The 2021 Fragile 15: Upheavals in a time of COVID
After a pandemic year, the concept of “fragility” seems more relevant than ever. As the rankings in this year’s annual Fragile States Index (FSI) suggest, global emergencies such as COVID-19 can expose the fault lines that feed assumptions about what fragility is, which states are fragile, and what resilience looks like in the face of crises.
Drawing on our first-hand, on-the-ground reporting, we offer a glimpse at the lives behind the FSI data in three categories: The five most fragile states; five with notable increases or decreases in fragility; and five that are dealing with key humanitarian crises. We hear from Yemenis struggling to buy food for their families, from Syrian refugees in Lebanon confronting spiralling inflation, from asylum seekers at the southern US border dealing with Trump-administration policies put in place during the coronavirus pandemic – policies that effectively cut off access to asylum.
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PIBOR, South Sudan
Tucked away behind the bend of a swollen river, an hour and a half by motorboat from the region’s main health centre, local residents in the remote South Sudanese village of Lekuangole say their children are starving to death.
There’s the three-year-old son of Ngalan Luryen who died of hunger last February after a week hiding in a forest from militiamen. And there’s the nine-year-old grandson of Anna Korok who lost his life in July when conflict split him from his family and left him nothing to eat.