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The Fallacy of the Failed State

Article in Third World Quarterly December 2008
DOI: 10.1080/01436590802544207

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Third World Quarterly

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Third World Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 8, 2008, pp 1491-1507

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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 such
widely divergent and problematic ways that they have lost any utility. The
article details six serious problems with the term 'state failure' and related
terms like 'fragile' or 'troubled' states, concluding that analysts should abandon
these terms. It concludes with a modest attempt to develop alternative concepts
and principles for thinking about diverse states that pose varied challenges for
academie analysis and policy makers.

Since the concept of 'failed states' entered the USA's political lexicon in the
early 1990s, it has come to occupy a prominent place in international peace
and security. The attacks of 9/11 focused attention on the failure of the
Afghan state to prevent the operation of al-Qaeda on its territory. The
situation in that country, and subsequent growing concern about other
similar states, only intensified concern about the role of 'failed states' in
harbouring or aiding terrorism. The US National Security Strategy of 2002
marked this shift from the battlefields of Europe: 'America is now threatened
less by conquering states than by failing ones'.
Yet the 'failed states' conceptand related terms like 'failing', 'fragile',
'stressed' and 'troubled' stateshas 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 of
the term. Not only does the term 'failing state' reflect the schoolmarm's
scorecard according to linear index defined by a univocal Weberian endstate,
but it has also grown to encompass states as diverse as Colombia, East
Timor, Indonesia, North Korea, Cote d'Ivoire, Haiti, Iraq, and the Sudan.1
Many progressives have welcomed the overdue linkage between the
security of people in the USA and other industrialised democracies with
abject poverty, corrupt government and human rights atrocities in distant
countries. It is something of an achievement to see poor, forgotten countries
receive 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: call@american.edu.
ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/08/081491-17 2008 Third World Quarterly
DOI: 10.1080/01436590802544207

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daily survival and well-being of 'locals' in these poor and often war-torn
societies are especially enthusiastic. For different reasons progressives and
conservatives have impelled the proliferation of the term 'failed state' and its
logical policy response, 'state building'.
And yet the 'failed state', as widely understood and debated, is a
fallacy. It is silly to say that Colombia, North Korea and Somalia are any
more equivalent than are Belgium, Bolivia and Burma (all of which at
least share ethnic separatist movements). My main argument is that the
'failed state' concept is largely useless and should be abandoned except
insofar as it refers to wholly collapsed stateswhere no authority is
recognisable either internally to a country's inhabitants or externally to the
international community. In the late 20th century this situation prevailed
over a sustained period in only one country, Somalia, from 1991 until
roughly 2004.2
In this paper I explore the origins and evolving content of the term 'failed
state', analysing the factors behind its emergence and its positive contributions to political analysis and policy prescriptions. I then specify six reasons
why the term 'failed states' and its corollary 'failing states', as well as
derivatives 'fragile' and 'troubled' states, should be eschewed. If internal and
external 'state builders' are to have any hope of fostering effective and
legitimate states, their conceptual tools must become more refined and
discriminating. I conclude with a modest initial attempt to develop
alternative concepts and principles for thinking about diverse states,
countries that pose varied challenges for academie analysis and for Western
policy makers, be they concerned with counter-terrorism, consolidating
peace, human rights, democratisation, or global hunger.

The 'failed state' phenomenon

The concept of state failure came to prominence in the early 1990s. The case
of Somalia, where the national state wholly ceased to exist, played a crucial
role in shaping analysts' thinking about states and state 'failure'.3 Two early
works, Heiman and Ratner's 1993 'Failed States' article in Foreign Policy and
Zartman's Collapsed States in 1995, addressed the most prominent crises of
the early 1990s.4 Heiman and Ratner referred to states that are 'simply
unable to function as independent entities' (p 33), and included Haiti,
Yugoslavia, the USSR, Sudan, Liberia and Cambodia. Zartman's collapsed
stateswhere '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 September
llth US policy makers were utilising and exploring it. The CIA funded a
multi-year, multidisciplinary research project beginning in 1994 called 'The
State Failure Task Force'. Based at the University of Maryland, the project
sought to identify the underlying causes of state failure, which it defined as 'a
relatively new label that encompasses a range of severe political conflicts and
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regime crises exemplified by events of the 1990s in Somalia, Bosnia, Liberia,

