Published 15 September 2026
National Interest and the Crisis of Global Governance
Why decades of peacekeeping, aid and state-building have failed to produce durable gains in the world’s most vulnerable states — and what would have to change.
About the book
International organisations and donors rarely fail for lack of ideas, expertise or money. They fail when the national interests of member states pull mandates, funding and metrics in divergent directions — hollowing out implementation capacity and producing selective support that leaves untouched the political bargains and rent-seeking mechanisms that sustain fragility.
The book is case-based throughout: Sahel security coalitions, European migration compacts, the bottlenecks of justice chains, reconstruction strategies. Each case is read as a problem of alignment between what partners are willing to back and what fragile states actually need.
From that reading it derives two instruments: a Minimum Viable Governance playbook, and bargain-shifting compacts designed to move the underlying political settlement rather than work around it. The result is written for policymakers, practitioners and graduate students alike.
What the book argues
01
The diagnosis is rarely wrong and the money is rarely absent. What breaks is the alignment between member states, whose competing national interests fragment mandates, funding cycles and success metrics before implementation even begins.
02
Interventions that avoid the political bargain — and the rent-seeking mechanisms attached to it — can improve indicators without shifting anything durable. Competing powers then shape the transition to peace and development on their own terms.
03
Rather than reconstructing a full state apparatus, the book defines the minimum set of governance functions that must actually work, and sequences everything else behind them.
04
Agreements built to change the political settlement itself, by aligning what international partners will genuinely back with what the fragile state actually requires — instead of restating shared objectives no one is positioned to deliver.
Key facts
Publisher
Ethics International Press
Publication
15 September 2026
Format
Hardcover, 345 pages
ISBN-13
978-1837118113
Language
English