Why do some rulers use the coercive power of the state to
repress their own people? Why do some states experience coups, civil wars and
other episodes of violence? Why do some states struggle to provide adequate
education, health care, or jobs for their people? Why are some states home to
terrorist groups, roving bandits and even pirates?
All of these questions point to the problem of state failure
in today’s world. According to Robert
Rotberg (2003: 2) “Nation-states exist to provide a decentralized method of
delivering political (public) goods to persons living within designated
parameters (borders).”[1] The mix of public goods that each society
expects its state to produce has varied over time, but at a basic minimum we
expect that states provide security to their citizens. This includes protection from external
threats (e.g., war, loss of territory, terrorism), domestic threats (e.g., rebel
groups, civil war, coups), crime (e.g., police, judicial system), and dispute
resolution between citizens (e.g., rule of law, contracts, judicial system,
property rights). Once individuals feel
secure, they are then able to engage in economic, cultural and political
activities that lead to increases in individual and societal well-being. The public good of security thus lays the
foundation for the provision of higher order goods, such as transportation and
communication infrastructure, a functioning economy, a rich associational life,
a responsive political system, education, health care, and a healthy natural
environment.
Rather than consider state failure to be a problem just for
Africa or other developing regions, a focus on public goods provision forces us
to confront the fact that all states fail to a certain degree at certain
times. We can think about state failure
as a continuum with relatively strong states on one end and relatively weak
states on the other. Strong states
perform well in effectively delivering most types of public goods; they tend to
have high GDP per capita, good infrastructure, quality of life, and tend to be
democratic. Weak states have an overall
tendency to be less effective at producing public goods, with lower GDP per
capita, poor infrastructure, poor quality of life, and they tend to have autocratic
governments.
At the extreme, a weak state is a failed state when it is
“no longer able or willing to perform the fundamental jobs of a nation-state in
the modern world” (Rotberg, 2003: 6).
Even worse is the collapsed state, in which there is a complete vacuum
of authority. Somalia is the most
well-known example of a collapsed state, which occurred in the aftermath of the
fall of President Siad Barre’s regime in 1991.
Americans are familiar with Somalia largely from the horrific images of
U.S. soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 when U.S.
forces engaged self-proclaimed president Mohamed Farrah Aidid and his
militia. This incident was later
dramatized in the movie Black Hawk Down. In the aftermath of the collapse of the
central government, Somalia devolved into a territorial patchwork of “warlords”
providing security for themselves and those loyal to them across the former
state. Over time, an official Somali
government reemerged to control the capital, but other parts of the former
Somali state continued to operate independently, such as Somaliland in the
north. Piracy sprang up off the coast of
Puntland and terrorized the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, requiring a
multinational force to begin naval patrols to protect commercial shipping. Somalia is thus an extreme example of a failed
state, but one that shows what happens when states are no longer capable of
providing the basic good of security.
A number of organizations have begun to identify indicators
and warning signs of state failure. Most
adopt a similar position to the one outlined in this blog post: states exist on
a continuum of strength and failure. For
example, the Fund for Peace produces their annual Failed States Index. You can check out their latest 2012 ranking
of all states here: http://www.fundforpeace.org/global/?q=fsi. You will note that Somalia anchors the failed
end of the spectrum, but it is joined by others that the index identifies as
those we should be alerted to, such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan,
South Sudan, Chad, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen and others. On the sustainable, strong end of the
spectrum are the Nordic states, Canada, and Australia. It may surprise you that the United States is
not in that top group of strong states, but is in the next tier with South
Korea and the Czech Republic. Check out
the component parts of the index to see why!
The Country Indicators for Foreign Policy at Carleton
University in Canada also has a state fragility index. You can check out their method for ranking
failed and failing states here: http://www4.carleton.ca/cifp/app/ffs_ranking.php. It produces a similar, though not identical
ranking of states on a continuum from fragility to strength. Both approaches to measuring state failure
rely on identifying failures in the provision of public goods. Security is the most basic good, but there
are many others that these approaches identify as critical to the success and
health of states. Ideally, these
approaches could be refined to one day produce early warning systems, so that
events like the Arab Spring would not be a surprise to policy makers. Unfortunately, our ability to predict the
specific time and form of such state failures is not very advanced at this
point in time.
If you are interested in learning more about state failure,
I regularly teach a course “State Failure in the Developing World”
(030:173). We explore a variety of
theoretical frameworks for understanding the causes and consequences of state
failures, as well as approaches to rebuilding states that have failed. We conduct in-depth analyses of a number of
states at different points on the continuum of failure, from a variety of
regions in the developing world. This
course will be offered again in the Fall Semester of 2013.
[1] Rotberg, Robert I., ed.
(2003) State Failure and State Weakness
in a Time of Terror. Washington
D.C.: Brookings Institution.
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