Afghanistan, and the Democratie Republic of Congo (Zare)'.5
The attacks of September llth brought 'failed states' into the top tier of
US security interests. Afghanistan's apparent incapacity to control its
territory and to locate and combat al-Qaeda lent new attention to the
concept. Indeed, in speeches in early 2006 citing the problem of failed states,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeatedly cited Afghanistan as an
example of state failure.6 State failure became prominent in foreign policy
discourse (especially in the USA) because failed states were seen as harbours
for terrorists and launching pads for their operations.
September llth and its aftermath occurred when many international
actors were developing new policies towards state failure. Toward the end of
the 1990s international financial institutions and development agencies
expanded their attention to state institutions. The development community
gradually became more familiar and comfortable with notions of first,
'governance', then, on a less widespread scale, 'state building' as important
links to development. During the Cold War the IMF, the World Bank and
regional development banks pointed to the prohibitions in their charters of
engaging in activities deemed political in the name of preserving their
purported neutrality. With the end of the Cold War, however, the links
between development and the quality of governance gained recognition.
Consequently issues such as military expenditures, corruption, transparency
and accountability in the use of development funds became part of the
development discourse and aid programming. Post-conflict societies and
different forms of weak or 'stressed-out' states received new attention,
boosted by the Bosnian war in the mid-1990s. After creating a Post-Conflict
Reconstruction Unit, the World Bank in 2002 opened a Low Income
Countries 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, and
indeed how they viewed the world. Among development specialists old ideas
that development consisted mainly of transferring resources (aid), spurring
trade or reshaping policies (eg structural adjustment policies) were being
supplanted by the idea that development consists of building institutions that
can generale and manage economie policies and processes. Western defence
establishments increasingly saw the lack of institutions capable of providing
order within countries as a top military threat, rather than more traditional
threats of opposing military capabilities or technologies per se, as reflected in
the US National Security Strategy of 2006. And diplomats increasingly
viewed the problems of war and peace not as contests between coherent
warring parties requiring the tools of negotiation and conflict resolution, but
as the absence or weakness of institutions, requiring the strengthening of
those institutions to then create and manage violence and social conflicts.9
The conflict cycle of peacemaking, peacekeeping and peace building set forth
in the 1992 Agenda for Peace had been supplanted as a framework for
conflict analysis by the state-building agenda. The concept of 'joined-up
government', whereby development, diplomatic and defence agencies were
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structurally brought together to integrale or harmonise their work, reflected a

recognition that these enterprises were intertwined.10
Understanding failing and fragile states became not just a new priority for
Western foreign policy bureaucracies but also for non-governmental
organisations and foundations. Thus, the US-based Carnegie Corporation
funded over a dozen research projects in a 'States-at-Risk' programme. The
UK-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-socomplete states emerged: 'troubled', 'under stress', 'weak' and 'shadow'
states. These efforts responded to genuine gaps and deficinties in the
concepts and tools available to international actors dealing with 'problem' or
conflictive countries. The next section explores their contribution and their
ultimate failure.

The failure of the 'failed state' concept

It is important to recognise that the failed state concept has acted as a

corrective to prevalent approaches to promoting peace, development or
humanitarian assistance. The failed state concept has helped direct research,
resources and policy attention to states which are not serving their
populations.11 It has also enhanced the linkage not just between international
security and internal stability among poor, peripheral societies, but also that
between basic freedoms and service delivery within small, powerless societies
and the interests of Western powers and regional powers. It has forced
humanitarian actors to question their knee-jerk reflexes of bypassing the state
to provide aid directly to populations in need. And it has injected needed
attention to institutional patterns and institutional capacity in efforts at
peacemaking and post-conflict peace building.
However, the 'failed state' concept now clouds, even misleads, clear
analysis. lts utility is diminished for a number of reasons. The concept
contains culturally specific assumptions about what a 'successful' state
should look like and groups together disparate sorts of states with diverse
problems. The failed state idea also leads to narrow and univalent policy
prescriptions that obscure other important conceptual issues and practical
challenges. Six major deficinties are detailed below.
Excessive aggregation of diverse states

The most serious problem with the concept of failed states is the problem of
definition, and more specifically of super-aggregation of very diverse sorts of
states and their problems. Despite having made the most serious attempt to
develop criteria to distinguish 'failing', 'failed' and 'collapsed' states,
Zartman, Rotberg, and some policy-oriented projects have had difficulties
developing indicators that are intuitively logical or widely shared. Rotberg's
list of indicators of a failed state (which h defines succinctly as 'broadly, a
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state in anarchy' ) provides the clearest example of the agglomeration of

extremely 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 and
guns;
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 the
supplanting of the national currency with external money.

