the fallacy of the 'failed state

Third World Quarterly 2008-12-0129(2008)8: 1491-1507

Third World Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 8, 2008, pp 1491-1507 D Routledge•*-' S ' ' ' ' r r g^ Taylor&FrancisGrt

The Fallacy of the 'Failed State'CHARLES T CALL

ABSTRACT This article examines the origins and evolution of the concepts of'failed' and 'failing' states, arguing that the terms have come t o be used in suchwidely divergent and problematic ways that they have lost any utility. Thearticle details six serious problems with the term 'state failure' and relatedterms like 'fragile' or 'troubled' states, concluding that analysts should abandonthese terms. It concludes with a modest attempt to develop alternative conceptsand principles for thinking about diverse states that pose varied challenges foracademie analysis and policy makers.

Since the concept of 'failed states' entered the USA's political lexicon in theearly 1990s, it has come to occupy a prominent place in international peaceand security. The attacks of 9/11 focused attention on the failure of theAfghan state to prevent the operation of al-Qaeda on its territory. Thesituation in that country, and subsequent growing concern about othersimilar states, only intensified concern about the role of 'failed states' inharbouring or aiding terrorism. The US National Security Strategy of 2002marked this shift from the battlefields of Europe: 'America is now threatenedless by conquering states than by failing ones'.

Yet the 'failed states' concept—and related terms like 'failing', 'fragile','stressed' and 'troubled' states—has become more of a liability than an asset.Foundations and think-tanks have rushed to fund work on 'failing' states,resulting in a proliferation of multiple, divergent and poorly defined uses ofthe term. Not only does the term 'failing state' reflect the schoolmarm'sscorecard according to linear index defined by a univocal Weberian endstate,but it has also grown to encompass states as diverse as Colombia, EastTimor, Indonesia, North Korea, Cote d'Ivoire, Haiti, Iraq, and the Sudan.1

Many progressives have welcomed the overdue linkage between thesecurity of people in the USA and other industrialised democracies withabject poverty, corrupt government and human rights atrocities in distantcountries. It is something of an achievement to see poor, forgotten countriesreceive high-level policy attention from the West. Those who care about the

Charles T Call is in the School of International Service, the American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave,NW, Washington, DC 20016, USA. Email: [email protected].

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daily survival and well-being of 'locals' in these poor and often war-tornsocieties are especially enthusiastic. For different reasons progressives andconservatives have impelled the proliferation of the term 'failed state' and itslogical policy response, 'state building'.

And yet the 'failed state', as widely understood and debated, is afallacy. It is silly to say that Colombia, North Korea and Somalia are anymore equivalent than are Belgium, Bolivia and Burma (all of which atleast share ethnic separatist movements). My main argument is that the'failed state' concept is largely useless and should be abandoned exceptinsofar as it refers to wholly collapsed states—where no authority isrecognisable either internally to a country's inhabitants or externally to theinternational community. In the late 20th century this situation prevailedover a sustained period in only one country, Somalia, from 1991 untilroughly 2004.2

In this paper I explore the origins and evolving content of the term 'failedstate', analysing the factors behind its emergence and its positive contribu-tions to political analysis and policy prescriptions. I then specify six reasonswhy the term 'failed states' and its corollary 'failing states', as well asderivatives 'fragile' and 'troubled' states, should be eschewed. If internal andexternal 'state builders' are to have any hope of fostering effective andlegitimate states, their conceptual tools must become more refined anddiscriminating. I conclude with a modest initial attempt to developalternative concepts and principles for thinking about diverse states,countries that pose varied challenges for academie analysis and for Westernpolicy makers, be they concerned with counter-terrorism, consolidatingpeace, human rights, democratisation, or global hunger.

The 'failed state' phenomenonThe concept of state failure came to prominence in the early 1990s. The caseof Somalia, where the national state wholly ceased to exist, played a crucialrole in shaping analysts' thinking about states and state 'failure'.3 Two earlyworks, Heiman and Ratner's 1993 'Failed States' article in Foreign Policy andZartman's Collapsed States in 1995, addressed the most prominent crises ofthe early 1990s.4 Heiman and Ratner referred to states that are 'simplyunable to function as independent entities' (p 33), and included Haiti,Yugoslavia, the USSR, Sudan, Liberia and Cambodia. Zartman's collapsedstates—where 'the basic functions of the state are no longer performed'—include the Congo of the 1960s; Chad, Ghana and Uganda of the early 1980s;and Somalia, Liberia and Ethiopia of the early 1990s (pp 2-3).

Well before the concept came to prominence after the attacks of Septemberllth US policy makers were utilising and exploring it. The CIA funded amulti-year, multidisciplinary research project beginning in 1994 called 'TheState Failure Task Force'. Based at the University of Maryland, the projectsought to identify the underlying causes of state failure, which it defined as 'arelatively new label that encompasses a range of severe political conflicts and1492


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regime crises exemplified by events of the 1990s in Somalia, Bosnia, Liberia,Afghanistan, and the Democratie Republic of Congo (Zaïre)'.5

The attacks of September llth brought 'failed states' into the top tier ofUS security interests. Afghanistan's apparent incapacity to control itsterritory and to locate and combat al-Qaeda lent new attention to theconcept. Indeed, in speeches in early 2006 citing the problem of failed states,Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeatedly cited Afghanistan as anexample of state failure.6 State failure became prominent in foreign policydiscourse (especially in the USA) because failed states were seen as harboursfor terrorists and launching pads for their operations.

