The Nexus of Gender Equality and State Fragility

State fragile is a current epidemic in the global world. Although modern development attempts to intervene, the developing world struggles with state failures and state collapse. The objective is to explore past and current strategies used in fragile states to strengthen elements that make up state capacity such as economic development and rule of law. Nevertheless, a substantial part of the research also aims to discover whether these strategies are effective in the context of facilitating the creation of gender equality. Several states classified as fragile tend to be detrimental to Women’s rights. As a result, I will probe how development strategies also affect women in fragile states and if there is a positive effect to move towards gender equality. For the purposes of my research, I will be looking at the existence of discriminatory laws, if states who exhibit “pro-gender equality” rulings in fact serve to improve women’s rights, and how does lack of gender equality inhibit a state from engaging in effective development. Furthermore, elements of state capacity will be explored from a different standpoint. Economic development will be defined as the access women possess to facilitate their own economic advancement whereas rule of law signifies the judicial strength of a state that is able to protect and ensure that women’s rights are not infringed. The results from this research is to have a product of country specific policy recommendations after investigating a series of case studies. However, it will involve the overall thematic of the importance of gender equality. It will also pose the question whether scholars understand the effects of gender equality in state making and state capacity