Presumably a state fails when it experiences all of these conditions. Rotberg

does not explicitly define what a 'failing state' is, but it is presumably a state
that exhibits some, but not all, of the above indicators of state failure. The
main problem is that these characteristics reflect very disparate social
realities, 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 range
of states and societies. The idea that these states have more shared traits than
distinguishing traits seems specious. Colombian state institutions have
provided goods and services on a qualitatively different level from those
provided by the Nepalese or Ivoirian state, though not throughout the
territory. The nature of armed conflicts differs tremendously, and the sorts of
policies that one might adopt should presumably reflect these different
realities.
Similarly, consider the annual Failed States Index (FSl) produced by the
Fund for Peace in Foreign Policy magazine for the first time in 2005. That
index 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 a
monolithic 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, Cote
d'Ivoire, North Korea, Yemen, Sudan and Haiti. The FSI project specifies not
only that state strengthening is the medicine for the malady of state failure,
but also recommends which parts of the body politie should receive the
medicine, without more detailed diagnosis.
Given that the symptoms range from poverty to civil war to ethnic
diversity to displacement, the idea that a single remedy applied to the same
state institutions will cure all problems would be amusing were it not so
dangerous. To apply a policy of security sector reform to a country like
North Korea, for instance, would make little sense. Likewise a policy of
strong support for Ivoirian state institutions might aggravate grievances and
violence. Similar thinking led to the universal application of standardised
neoliberal structural adjustment packages to all poor countries in the 1990s.
We now know that these policies worked against peace processes in places
like Central America and Cambodia, and contributed to warfare in Bosnia
and Central Africa.15 The failed state concept has led the Western policy
community to apply a blunt instrument to states with three million persons
(eg Liberia) or 200 million (Indonesia), to strong states with limited areas out
of control (Colombia) as much as to weak and legitimate states with low
capacity but high legitimacy (East Timor) or predatory states deliberately
looting 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 to
lead to a single prescription for diverse maladies: more order. Although those
who advance the failed state concept prescribe diverse and tailored solutions
to the problems of failing and failed states, they privilege policies that will
reinforce order and stability, even when the prevailing order is unjust.16 This
emphasis on order and stability clearly serves the interests of Western powers
concerned about international insecurities stemming from drug trafficking,
terrorism, or internal armed conficts abroad. It also reflects learning from
post-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 better
assured, in the explicit and implicit emphasis on creating states that are
foremost 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 system
of justice and leadership.17

Three of these 'core five'namely, the military, the police and the justice
systemdirectly reflect a concern for order and stability. These 'core five'
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institutions are seen as the solution for all failed states, despite the vastly
disparate 41 indicators of failure described earlier.
It is not clear how a stronger military or police capacity (or any of the five
core functions) will ensure a rise in GNP, less corruption, more equity among
ethnic groups, less subordination to ruling elites, or improved human rights
performance. The specious connection between stronger state institutions in
these areas and the various problems reflected in the diversity of problemridden states points to the need for more contextualisation, and perhaps
categories, to capture these problems with more nuance.
As noted earlier, deficint aspects of state performance and state
institutions represent genuine problems that have been overlooked. The
main challenge for addressing these problems is to go beyond the need to
simply 'build states', with the implication that external actors should target
their assistance first and foremost towards state strength. The one-size-fits-all
'state-building' answer to 'failed states' misses important tensions and tradeoffs in pursuing state strength. Most salient, enhancing the capacity of
military and police and judiciaries when these are instruments of repression,
corruption, ethnic discrimination, and/or organised crime will only worsen
these problems. The central challenge for state buildinghow to strengthen
state legitimacy and effectiveness when the state is predatory, corrupt,
authoritarian or otherwise 'bad'is swept under the rug by the discourse of
failed states and state building.
Dodging democracy and democratisation