September llth and its aftermath occurred when many internationalactors were developing new policies towards state failure. Toward the end ofthe 1990s international financial institutions and development agenciesexpanded their attention to state institutions. The development communitygradually became more familiar and comfortable with notions of first,'governance', then, on a less widespread scale, 'state building' as importantlinks to development. During the Cold War the IMF, the World Bank andregional development banks pointed to the prohibitions in their charters ofengaging in activities deemed political in the name of preserving theirpurported neutrality. With the end of the Cold War, however, the linksbetween development and the quality of governance gained recognition.Consequently issues such as military expenditures, corruption, transparencyand accountability in the use of development funds became part of thedevelopment discourse and aid programming. Post-conflict societies anddifferent forms of weak or 'stressed-out' states received new attention,boosted by the Bosnian war in the mid-1990s. After creating a Post-ConflictReconstruction Unit, the World Bank in 2002 opened a Low IncomeCountries Under Stress office (LICUS) to address fragile states.7

By 2006 failing or fragile states significantly shaped the way development,diplomatic and defence agencies viewed the nature of their enterprises, andindeed how they viewed the world. Among development specialists old ideasthat development consisted mainly of transferring resources (aid), spurringtrade or reshaping policies (eg structural adjustment policies) were beingsupplanted by the idea that development consists of building institutions thatcan generale and manage economie policies and processes. Western defenceestablishments increasingly saw the lack of institutions capable of providingorder within countries as a top military threat, rather than more traditionalthreats of opposing military capabilities or technologies per se, as reflected inthe US National Security Strategy of 2006. And diplomats increasinglyviewed the problems of war and peace not as contests between coherentwarring parties requiring the tools of negotiation and conflict resolution, butas the absence or weakness of institutions, requiring the strengthening ofthose institutions to then create and manage violence and social conflicts.9The conflict cycle of peacemaking, peacekeeping and peace building set forthin the 1992 Agenda for Peace had been supplanted as a framework forconflict analysis by the state-building agenda. The concept of 'joined-upgovernment', whereby development, diplomatic and defence agencies were

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structurally brought together to integrale or harmonise their work, reflected arecognition that these enterprises were intertwined.10

Understanding failing and fragile states became not just a new priority forWestern foreign policy bureaucracies but also for non-governmentalorganisations and foundations. Thus, the US-based Carnegie Corporationfunded over a dozen research projects in a 'States-at-Risk' programme. TheUK-based Overseas Development Institute developed a programme on'fragile states'. Just as countries that feil short of being labelled 'democracies'received a plethora of adjectives in the 1990s, other adjectives for not-so-complete states emerged: 'troubled', 'under stress', 'weak' and 'shadow'states. These efforts responded to genuine gaps and deficiënties in theconcepts and tools available to international actors dealing with 'problem' orconflictive countries. The next section explores their contribution and theirultimate failure.

The failure of the 'failed state' conceptIt is important to recognise that the failed state concept has acted as acorrective to prevalent approaches to promoting peace, development orhumanitarian assistance. The failed state concept has helped direct research,resources and policy attention to states which are not serving theirpopulations.11 It has also enhanced the linkage not just between internationalsecurity and internal stability among poor, peripheral societies, but also thatbetween basic freedoms and service delivery within small, powerless societiesand the interests of Western powers and regional powers. It has forcedhumanitarian actors to question their knee-jerk reflexes of bypassing the stateto provide aid directly to populations in need. And it has injected neededattention to institutional patterns and institutional capacity in efforts atpeacemaking and post-conflict peace building.

However, the 'failed state' concept now clouds, even misleads, clearanalysis. lts utility is diminished for a number of reasons. The conceptcontains culturally specific assumptions about what a 'successful' stateshould look like and groups together disparate sorts of states with diverseproblems. The failed state idea also leads to narrow and univalent policyprescriptions that obscure other important conceptual issues and practicalchallenges. Six major deficiënties are detailed below.

Excessive aggregation of diverse statesThe most serious problem with the concept of failed states is the problem ofdefinition, and more specifically of super-aggregation of very diverse sorts ofstates and their problems. Despite having made the most serious attempt todevelop criteria to distinguish 'failing', 'failed' and 'collapsed' states,Zartman, Rotberg, and some policy-oriented projects have had difficultiesdeveloping indicators that are intuitively logical or widely shared. Rotberg'slist of indicators of a failed state (which hè defines succinctly as 'broadly, a1494

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state in anarchy' ) provides the clearest example of the agglomeration ofextremely diverse institutional and social conditions. The list includes:

civil wars characterised by enduring violence;disharmony between communities;loss of control over peripheral regions to out-groups;growth of criminal violence, including gangs, and trafficking of arms andguns;cessation of functioning legislatures and judiciaries;informal privatisation of education, health and other social services;corruption;loss of legitimacy;declining per capita GDP, with associated soaring smuggling and thesupplanting of the national currency with external money.

Presumably a state fails when it experiences all of these conditions. Rotbergdoes not explicitly define what a 'failing state' is, but it is presumably a statethat exhibits some, but not all, of the above indicators of state failure. Themain problem is that these characteristics reflect very disparate socialrealities, and thus require diverse policy responses.

Consider Rotberg's 'failing states' in 2003: Colombia, Cote d'Ivoire, Iraq,North Korea and Indonesia. These countries represent a tremendous rangeof states and societies. The idea that these states have more shared traits thandistinguishing traits seems specious. Colombian state institutions haveprovided goods and services on a qualitatively different level from thoseprovided by the Nepalese or Ivoirian state, though not throughout theterritory. The nature of armed conflicts differs tremendously, and the sorts ofpolicies that one might adopt should presumably reflect these differentrealities.

