When Governance Fails: Sovereignty Sharing in Fragile States with Professor John Ciorciari

In this week's episode, we speak with Dr. John Ciorciari about his new book, “Sovereignty Sharing in Fragile States.” Dr. Ciorciari discusses what sovereignty sharing is, defining it as "consent-based agreements between a national government and international actors to share domestic authority," and he goes on to outline the governance challenges around the world that motivated him to write the book. Dr. Ciorciari explains the common denominators underlying state 'fragility', and why he chose to focus on the 'rule of law' in contextualizing his analysis in the book, and why 'rule of law' reform is very difficult in the international setting -- especially in establishing governmental institutions. Dr. Ciorciari describes incentives and downsides of sovereignty sharing for both host and donor country, whether U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan were sovereignty sharing situations, and how corruption and foreign policy have shaped sovereignty sharing.