The focus on failed states and building states obscures another important
issue: regimes and their nature. For those concerned primarily with order, the
discourse of states and state building helps avoid thorny issues of
democratisation, representation, horizontal accountability and transparency.
An increasing concern with states and state building coincided with a period
in the late 1990s of disillusion with the ability of international actors
whether the UN, international financial institutions, international NGOs
(iNGOs) or bilateral statesto instil democracy in war-torn countries. The
cases of post-war democratisation in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Cambodia and
Liberia weakened the optimism (and resolve) of liberal interventionists about
the ability of democracy to take root in heavily internationalised operations
after war. In fact, the focus on states and state institutions in most cases
provided a refreshing and needed corrective to concepts, policies and
programmes that did not deliver on the promise of democracy.
However, by focusing on state institutions in an apolitical and technical
manner, issues of the rules of governance are neglected or relegated to a
backseat. The response to state failureenhanced states and state institutionstends to prioritise state agencies like the military, the police, the
judiciary, public finance agencies, as well as health, education, and other
executive agencies that deliver social services. This discourse is a marked
departure from the institutions that the democratisation sub-field has
emphasised over the past decade: political parties, civil society organisations,
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legislatures and the organisations that mediate between citizens and various
governmental bodies.1
In societies where state strength is not so much an issue as the degree to
which the state serves all the territory equally, or where only certain social
groups have access to effective state services, then issues of regime are likely
to be more important than issues about the state.19 In countries like Croatia,
Macedonia, Colombia and Indonesia, for instance, the strength of state
institutions is far less weighty than how state institutions reflect and respond
to popular aspirations, needs and identity. And in societies where ethnic
groups exist in tension or hold disproportionate economie and political
power, or where elites have long exploited the populace without any
accountability, strengthening state institutions without attention to how
society will relate to the state is perilous. In such states (eg Liberia,
Afghanistan, Burundi), state building inevitably must reckon not solely with
the nature of the state (federal, autonomous, etc) but also with the regime's
rules of governance.
Although recent scholarship has brought needed attention to the state,
current concepts of state failure and state building threaten to throw the baby
out with the bathwater. State building has marginalised questions like what
sort of democratie regime is appropriate for a given country, how oppressed
groups will receive representation, how social groups' interests will be
mediated, what forms of accountability over state authorities should be
adopted, and to what extent liberal rights will be enshrined and enforced, and
by what sort of judicial system.20 These issues of governance, electoral rules,
justice and group rights (among many others) will not resolve themselves
solely through effective state strengthening. They require deliberate and
thoughtful attention.
Conflation of peace and stateness

One aspect of the growing attention to state failure is the new attention to
states and state institutions among those concerned with peace building and
peacekeeping. Although state building is not a term often used by donors or
the United Nations, these organisations have increasingly come to see
fostering sustainable state institutions as the core task of peacebuilding.
States are seen as necessary for peace, and successful peace building becomes
virtually synonymous with state building. A report by a UN-appointed HighLevel Panel making recommendations for UN reform flatly says, 'Along with
establishing security, the core task of peacebuilding is to build effective public
institutions that, through negotiations with civil society, can establish a
consensual framework for governance within the rule of law'.21 A 2004 UN
study found that numerous UN officials indicated that the creation of
effective and legitimate states is now the central marker of success of a peace
operation.
Yet state-buildmg can jeopardise peace, and contribute to insecurity and
group tensions. Where external donors provide resources to corrupt,
predatory central governments in the name of strengthening their institutions,
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state building only advances abusive authority and fuels resentment and
armed resistance. Where post-conflict state building creates institutions that
serve only an ethnic or other minority, peace is threatened. Conversely, by
accepting peace deals which enshrine the power of military faction leaders,
enabling them to divide and capture state resources, then peace building
undermines state building.
Just as it glosses over tricky issues of democratisation, the failed state
concept allows decision makers to avoid some of the tensions between the
strengthening of a central state and the delicate process of ensuring that
armed groups do not topple or threaten one another or the state. Peace
building may require avoiding state building for a time, just as enhancing
state capacities may sometimes foster instability.
Paternalism: teleological assumption and Western bias