Similarly, consider the annual Failed States Index (FSl) produced by theFund for Peace in Foreign Policy magazine for the first time in 2005. Thatindex included 41 sub-indicators of state failure (grouped into 12 categories)as diverse as:

pressures deriving from high population density;history of aggrieved communal groups based on recent or past injustices;'brain drain';institutionalised political exclusion;a drop in GNP;the appearance of private militias or guerrillas;increased corruption;higher poverty rates for some ethnic groups;human rights violations;fragmentation of ruling elites based on group lines, etc.14

The consequence of such agglomeration of diverse criteria is to throw amonolithic cloak over disparate problems that require tailored solutions. The

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top 10 states on the Failed State Index included those as diverse as Iraq, Coted'Ivoire, North Korea, Yemen, Sudan and Haiti. The FSI project specifies notonly that state strengthening is the medicine for the malady of state failure,but also recommends which parts of the body politie should receive themedicine, without more detailed diagnosis.

Given that the symptoms range from poverty to civil war to ethnicdiversity to displacement, the idea that a single remedy applied to the samestate institutions will cure all problems would be amusing were it not sodangerous. To apply a policy of security sector reform to a country likeNorth Korea, for instance, would make little sense. Likewise a policy ofstrong support for Ivoirian state institutions might aggravate grievances andviolence. Similar thinking led to the universal application of standardisedneoliberal structural adjustment packages to all poor countries in the 1990s.We now know that these policies worked against peace processes in placeslike Central America and Cambodia, and contributed to warfare in Bosniaand Central Africa.15 The failed state concept has led the Western policycommunity to apply a blunt instrument to states with three million persons(eg Liberia) or 200 million (Indonesia), to strong states with limited areas outof control (Colombia) as much as to weak and legitimate states with lowcapacity but high legitimacy (East Timor) or predatory states deliberatelylooting the state for personal or corrupt ends (Liberia).

Cookie-cutter prescriptions for 'stronger states'Just as the 'failed state' concept cobbles together diverse states, it tends tolead to a single prescription for diverse maladies: more order. Although thosewho advance the failed state concept prescribe diverse and tailored solutionsto the problems of failing and failed states, they privilege policies that willreinforce order and stability, even when the prevailing order is unjust.16 Thisemphasis on order and stability clearly serves the interests of Western powersconcerned about international insecurities stemming from drug trafficking,terrorism, or internal armed confiïcts abroad. It also reflects learning frompost-conflict societies that, without security, nothing else is possible.However, the multiple and context-specific needs of a war-torn, abusive,weak or other problem-plagued states tend to be lost, rather than betterassured, in the explicit and implicit emphasis on creating states that areforemost strong security providers.

The Fund for Peace's FSI, for instance, suggests that policy makers pursue'many remedies and treatments' for the 'political pathology' of failed states.The Index also suggests, however, that:

Policymakers also must pay more attention to building state institutions,particularly the 'core five' institutions: military, police, civil service, the systemof justice and leadership.17

Three of these 'core five'—namely, the military, the police and the justicesystem—directly reflect a concern for order and stability. These 'core five'1496



institutions are seen as the solution for all failed states, despite the vastlydisparate 41 indicators of failure described earlier.

It is not clear how a stronger military or police capacity (or any of the fivecore functions) will ensure a rise in GNP, less corruption, more equity amongethnic groups, less subordination to ruling elites, or improved human rightsperformance. The specious connection between stronger state institutions inthese areas and the various problems reflected in the diversity of problem-ridden states points to the need for more contextualisation, and perhapscategories, to capture these problems with more nuance.

As noted earlier, deficiënt aspects of state performance and stateinstitutions represent genuine problems that have been overlooked. Themain challenge for addressing these problems is to go beyond the need tosimply 'build states', with the implication that external actors should targettheir assistance first and foremost towards state strength. The one-size-fits-all'state-building' answer to 'failed states' misses important tensions and trade-offs in pursuing state strength. Most salient, enhancing the capacity ofmilitary and police and judiciaries when these are instruments of repression,corruption, ethnic discrimination, and/or organised crime will only worsenthese problems. The central challenge for state building—how to strengthenstate legitimacy and effectiveness when the state is predatory, corrupt,authoritarian or otherwise 'bad'—is swept under the rug by the discourse offailed states and state building.

Dodging democracy and democratisationThe focus on failed states and building states obscures another importantissue: regimes and their nature. For those concerned primarily with order, thediscourse of states and state building helps avoid thorny issues ofdemocratisation, representation, horizontal accountability and transparency.An increasing concern with states and state building coincided with a periodin the late 1990s of disillusion with the ability of international actors—whether the UN, international financial institutions, international NGOs(iNGOs) or bilateral states—to instil democracy in war-torn countries. Thecases of post-war democratisation in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Cambodia andLiberia weakened the optimism (and resolve) of liberal interventionists aboutthe ability of democracy to take root in heavily internationalised operationsafter war. In fact, the focus on states and state institutions in most casesprovided a refreshing and needed corrective to concepts, policies andprogrammes that did not deliver on the promise of democracy.

