States of Fragility 2025 considers a world of shifting power dynamics, where the most severe impacts of crisis, conflict and instability converge in the 61 contexts identified with high and extreme fragility. Multidimensional fragility lies at the core of the geopolitical shifts that are disrupting decades long global power equilibria, creating challenges and opportunities that require deep reflection and rapid adaptation across humanitarian, development and peace communities.
The report analyses the state of fragility in 2025, how it shapes global structural trends, current responses to it, and how it is perceived and tackled by the people most exposed to its impact: the 2 billion people in contexts with high and extreme fragility that account for 25% of the world’s population but 72% of the world’s extreme poor. Maintaining a focus on the furthest behind is more critical than ever for development partners, as a global good and a geostrategic necessity.
States of Fragility 2025
Abstract
Executive Summary
Fragility is the combination of exposure to risk and the insufficient resilience of a state, system and/or community to manage, absorb or mitigate those risks. The OECD multidimensional fragility framework assesses fragility based on 56 indicators of risk and resilience across six dimensions: economic, environmental, political, security, societal and human. This provides the analytical foundation for the States of Fragility report series and online platform.
Following the shocks of the last five years, global fragility remains at a near-record high level. The diversity of fragility profiles across all contexts is striking: within the same classification of ‘extreme fragility’, Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia each present unique combinations of risk and resilience. This is also true within the medium to low fragility classification, where otherwise resilient contexts have concentrated subnational pockets of fragility, often characterised by acute poverty, environmental fragility and localised violence – Mindanao in the Philippines is a case in point. The concentration of fragility continues as a prominent trend. Though it increased the most in contexts with overall medium to low exposure, not eligible to official development assistance (ODA), its most severe impact is observed in the 61 contexts experiencing extreme or high fragility, home to 25% of the world’s population in 2025 – 2.1 billion people – but 72% of the extreme poor (2024), which could surge to 92% by 2040.
Fragility increased most in the political, security and economic dimensions, driven by geopolitical competition, the race for energy security, rising debt and an increased willingness to use violence of all kinds. The number of armed conflicts is at its highest since the end of the Cold War. Armed conflict is concentrated in contexts with the highest exposure to fragility: Sudan, the Great lakes region, the Sahel and West Africa and Myanmar. Of the 61 contexts with high and extreme fragility, 24 are experiencing armed conflict and 8 are in a state of war. Beyond armed conflict, multi-layered trends on violence – increased non-state violence, violence against women, high homicide rates and the role of organised crime in and outside of conflict-affected areas – highlight the necessity of preventative action on violence. However, resources for peace and conflict prevention in contexts facing high and extreme fragility are at their second lowest level since 2004.
Looking at a fragmented and disordered world through a fragility lens gives the impression of a state of geopolitical flux, with no truly dominant actors – autocracies are not as resilient as often assumed, and many democracies are investing less and less in their resilience capacity, particularly in state institutions, checks and balances. This state of flux also presents opportunities. The initiative is there to be seized by whoever can organise themselves most effectively. Across Africa and the Middle East, fragility is being instrumentalised for political, economic and security ends, often reversing development gains. State and non-state actors are analysing the sources of risk and resilience that shape fragility – not as challenges to address but as situations to leverage and exploit as part of local and global strategies. In contexts such as Mali and Niger, this compromises the quality and availability of partnerships as internal and external state and non-state elites focus on short term transactional gains that can feed cycles of conflict, poverty and inequality. Understanding fragility therefore offers an advantage in terms of how to apply and align instruments of international statecraft, including development assistance with domestic policy objectives.
Global trade has repeatedly been disrupted in recent years, first by the COVID-19 pandemic, then by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, a major grain exporter, and in 2024 by the Red Sea shipping crisis – a precipitous drop in the volume of traffic through the Suez Canal and Bab El-Mandeb Straight due to outright attacks on commercial vessels. Such incidents highlight the economic interdependencies on which global prosperity depends. Decades of relative prosperity have been an important source of resilience for much of the world, but the kind of growth that brings widespread poverty reduction has proven much harder to achieve in contexts exposed to high and extreme fragility. Incomes in these contexts stopped catching up with advanced economies around 2015, and post COVID have settled at negative growth (in contexts with extreme fragility) and around 2% (in contexts with high fragility). Debt sustainability and fiscal fragility have become even more challenging since 2022, constraining the ability to respond to shocks or invest in the future. Within these overall trends there is huge diversity, however, and this report identifies opportunities for economic partnerships that can be an important pillar of both development and peace strategies.
Global demographic growth is concentrated in contexts with high to extreme fragility, particularly in Africa. Youth in these contexts are increasingly digitally connected, politically active and open to engagement on their futures: a political force to be harnessed by whoever provides the most convincing narrative; in most cases, their needs and expectations are being frustrated. They are also vulnerable to misinformation, disinformation and violence, and limited by poor health and education opportunities and gender divides. The ways and means of engaging with youth in contexts with high and extreme fragility needs to change. Short term engagements can be ineffective where other actors are offering hard incentives to migrate (illegally), join militias or organised criminal groups, or act as disruptive agents for one political entity or another. Failing to engage more substantively with youth populations in contexts with high and extreme fragility risks turning the potential for a demographic dividend into liability. Where risks of poverty, violence, disfranchisement and inequality, notably gender inequality, intersect, incentivising positive, attractive and competitive pathways for young populations is priority for effective development and conflict prevention.
Even in contexts with extreme fragility progress is possible and development assistance can be effective. Positive signs in Iraq and Somalia demonstrate that sustained engagement across humanitarian, development and peace pillars can foster progressive change. However, in many other contexts with extreme fragility, longstanding development gaps, high levels of poverty, and political vacuums persist. This has geopolitical consequences: competing national and international actors are often quick to establish their influence and models for short-term, transactional, extractive and elite-centric gains.