The most self-evident deficiency of the concept of state failure is the valuebased notion of what a state is, and a patronising approach to scoring states
based on those values. Naturally all categorisations rest on values. Indeed, I
share many of the liberal values that lament the shortcomings of states that
fail to provide basic, life-sustaining services to their populations. At the same
time, the failed state concept repeats the same assumptions that modernisation theory made in its heyday, assumptions that proved to be so
problematic.
Both approaches assume that there is some 'good' endpoint towards which
states should move, and that this movement is somehow natural. Like the
'modern' standard of three decades ago, the 'successful state' standard of
today is based on the features of the dominant Western states. Indeed, little
discussion of the partial failures of Western states occurs in the literatiire on
failed states. The schoolmarm tone of the concept is apparent: states are
'bad' because they have failed some externally defined test. Even where a
state's population might be better served by the temporary or partial
assumption of its sovereignty by some assemblage of international or
regional actors,25 the multiple problems of such arrangementsie alternaties to the failed stateare not acknowledged or considered.
Similarly, the appeal of forms of authority organised at levels other than
the statesub-state authority arrangements or transnational authority
arrangementsare not acknowledged even where these may prove more
sensible than seeking to get failing states out of 'detention hall' and back to
some pre-failure status. The failed state concept goes farther than
modernisation theory in presuming that all states at one point held some
'successful' (or passing grade) status. Rotberg's criteria for failed stateness
are telling: 'A failed state is a polity that is no langer able or willing to
perform the fundamental tasks of a nation-state in the modern world'.
Yet many such states have never been effective in meaningful ways, and
their populations have received services and security via alternative forms of
authority. Whether these tribes, local strongmen, regional authorities, or
transnational arrangements have delivered effectively or not, the point is that
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an ahistorical assessment of a state facilitates quick fixes and prepared

solutions that do not necessarily reflect the context of a particular society. One
consequence of this usage of the concept is that states with relatively stable
objectionable features are conflated with states experiencing unusual crises of
authority. For instance, Colombia is considered to be 'failing' despite the
relatively stable condition of its state institutions over four decades. By
contrast, Zimbabwe is considered to be failing as a result of an important
change 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 the

obfuscation 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 of
colonialism and exploitation in the impoverishment and poor governance of
many societies presently considered fragile or failing.27 European states (and
later North American countries) created the system of nation-states, often
drawing the borders of states themselves, as well as extracting resources,
fostering colonial institutions with powerful legacies, propping up postcolonial leaders, providing them with arms, and undermining the emergence
of plural and civil societies that might have diminished poverty, warfare and
weak institutions.28
Certainly elites and social groups in many poor and war-torn societies bear
important responsibility for choices they have made. However, it is egregious
to ignore the role of Western colonial powers, international financial
institutions, development agencies and the systems these actors have created
in the historical evolution of so-called failed states.
Discarding 'failed states': some obvious alternatives
If one accepts these deficinties of the failed state concept, then what is the
appropriate response? Are alternative concepts, such as 'troubled' states,
'states at risk', 'fragile states', etc, adopted by international donors or NGOs
better? In most cases, no. Unless concepts identify a specific variable or
continum along which these states are 'troubled', our understanding of the
varied condition of various states will be misinformed and poorly addressed.
The search for alternative concepts is timely. Several research projects and
development agencies have already begun to move towards more discriminating categories. The CIA-funded State Failure Task Force, for instance,
disaggregated its object of inquiry, abandoning the use of the term 'state
failure', 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 reflecting
whether a country was emerging from armed conflict, how poor it was and
whether it was pro-USA or anti-USA.30 Both sets of categories represented a
deliberate choice to abandon the 'failed/failing state' terminology.
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Nevertheless, neither categorisation is fully satisfactory. The Political

Instability Task Force used four categories of events: 1) revolutionary wars;
2) genocide/politicide; 3) ethnic wars; and 4) adverse regime change.3 These
are neither exhaustive nor clearly demarcated.32 The intended utility of
USAlD's classification for US policy makers renders it less than impartial.33
Other development agencies also sought to make their terminology more
precise, though without complete satisfaction. The World Bank's LICUS
changed its name in 2005 to the Fragile States Unit, and then (merging with
the Post-Conflict unit) to Fragile and Conflict-Affected Countries Group.
Several criteria distinguish diverse states in ways that provide a more
disaggregated 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 for
further empirical work. These are not meant to be comprehensive and
mutually exclusive categories. Some states fall into more than one category.
Yet the logic of each shapes the nature of the appropriate response both
internally and externally, yielding a much more nuanced analytic tooi than
'failed states'.
Collapsed states