However, by focusing on state institutions in an apolitical and technicalmanner, issues of the rules of governance are neglected or relegated to abackseat. The response to state failure—enhanced states and state institu-tions—tends to prioritise state agencies like the military, the police, thejudiciary, public finance agencies, as well as health, education, and otherexecutive agencies that deliver social services. This discourse is a markeddeparture from the institutions that the democratisation sub-field hasemphasised over the past decade: political parties, civil society organisations,

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legislatures and the organisations that mediate between citizens and variousgovernmental bodies.1

In societies where state strength is not so much an issue as the degree towhich the state serves all the territory equally, or where only certain socialgroups have access to effective state services, then issues of regime are likelyto be more important than issues about the state.19 In countries like Croatia,Macedonia, Colombia and Indonesia, for instance, the strength of stateinstitutions is far less weighty than how state institutions reflect and respondto popular aspirations, needs and identity. And in societies where ethnicgroups exist in tension or hold disproportionate economie and politicalpower, or where elites have long exploited the populace without anyaccountability, strengthening state institutions without attention to howsociety will relate to the state is perilous. In such states (eg Liberia,Afghanistan, Burundi), state building inevitably must reckon not solely withthe nature of the state (federal, autonomous, etc) but also with the regime'srules of governance.

Although recent scholarship has brought needed attention to the state,current concepts of state failure and state building threaten to throw the babyout with the bathwater. State building has marginalised questions like whatsort of democratie regime is appropriate for a given country, how oppressedgroups will receive representation, how social groups' interests will bemediated, what forms of accountability over state authorities should beadopted, and to what extent liberal rights will be enshrined and enforced, andby what sort of judicial system.20 These issues of governance, electoral rules,justice and group rights (among many others) will not resolve themselvessolely through effective state strengthening. They require deliberate andthoughtful attention.

Conflation of peace and statenessOne aspect of the growing attention to state failure is the new attention tostates and state institutions among those concerned with peace building andpeacekeeping. Although state building is not a term often used by donors orthe United Nations, these organisations have increasingly come to seefostering sustainable state institutions as the core task of peacebuilding.States are seen as necessary for peace, and successful peace building becomesvirtually synonymous with state building. A report by a UN-appointed High-Level Panel making recommendations for UN reform flatly says, 'Along withestablishing security, the core task of peacebuilding is to build effective publicinstitutions that, through negotiations with civil society, can establish aconsensual framework for governance within the rule of law'.21 A 2004 UNstudy found that numerous UN officials indicated that the creation ofeffective and legitimate states is now the central marker of success of a peaceoperation.

Yet state-buildmg can jeopardise peace, and contribute to insecurity andgroup tensions. Where external donors provide resources to corrupt,predatory central governments in the name of strengthening their institutions,1498

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state building only advances abusive authority and fuels resentment andarmed resistance. Where post-conflict state building creates institutions thatserve only an ethnic or other minority, peace is threatened. Conversely, byaccepting peace deals which enshrine the power of military faction leaders,enabling them to divide and capture state resources, then peace buildingundermines state building.

Just as it glosses over tricky issues of democratisation, the failed stateconcept allows decision makers to avoid some of the tensions between thestrengthening of a central state and the delicate process of ensuring thatarmed groups do not topple or threaten one another or the state. Peacebuilding may require avoiding state building for a time, just as enhancingstate capacities may sometimes foster instability.

Paternalism: teleological assumption and Western biasThe most self-evident deficiency of the concept of state failure is the value-based notion of what a state is, and a patronising approach to scoring statesbased on those values. Naturally all categorisations rest on values. Indeed, Ishare many of the liberal values that lament the shortcomings of states thatfail to provide basic, life-sustaining services to their populations. At the sametime, the failed state concept repeats the same assumptions that modernisa-tion theory made in its heyday, assumptions that proved to be soproblematic.

Both approaches assume that there is some 'good' endpoint towards whichstates should move, and that this movement is somehow natural. Like the'modern' standard of three decades ago, the 'successful state' standard oftoday is based on the features of the dominant Western states. Indeed, littlediscussion of the partial failures of Western states occurs in the literatiire onfailed states. The schoolmarm tone of the concept is apparent: states are'bad' because they have failed some externally defined test. Even where astate's population might be better served by the temporary or partialassumption of its sovereignty by some assemblage of international orregional actors,25 the multiple problems of such arrangements—ie alter-naties to the failed state—are not acknowledged or considered.

Similarly, the appeal of forms of authority organised at levels other thanthe state—sub-state authority arrangements or transnational authorityarrangements—are not acknowledged even where these may prove moresensible than seeking to get failing states out of 'detention hall' and back tosome pre-failure status. The failed state concept goes farther thanmodernisation theory in presuming that all states at one point held some'successful' (or passing grade) status. Rotberg's criteria for failed statenessare telling: 'A failed state is a polity that is no langer able or willing toperform the fundamental tasks of a nation-state in the modern world'.

Yet many such states have never been effective in meaningful ways, andtheir populations have received services and security via alternative forms ofauthority. Whether these tribes, local strongmen, regional authorities, ortransnational arrangements have delivered effectively or not, the point is that

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an ahistorical assessment of a state facilitates quick fixes and preparedsolutions that do not necessarily reflect the context of a particular society. Oneconsequence of this usage of the concept is that states with relatively stableobjectionable features are conflated with states experiencing unusual crises ofauthority. For instance, Colombia is considered to be 'failing' despite therelatively stable condition of its state institutions over four decades. Bycontrast, Zimbabwe is considered to be failing as a result of an importantchange in policies by a quasi-democratic ruler, Robert Mugabe, in 2000.

