Thinking the Fragile State Otherwise: Fanon, Nkrumah, Nyerere, and African Theories of Post-Conflict State Formation

Thinking the Fragile State Otherwise: Fanon, Nkrumah, Nyerere, and African Theories of Post-Conflict State Formation examines the dominance of liberal peacebuilding vocabularies that obscure African intellectual resources for understanding authority, violence, and reconstruction. Centering South Sudan without treating it as exceptional, the study situates the case within broader debates in post-colonial theory, African political thought, and critical international relations. It develops the concept of African-centred post-conflict statecraft to explain how formal norms, institutional design, and struggles over authority are configured through distinct intellectual traditions. Drawing on intellectual history and textual analysis of African political thought; critical engagement with liberal peacebuilding theory from an African perspective; and application of these frameworks to South Sudan's post-conflict governance, the study advances three linked propositions. First, decolonization thought can be re-read as a critique of state formation rather than a completed historical moment. Second, African socialist and anti-colonial traditions provide alternative design vocabularies for political order. Third, African political thought reshapes how fragile-state dynamics are interpreted and addressed. The analysis addresses the central question of what analytical resources Fanon's account of decolonization offers for understanding governance pathologies in post-independence African states. It shows that institutions, narratives, and policy frameworks function as political instruments rather than neutral containers, revealing the limits of externally derived statebuilding models. The study concludes that reform efforts fail when they treat fragility as a technical deficit rather t