Because of the more widely shared understanding of a collapsed state than a

failed state, the term holds more meaning.35 Here it refers to countries whose
state apparatus ceases to exist for a period of several months. The concept
here does not refer to the inability of some ministries to provide services, or to
a 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 know
where to go to obtain a recognised passport, and all services normally
provided by the state are provided by sub-state or non-state actors. From
1990 onwards only Somalia (1990-2004), the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
(in 1991), the Soviet Union (1991) and possibly Afghanistan (1992-95) meet
these criteria.36 During the period from 1995 to 2005 Somalia was the only
sustained collapsed state in the world. lts passports ceased to be recognised
internationally. Frequently cited cases of state failure like Sudan, Iraq, the
DRC and North Korea do not constitute collapse.
Collapsed states present their own challenges for state builders. The need
to create some agreement among social elites and salient social groups to
support a new state arrangement is necessary. The process by which such an
agreement is reached will shape the structure of the state, its initial
legitimacy, and whether state reconstruction will fuel or spark armed
conflict. Subsequent state formation must reckon with those who have
substituted for the state: armies, militias, trading and commercial consortia,
mafias, purveyors of finance, local or religious authorities, informal disputeresolving entities, school teachers, private health providers, regional
hospitals, etc. That process is exceedingly complex and will vary across
space and issue area. Since the absence of the state is at the centre of these
societies' challenges, state building here is paramount. Peace building
strategies, efforts to bring elites to justice, humanitarian relief, democracy
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promotion, and development strategies must all intersect with efforts to

create 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 institutionstribes, patron-client
networks, or ethnically based networkshold as much power as formal state
institutions.37 The term 'weak states' is useful for places where these informal
networks, rather than state ministries, are the main channels of service
delivery and allocation of public resources. The problem of low state capacity
generally reflects long colonial histories more than sudden crises, although
factors such as economie shocks, terms of trade, and corrupt or incompetent
rule make a difference. Informal institutions may protect and serve the
populace of weak states, but this performance will be inconsistent across
social groups and territory. Such states are not necessarily 'failing'.
War does not necessarily equate to weak state capacity. The current wartorn Colombian state, for instance, has much greater formal capacity than
the Liberian state did during (and before and after) its 1990-97 civil war. A
related difference is whether the formal institutional capacity ever existed and
can be readily tapped once again after a crisis or armed conflict. Although it
is difncult to measure the extent to which formal vs informal institutions
deliver services and are linked to citizen identity, some indicators exist and
should be a foundation for devising strategies of addressing state capacity
and legitimacy.
War-torn states

According to Rotberg, all failed states are experiencing some degree of armed
conflict, even though oft-cited 'failed states' like North Korea and
Bangladesh are not at war. Conceptually the degree and nature of armed
conflict vary across countries. Where warfare is limited to specific areas and
specific groups (eg Chechnya in Russia, despite attacks that have occurred in
Moscow), the challenges of state building differ from where civil war is
territorially extensive and involves most social groups (eg Liberia in 2003).
Where warfare is extensive, it poses a certain number of common
challenges for would-be state builders. First, war can be a driving engine of
state formation, either intentionally or inadvertently. Second, wartime states
make 'neutral' state building difficult if not impossible, especially in civil
wars. Where aiding the state means aiding one side in a war (eg US policy on
Colombia over the past decade), external efforts at state building undermine
negotiated peace. External support for wartime states often leads to
conflating support for self-sustaining and legitimate states with partisan
support for a particular government. National elites will probably be more
interested in capturing symbolic support and war resources than in revisiting
the design or efficacy of the state. As in Palestine and Liberia in the late
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1990s, external actors often knowingly support state practices and institutions that they know are not sustainable (and may be corrupt) because of
their commitment to stay involved in seeking to resolve an armed conflict.38
Post-war states present their own challenges. In countries such as El
Salvador, Cambodia, Bosnia and Mozambique, peace agreements laid the
foundation for state building. Subsequent peace agreements in the 21st
century have been even more self-consciously designed to offer a roadmap for
reforming and bolstering states and their institutions. Here the text of the
agreement is crucial for the state-building enterprise. The text both empowers
state reform and state institution building and constrains it. If certain
institutions are omitted from peace agreements, shaping state structures and
effectiveness in those areas is likely to be more difficult. The verification
mechanisms represent tools for implementation and interpretation of state
building.
Although post-conflict countries are often lumped together, the way that
war ends makes a difference. Countries whose ancien rgimes are defeated
have certain dynamics in common that distinguish them from countries
where 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 and
re-filling state institutions than in negotiated transitions from war. And they
are often eager to redesign and re-staff state agencies according to the
ideologies or identity concerns that drove their effort to topple the prior
regime. In Marxist rebellions, militaries, police forces and representational
organs were historically refashioned along communist lines and filled with
party members. Where ethnic or national liberation struggles are successful
(eg Uganda, East Timor, Rwanda), perceived biases in prior institutions are
eliminated, but the scope and capacity of state agencies may or may not be
affected.
External actors face different challenges in building states after insurgent
victory. Often the challenge is to provide security for the vanquished army
and for the population associated with it. In Kosovo, for instance, NATO
failed sufficiently to protect Serbs.39 Moreover, state building here tends to
focus on constraining or shaping the victorious groups occupying the state
and on empowering the vanquished in both the design and the staffing of the
post-war state. In Haiti (1994), East Timor and Kosovo, external actors
sought to make sure that new governments would be neither excessively
authoritarian nor exclusive in reforming the state's rules and institutions.
External actors approach these tasks with different concerns, capacities and
strategies. In other cases, they may empower exclusivity by reinforcing an
anti-democratic government. State building in these post-defeat states
requires different strategies from those in post-settlement states.
Authoritarian states j regimes