Obfuscation of the West's role in 'failure'Related to the paternalistic character of the failed state label is theobfuscation of the West's role in the contemporary condition of these states.This ahistoric scoring of a state as failing or fragile omits the long history ofcolonialism and exploitation in the impoverishment and poor governance ofmany societies presently considered fragile or failing.27 European states (andlater North American countries) created the system of nation-states, oftendrawing the borders of states themselves, as well as extracting resources,fostering colonial institutions with powerful legacies, propping up post-colonial leaders, providing them with arms, and undermining the emergenceof plural and civil societies that might have diminished poverty, warfare andweak institutions.28

Certainly elites and social groups in many poor and war-torn societies bearimportant responsibility for choices they have made. However, it is egregiousto ignore the role of Western colonial powers, international financialinstitutions, development agencies and the systems these actors have createdin the historical evolution of so-called failed states.

Discarding 'failed states': some obvious alternativesIf one accepts these deficiënties of the failed state concept, then what is theappropriate response? Are alternative concepts, such as 'troubled' states,'states at risk', 'fragile states', etc, adopted by international donors or NGOsbetter? In most cases, no. Unless concepts identify a specific variable orcontinuüm along which these states are 'troubled', our understanding of thevaried condition of various states will be misinformed and poorly addressed.

The search for alternative concepts is timely. Several research projects anddevelopment agencies have already begun to move towards more discrimi-nating categories. The CIA-funded State Failure Task Force, for instance,disaggregated its object of inquiry, abandoning the use of the term 'statefailure', and changing its name to 'Political Instability Task Force'.29

Similarly in 2006 the US Agency for International Development (USAID)issued a new template of categories of states to guide policy development.Deliberately omitting 'failing states', USAID adopted five categories reflectingwhether a country was emerging from armed conflict, how poor it was andwhether it was pro-USA or anti-USA.30 Both sets of categories represented adeliberate choice to abandon the 'failed/failing state' terminology.

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Nevertheless, neither categorisation is fully satisfactory. The PoliticalInstability Task Force used four categories of events: 1) revolutionary wars;2) genocide/politicide; 3) ethnic wars; and 4) adverse regime change.3 Theseare neither exhaustive nor clearly demarcated.32 The intended utility ofUSAlD's classification for US policy makers renders it less than impartial.33

Other development agencies also sought to make their terminology moreprecise, though without complete satisfaction. The World Bank's LICUSchanged its name in 2005 to the Fragile States Unit, and then (merging withthe Post-Conflict unit) to Fragile and Conflict-Affected Countries Group.

Several criteria distinguish diverse states in ways that provide a moredisaggregated analysis of what are broadly conceived as 'failing' or 'failed'states.34 Here I suggest an initial list of categories that may lay the basis forfurther empirical work. These are not meant to be comprehensive andmutually exclusive categories. Some states fall into more than one category.Yet the logic of each shapes the nature of the appropriate response bothinternally and externally, yielding a much more nuanced analytic tooi than'failed states'.

Collapsed statesBecause of the more widely shared understanding of a collapsed state than afailed state, the term holds more meaning.35 Here it refers to countries whosestate apparatus ceases to exist for a period of several months. The concepthere does not refer to the inability of some ministries to provide services, or toa state under siege in warfare, nor to an absence of the state in some regions,but to a complete collapse of a national state. Here citizens do not knowwhere to go to obtain a recognised passport, and all services normallyprovided by the state are provided by sub-state or non-state actors. From1990 onwards only Somalia (1990-2004), the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia(in 1991), the Soviet Union (1991) and possibly Afghanistan (1992-95) meetthese criteria.36 During the period from 1995 to 2005 Somalia was the onlysustained collapsed state in the world. lts passports ceased to be recognisedinternationally. Frequently cited cases of state failure like Sudan, Iraq, theDRC and North Korea do not constitute collapse.

Collapsed states present their own challenges for state builders. The needto create some agreement among social elites and salient social groups tosupport a new state arrangement is necessary. The process by which such anagreement is reached will shape the structure of the state, its initiallegitimacy, and whether state reconstruction will fuel or spark armedconflict. Subsequent state formation must reckon with those who havesubstituted for the state: armies, militias, trading and commercial consortia,mafias, purveyors of finance, local or religious authorities, informal dispute-resolving entities, school teachers, private health providers, regionalhospitals, etc. That process is exceedingly complex and will vary acrossspace and issue area. Since the absence of the state is at the centre of thesesocieties' challenges, state building here is paramount. Peace buildingstrategies, efforts to bring elites to justice, humanitarian relief, democracy

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promotion, and development strategies must all intersect with efforts tocreate a national state. Somalia faces a plethora of challenges.

Weak formal institutional capacity (aka 'weak states')The most important distinction among states is not whether they are failing,but whether the formal institutions of the state are, or ever have been, where'things happen'. In many states informal institutions—tribes, patron-clientnetworks, or ethnically based networks—hold as much power as formal stateinstitutions.37 The term 'weak states' is useful for places where these informalnetworks, rather than state ministries, are the main channels of servicedelivery and allocation of public resources. The problem of low state capacitygenerally reflects long colonial histories more than sudden crises, althoughfactors such as economie shocks, terms of trade, and corrupt or incompetentrule make a difference. Informal institutions may protect and serve thepopulace of weak states, but this performance will be inconsistent acrosssocial groups and territory. Such states are not necessarily 'failing'.

War does not necessarily equate to weak state capacity. The current war-torn Colombian state, for instance, has much greater formal capacity thanthe Liberian state did during (and before and after) its 1990-97 civil war. Arelated difference is whether the formal institutional capacity ever existed andcan be readily tapped once again after a crisis or armed conflict. Although itis difncult to measure the extent to which formal vs informal institutionsdeliver services and are linked to citizen identity, some indicators exist andshould be a foundation for devising strategies of addressing state capacityand legitimacy.

