacity, often longstanding or deeply entrenched conflict, endemic poverty, food insecurity, competition for scarce resources, the absence of an enabling environment, and so on. These states also are hostage to the “no security without development, no development without security” conundrum, very often are handicapped by the lack of political will, as well as the lack of adequate resources to address any single problem, much less the panoply of challenges that such states confront.
Conceptualizing – and then understanding – the nexus of problems or challenges and their particular drivers, as well as the density of their manifold interrelationships is but a first step towards addressing state fragility.
Photo by Kevin Grieve on Unsplash