Although authoritarian regimes contain the seeds of their own demise, some
show 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 through
violence, but establish sufficient coercive control that opposition is curtailed
through repression, leading to surprisingly low levels of political or criminal
violence. The lack of violent opposition, the pervasive nature of such regimes,
and the robust and extensively diffused (often widely internalised) ideologies
that support such regimes make semi-stable authoritarian regimes relatively
unusual (especially where they possess nuclear or other weapons of mass
destruction).
The challenges of state building in such circumstances differ significantly
from 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 the
main vehicles for the exercise of power and the delivery of services. State
building is relatively meaningless without regime change. Semi-stable
authoritarian regimes have generally refashioned the state along the lines
they desire. External detractors will have minimal influence, exercised mainly
through economie incentives or security issue-specific negotiations. Once
regime change occurs, the character of that transition will heavily shape statebuilding needs and approaches. For example, was it violent and decisive as in
Japan in 1945? Was it non-violent as those of Eastern Europe in 1989? Was it
violent and indecisive as in Iraq in 2003?
These are just some of the more obvious and well-understood categories of
states that are lost when folded into the 'state failure' umbrella. Many others
exist. These categories reflect a more differentiated approach to categorising
what are often lumped together as failed or fragile states. They are imperfect
insofar as they overlap and their criteria are not sufficiently precise. Yet they
signify a step forward from a blanket declaration that a state is 'sick' without
making any cogent diagnosis of what sorts of symptoms or prognosis that
state faces. These categories are familiar, often used by analysts from within
these societies (unlike 'failed state') and are open to detailed empirical
analysis.
Conclusions

The concept of state failure reflects new ways of thinking about order, peace
and development. States and state institutions have been 'rediscovered' by
aid agencies, financial institutions, diplomats and militaries in Western
countries and in intergovernmental bodies. We have not yet fully
comprehended the degree to which this renewed concern with states is likely
to reshape foreign policy programmes and the manner in which national
elites in Asia, Latin America and Africa deploy these concepts in their
interactions 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. lts
prominence derives mainly not from concern for the inability of some states
to provide for their own population's security, welfare and rights, but to
deter 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 orderproviding capacities of states. As shown above, the failed state concept has
fuelled a tendency towards single, technocratie formulas for strengthening
states, which emphasise coercive capabilities. Although security is a sine qua
non for sustained legitimacy and development, external efforts that privilege
coercive 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 the
coercive capacities of peripheral countries led to a cycle of serious problems:
oppressive governments, serious human rights violations, and instability that
came back to haunt those who had originally adopted an expeditious but
unsound approach to building state institutions for stabilisation. In the
Caribbean in the early part of the 20th century, the USA pursued a strategy
of state building that centred on constabulary forces, without sufficient
attention to issues of regime, to other state institutions, or to accountability.
The result was the rise of constabulary officer Somoza to lead an
authoritarian Nicaragua for decades, as well as repressive dictatorships by
the Duvaliers in Haiti and by Fulgencio Batista in Cuba.40 A security-centred
state-building template is one of the more serious dangers of the failed state
concept.
The failed state concept has helped identify and emphasise genuine
problems. The concept has drawn overdue attention to the importance of
state institutions in peace processes, in development effbrts, and in
considering sources of transnational insecurity. Humanitarian NGOs, the
UN, regional organisations, bilateral donors and Western militaries should
all take the state and its institutions more seriously in their endeavours.
Yet imprecise concepts make for poor scholarship and bad policy. I have
provided a critique of the fallacy of the failed state. The concept's harm is not
limited to extreme or isolated examples. The term is inadequate, even
misleading, for virtually every country it purports to describe. Just as the
State Failure Task Force has done, scholars should abandon the concept of
state failure, and put renewed effbrt into devising categories of analysis that
will be denotatively and connotatively clear, useful and discriminating.
Notes
1 am grateful to William Stanley, Madalene O'Donnell, Elizabeth Cousens, Vanessa Wyeth, Yolande
Bouka, 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 Call
with 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: State
Failure and the Crisis of Governance, Tokyo, United Nations University, 2005, p 16.
4 William I. Zartman, Collapsed States: The disntegration and restoration of legitimate authority,
Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995; and Gerald B. Heiman and Steven R. Ratner, 'Saving Failed
States', Foreign Policy, 89, 1999. Earlier references are not as immediately relevant to the
contemporary 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 5
February 2008 For results, see also J Goldstone, R Bates, TR Gurr et al, 'A global forecasting model
of political instability', paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, 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 5
February 2008. See also her 'Transformational diplomacy', speech delivered at Georgetown
University, 16 January 2006, at http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/59306.htm, accessed 5
February 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 these
distinctions 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 democratie
diffusion or fundamental holes in the world political map?', Third World Quarterly, 28 (6), September