War-torn states

According to Rotberg, all failed states are experiencing some degree of armedconflict, even though oft-cited 'failed states' like North Korea andBangladesh are not at war. Conceptually the degree and nature of armedconflict vary across countries. Where warfare is limited to specific areas andspecific groups (eg Chechnya in Russia, despite attacks that have occurred inMoscow), the challenges of state building differ from where civil war isterritorially extensive and involves most social groups (eg Liberia in 2003).

Where warfare is extensive, it poses a certain number of commonchallenges for would-be state builders. First, war can be a driving engine ofstate formation, either intentionally or inadvertently. Second, wartime statesmake 'neutral' state building difficult if not impossible, especially in civilwars. Where aiding the state means aiding one side in a war (eg US policy onColombia over the past decade), external efforts at state building underminenegotiated peace. External support for wartime states often leads toconflating support for self-sustaining and legitimate states with partisansupport for a particular government. National elites will probably be moreinterested in capturing symbolic support and war resources than in revisitingthe design or efficacy of the state. As in Palestine and Liberia in the late1502

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1990s, external actors often knowingly support state practices and institu-tions that they know are not sustainable (and may be corrupt) because oftheir commitment to stay involved in seeking to resolve an armed conflict.38

Post-war states present their own challenges. In countries such as ElSalvador, Cambodia, Bosnia and Mozambique, peace agreements laid thefoundation for state building. Subsequent peace agreements in the 21stcentury have been even more self-consciously designed to offer a roadmap forreforming and bolstering states and their institutions. Here the text of theagreement is crucial for the state-building enterprise. The text both empowersstate reform and state institution building and constrains it. If certaininstitutions are omitted from peace agreements, shaping state structures andeffectiveness in those areas is likely to be more difficult. The verificationmechanisms represent tools for implementation and interpretation of statebuilding.

Although post-conflict countries are often lumped together, the way thatwar ends makes a difference. Countries whose ancien régimes are defeatedhave certain dynamics in common that distinguish them from countrieswhere negotiated settlements have occurred (here I speak of decisive defeat,not regime change followed by extensive warfare as in Iraq and Afghanistan).Newly empowered victors are generally less encumbered in redesigning andre-filling state institutions than in negotiated transitions from war. And theyare often eager to redesign and re-staff state agencies according to theideologies or identity concerns that drove their effort to topple the priorregime. In Marxist rebellions, militaries, police forces and representationalorgans were historically refashioned along communist lines and filled withparty members. Where ethnic or national liberation struggles are successful(eg Uganda, East Timor, Rwanda), perceived biases in prior institutions areeliminated, but the scope and capacity of state agencies may or may not beaffected.

External actors face different challenges in building states after insurgentvictory. Often the challenge is to provide security for the vanquished armyand for the population associated with it. In Kosovo, for instance, NATOfailed sufficiently to protect Serbs.39 Moreover, state building here tends tofocus on constraining or shaping the victorious groups occupying the stateand on empowering the vanquished in both the design and the staffing of thepost-war state. In Haiti (1994), East Timor and Kosovo, external actorssought to make sure that new governments would be neither excessivelyauthoritarian nor exclusive in reforming the state's rules and institutions.External actors approach these tasks with different concerns, capacities andstrategies. In other cases, they may empower exclusivity by reinforcing ananti-democratic government. State building in these post-defeat statesrequires different strategies from those in post-settlement states.

Authoritarian states j regimesAlthough authoritarian regimes contain the seeds of their own demise, someshow remarkable staying power. Consider Castros' Cuba, Qaddafi's Libya,

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and Kim Jong U's North Korea. Such regimes often come to power throughviolence, but establish sufficient coercive control that opposition is curtailedthrough repression, leading to surprisingly low levels of political or criminalviolence. The lack of violent opposition, the pervasive nature of such regimes,and the robust and extensively diffused (often widely internalised) ideologiesthat support such regimes make semi-stable authoritarian regimes relativelyunusual (especially where they possess nuclear or other weapons of massdestruction).

The challenges of state building in such circumstances differ significantlyfrom those in 'hot' civil wars or weak states. Such states are often not 'weak'in terms of their formal institutional character, since state agencies are themain vehicles for the exercise of power and the delivery of services. Statebuilding is relatively meaningless without regime change. Semi-stableauthoritarian regimes have generally refashioned the state along the linesthey desire. External detractors will have minimal influence, exercised mainlythrough economie incentives or security issue-specific negotiations. Onceregime change occurs, the character of that transition will heavily shape state-building needs and approaches. For example, was it violent and decisive as inJapan in 1945? Was it non-violent as those of Eastern Europe in 1989? Was itviolent and indecisive as in Iraq in 2003?

These are just some of the more obvious and well-understood categories ofstates that are lost when folded into the 'state failure' umbrella. Many othersexist. These categories reflect a more differentiated approach to categorisingwhat are often lumped together as failed or fragile states. They are imperfectinsofar as they overlap and their criteria are not sufficiently precise. Yet theysignify a step forward from a blanket declaration that a state is 'sick' withoutmaking any cogent diagnosis of what sorts of symptoms or prognosis thatstate faces. These categories are familiar, often used by analysts from withinthese societies (unlike 'failed state') and are open to detailed empiricalanalysis.

ConclusionsThe concept of state failure reflects new ways of thinking about order, peaceand development. States and state institutions have been 'rediscovered' byaid agencies, financial institutions, diplomats and militaries in Westerncountries and in intergovernmental bodies. We have not yet fullycomprehended the degree to which this renewed concern with states is likelyto reshape foreign policy programmes and the manner in which nationalelites in Asia, Latin America and Africa deploy these concepts in theirinteractions with international actors or with their own populations.

However, state failure must be seen in the context of the post-9/11 period.The rediscovery of the state has occurred in the context of the 'war on terror',as failing states are deemed dangerous for Western security interests. ltsprominence derives mainly not from concern for the inability of some statesto provide for their own population's security, welfare and rights, but todeter and control threats to the populations and institutions of rich countries.

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The important need to combat terrorism has led to a privileging of the order-providing capacities of states. As shown above, the failed state concept hasfuelled a tendency towards single, technocratie formulas for strengtheningstates, which emphasise coercive capabilities. Although security is a sine quanon for sustained legitimacy and development, external efforts that privilegecoercive capabilities everywhere and anywhere, without regard for context,are likely to bolster abusive, predatory and illegitimate states.

Past historie periods where Western powers privileged enhancing thecoercive capacities of peripheral countries led to a cycle of serious problems:oppressive governments, serious human rights violations, and instability thatcame back to haunt those who had originally adopted an expeditious butunsound approach to building state institutions for stabilisation. In theCaribbean in the early part of the 20th century, the USA pursued a strategyof state building that centred on constabulary forces, without sufficientattention to issues of regime, to other state institutions, or to accountability.The result was the rise of constabulary officer Somoza to lead anauthoritarian Nicaragua for decades, as well as repressive dictatorships bythe Duvaliers in Haiti and by Fulgencio Batista in Cuba.40 A security-centredstate-building template is one of the more serious dangers of the failed stateconcept.

The failed state concept has helped identify and emphasise genuineproblems. The concept has drawn overdue attention to the importance ofstate institutions in peace processes, in development effbrts, and inconsidering sources of transnational insecurity. Humanitarian NGOs, theUN, regional organisations, bilateral donors and Western militaries shouldall take the state and its institutions more seriously in their endeavours.

Yet imprecise concepts make for poor scholarship and bad policy. I haveprovided a critique of the fallacy of the failed state. The concept's harm is notlimited to extreme or isolated examples. The term is inadequate, evenmisleading, for virtually every country it purports to describe. Just as theState Failure Task Force has done, scholars should abandon the concept ofstate failure, and put renewed effbrt into devising categories of analysis thatwill be denotatively and connotatively clear, useful and discriminating.

Notes1 am grateful to William Stanley, Madalene O'Donnell, Elizabeth Cousens, Vanessa Wyeth, YolandeBouka, Sanjeev Khagram, Barney Rubin, Jim Ron and Heather Svanidze for helpful feedback

l Noam Chomsky's Failed States, New York, NY: Henry Holt, 2007, analyses the USA as a failed state.2 K Menkhaus, Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism, Adelphi Paper no 364, Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2004. See also Menkhaus, 'Somalia: governance vs state-building', in CT Callwith V Wyeth (eds), Building States to Build Peace, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008.

3 SV Emsiedel, 'Policy responses to state failure', in S Chesterman (ed), Making States Work: StateFailure and the Crisis of Governance, Tokyo, United Nations University, 2005, p 16.

4 William I. Zartman, Collapsed States: The disïntegration and restoration of legitimate authority,Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995; and Gerald B. Heiman and Steven R. Ratner, 'Saving FailedStates', Foreign Policy, 89, 1999. Earlier references are not as immediately relevant to thecontemporary deployment of the term 'failed' or 'collapsed' state. See N Yoffee & GL Cowgill(eds), The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1988;and M Janicke, State Failure: The Impotence of Politics in Industrial Society, University Park, PA:

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Penn State University Press, 1990. Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,New York- Viking Adult, 2004, provides a provocative examination of social, not state, collapse.

5 See the Political Instability Task Force website, at http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/pitf/, accessed 5February 2008 For results, see also J Goldstone, R Bates, TR Gurr et al, 'A global forecasting modelof political instability', paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political ScienceAssociation, September 2005, Table l.

6 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,Washington, DC, 15 February 2006, at http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/61262.htm, accessed 5February 2008. See also her 'Transformational diplomacy', speech delivered at GeorgetownUniversity, 16 January 2006, at http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/59306.htm, accessed 5February 2008.

7 See the LICUS website, at http://www.worldbank.org/hcus/, accessed 5 February 2008.8 World Bank, World Development Report: The State in a Changing World, Washington, DC: World

Bank, 1997.9 RS Williamson, 'The dangers of weak, failing and failed states', Whitehead Journal o] Diplomacy and

International Relations, 8 (1), 2007, pp 9-19.10 N Bensahel, 'Organising for nation building', Survival, 49 (2), 2007, p 49; and S Patnck & K Brown,

Greater than the Sum of its Parts? Assessing 'Whole of Government' Approaches to Fragile States,Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, 2007.

11 A Ghani & C Lockhart, Fixing Failed States, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.12 RI Rotberg, When States Fail: Causes and Consequences, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

2004, p 5. .13 Ibid, pp 5-9. The crucial element of 'weak states' seems to be that their inter-communal tensions have

not yet thoroughly 'become overtly violent' (p. 4). While the author seems to be able to draw thesedistinctions readily, they are not so apparent to me.