2007. 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 February
2008.
18 See Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkms
University Press, 1999.
19 I diverge here from the views of Michael Barnett in 'Building a Republican peace', International
Security, 30 (4), 2006, pp 87-112.
20 One exception is Anna K Jarstad & Timothy Sisk, From War to Democracy: Dilemmas of
Peacebuilding, New York: Cambridge, 2008.
21 High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared
Responsibility, New York: United Nations, December 2004, para 229.
22 See CT Call, Institutionalizing Peace: A Review of Post-Conflict Peacebuilding Concepts and Issues for
DPA, 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 of
violence 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', International
Security, 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 of
Late 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. See
category descriptions in 'Annex AStrategie Framework for Foreign Assistance', from the US

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31
32

33

34

35
36

37
38

39
40

Director of Foreign Assistance, 'FY2007 Operational Plan Guidance', 27 October 2006, USAID white
paper, p 33.
TR Gurr et al, State Failure Task Force Report: Phase II Findings, McLean, VA: Science Applications
International Corporation (SAIC), 31 Jury 1998, p 41.
For instance, was Laurent Kabila's movement in Eastern Zaire 'revolutionary' or 'ethnic'? What of the
US civil war? Given Jack L. Snyder's research in From Voting to Violence: Democratization and
Nationalist Conflict, New York: WW Norton, 2000, why do regime changes in an authoritarian
direction pose more threat of instability than those in the direction of democracy?
Thus the list of 'sustained partners' includes authoritarian pro-US regimes like Saudi Arabia and
Equatorial Guinea, which would logically be considered 'restrictive' were it not for their political
relationships with the USA. For details see 'Annex BExtended Framework' to the document in the
USAID white paper (note 30), which explicitly cites ideology as a criterion for 'restrictive states' and lists
the countries for each category except for 'restrictive states'.
The Political Instability Task Force found, in testing multiple variables several ways, that
disaggregating states did not improve its model's predictive powers. See Goldstone et al, 'A global
forecasting model of political instability', p 15.
It is here more narrowly defined than in Zartman, Collapsed States, op cit.
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 of
instances in which the central state authority collapses for several years'. It found that, 'Fewer than
twenty such episodes occurred globally between 1955 and 1998, however'. In fact, a careful review of
the post-1989 cases reveals that only four cases meet the definition as interpreted here. Other cases
listed, such as Guinea-Bissau, Bosnia, Burundi and Sierra Leone during the 1990s, experienced either
regime change, where other actors took the reins of the state, or war that left the state unable to carry
out 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.
Among the literature on informal political institutions, see W Reno, Warlord Politics and African
States, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999; and M Bratton, 'Formal versus informal institutions in
Africa', Journal of Democracy, 18 (3), 2007, pp 96-111.
Mike McGovern, 'Liberia: the risks of rebuilding a shadow state', and Rex Brynen, 'Palestine: building
neither peace nor state,' both in Call with Wyeth, Building States to Build Peace.
Human Rights Watch, Failure to Protect: Anti-Minority Violence in Kosovo, New York: Human Rights
Watch, 2004.
Jan Knippers Black, Sentinels of Empire, Westport, CT: Greenwood-Praeger, 1986.

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