14 See the 41 sub-indicators listed in Fund for Peace's Failed States Index, at http://www.fundforpeace.org/web/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=99&Itemid=140, accessed 5 February 2008.

15 See, for example, Alvaro de Soto & Graciana del Castillo, 'Obstacles to peacekeeping', Foreign Policy,94/1994, pp 69-83; and Susan L Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, Washington, DC: Brookings, 1995.

16 Diverse solutions are described in BM Kraxberger, 'Failed states: temporary obstacles to democratiediffusion or fundamental holes in the world political map?', Third World Quarterly, 28 (6), September2007. pp 1055-1071.

17 See Fund for Peace, Failed States Index, Frequently Asked Questions #9, at http://www.fundforpeace.org/web/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=102&Itemid=327#8, accessed 5 February2008.

18 See Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation, Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkmsUniversity Press, 1999.

19 I diverge here from the views of Michael Barnett in 'Building a Republican peace', InternationalSecurity, 30 (4), 2006, pp 87-112.

20 One exception is Anna K Jarstad & Timothy Sisk, From War to Democracy: Dilemmas ofPeacebuilding, New York: Cambridge, 2008.

21 High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A More Secure World: Our SharedResponsibility, New York: United Nations, December 2004, para 229.

22 See CT Call, Institutionalizing Peace: A Review of Post-Conflict Peacebuilding Concepts and Issues forDPA, report for UN Department of Political Affaire, New York, 2005.1 have contributed to this trend.

23 CT Call, 'Conclusion', in Call with Wyeth, Building States to Build Peace.24 For instance, the British 'troubles' in Northern Ireland, race riots in France, even the interna! armed

conflicts and authoritarian traits of Russia seem to escape analysis in Rotberg, When States Fail.Although these problems may serve as evidence that 'successful' states can handle myriad forms ofviolence and social strife, they are not clearly outside the defmition of failing states.

25 See SD Krasner, 'Sharing sovereignty: new institutions for collapsed and failing states', InternationalSecurity, 29 (2), 2004, pp 85-120.

26 Rotberg, When States Fail, p 6, emphasis added.27 David Chandler, Empire in Dental: The Politics of State-Building, London: Pluto, 2006.28 RE Brooks, 'Failed states, or the state as failure?', University of Chicago Law Review, Fail 2005, pp

1159-1196. See the large postcolonial literature, including Edward Said, Orientalism, New York:Vintage, 1979; and Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy ofLate Colonialism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

29 See http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/pitf/, accessed 5 February 2008.30 These five categories, in a form I have abbreviated, are as follows: rebuilding countries, developing

countries, transforming countries, sustaining partnership countries, and restrictive countries. Seecategory descriptions in 'Annex A—Strategie Framework for Foreign Assistance', from the US

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Director of Foreign Assistance, 'FY2007 Operational Plan Guidance', 27 October 2006, USAID whitepaper, p 33.

31 TR Gurr et al, State Failure Task Force Report: Phase II Findings, McLean, VA: Science ApplicationsInternational Corporation (SAIC), 31 Jury 1998, p 41.

32 For instance, was Laurent Kabila's movement in Eastern Zaire 'revolutionary' or 'ethnic'? What of theUS civil war? Given Jack L. Snyder's research in From Voting to Violence: Democratization andNationalist Conflict, New York: WW Norton, 2000, why do regime changes in an authoritariandirection pose more threat of instability than those in the direction of democracy?

33 Thus the list of 'sustained partners' includes authoritarian pro-US regimes like Saudi Arabia andEquatorial Guinea, which would logically be considered 'restrictive' were it not for their politicalrelationships with the USA. For details see 'Annex B—Extended Framework' to the document in theUSAID white paper (note 30), which explicitly cites ideology as a criterion for 'restrictive states' and liststhe countries for each category except for 'restrictive states'.

34 The Political Instability Task Force found, in testing multiple variables several ways, thatdisaggregating states did not improve its model's predictive powers. See Goldstone et al, 'A globalforecasting model of political instability', p 15.

35 It is here more narrowly defined than in Zartman, Collapsed States, op cit.36 Before adopting an unfortunately broad definition of state failure, the State Failure Task Force

adopted a definition identical to that of a collapsed state: 'Narrowly defined, state failure consists ofinstances in which the central state authority collapses for several years'. It found that, 'Fewer thantwenty such episodes occurred globally between 1955 and 1998, however'. In fact, a careful review ofthe post-1989 cases reveals that only four cases meet the definition as interpreted here. Other caseslisted, such as Guinea-Bissau, Bosnia, Burundi and Sierra Leone during the 1990s, experienced eitherregime change, where other actors took the reins of the state, or war that left the state unable to carryout all of its tasks in all of the national territory, but not a collapse of state authority. TRGurr et al,State Failure Task Force Report: Phase III Findings, McLean, VA: SAIC, 30 September 2000, pp 3, 79.

37 Among the literature on informal political institutions, see W Reno, Warlord Politics and AfricanStates, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999; and M Bratton, 'Formal versus informal institutions inAfrica', Journal of Democracy, 18 (3), 2007, pp 96-111.

38 Mike McGovern, 'Liberia: the risks of rebuilding a shadow state', and Rex Brynen, 'Palestine: buildingneither peace nor state,' both in Call with Wyeth, Building States to Build Peace.

39 Human Rights Watch, Failure to Protect: Anti-Minority Violence in Kosovo, New York: Human RightsWatch, 2004.

40 Jan Knippers Black, Sentinels of Empire, Westport, CT: Greenwood-Praeger, 1986.

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