The Idea Of Failed States

Why are some states able to deliver public services to their citizens while others cannot? Why are some states beset by internal conflict that leaves many impoverished? Much of what has become known as the failed states literature attempts to engage with these questions, but does so in way that betrays a particular bias, engaging in advocacy for intervention rather than analysis. The Idea of Failed States directly challenges existing thinking about conventional state strength as it finds that institutional approaches to state strength obscure as much as they reveal. The question of why some states are strong and others weak has traditionally been addressed using measures of economic growth, resources, and quality of life. This book compares the dimensions of state strength characterised by community, society, and nation and uses social capital concepts to further illuminate them. Applying this approach across forty-two countries shows ‘weak’ states exhibiting a consistent and unique patterns of relationships between community, society, and nation as well as equally consistent and unique relationships in strong states. A blend of theory and empirics, The Idea of Failed States present a new way to think about the state – one that applies to both strong and weak alike. This work should be of interest to students and scholars researching social capital, public policy, international development and security studies.

Contests to reorganize the international system after the Cold War agree on the security threat of failed states: this book asks why.

"It's hard to imagine any American reading this book and not seeing his country in a new, and deeply troubling, light." —The New York Times Book Review The United States has repeatedly asserted its right to intervene militarily against "failed states" around the globe. In this much-anticipated follow-up to his international bestseller Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky turns the tables, showing how the United States itself shares features with other failed states—suffering from a severe "democratic deficit," eschewing domestic and international law, and adopting policies that increasingly endanger its own citizens and the world. Exploring the latest developments in U.S. foreign and domestic policy, Chomsky reveals Washington's plans to further militarize the planet, greatly increasing the risks of nuclear war. He also assesses the dangerous consequences of the occupation of Iraq; documents Washington's self-exemption from international norms, including the Geneva conventions and the Kyoto Protocol; and examines how the U.S. electoral system is designed to eliminate genuine political alternatives, impeding any meaningful democracy. Forceful, lucid, and meticulously documented, Failed States offers a comprehensive analysis of a global superpower that has long claimed the right to reshape other nations while its own democratic institutions are in severe crisis. Systematically dismantling the United States' pretense of being the world's arbiter of democracy, Failed States is Chomsky's most focused—and urgent—critique to date.

The threat of terror, which flares in Africa and Indonesia, has given the problem of failed states an unprecedented immediacy and importance. In the past, failure had a primarily humanitarian dimension, with fewer implications for peace and security. Now nation-states that fail, or may do so, pose dangers to themselves, to their neighbors, and to people around the globe: preventing their failure, and reviving those that do fail, has become a strategic as well as a moral imperative. State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror develops an innovative theory of state failure that classifies and categorizes states along a continuum from weak to failed to collapsed. By understanding the mechanisms and identifying the tell-tale indicators of state failure, it is possible to develop strategies to arrest the fatal slide from weakness to collapse. This state failure paradigm is illustrated through detailed case studies of states that have failed and collapsed (the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, the Sudan, Somalia), states that are dangerously weak (Colombia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan), and states that are weak but safe (Fiji, Haiti, Lebanon).

Social science.

State collapse is one of the major threats to peace, stability, and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa today. In a collapsed state the regime finally wears out its ability to satisfy the demands of the various groups in society; it fails to govern or to keep the state together. The collapse is marked by the loss of control over political and economic space. A collapsed state can no longer perform its basic security and development functions and has no effective control over its territory and borders. Efforts to avoid drawing other nations into a wider conflict created by the collapse of a state—and creating favorable conditions for reconciliation and reconstruction of a failed state after it has collapsed—present major challenges. In April, 2008 the Cornell Institute for African Development called a symposium on ‘Failed and Failing States in Africa: Lessons from Darfur and Beyond’ to address these critical issues. Key contributions to the symposium are brought together in this volume. Taken together these essays represent a significant discussion on the challenges presented by the presence of failing states within Africa.

Since 1990, more than 10 million people have been killed in the civil wars of failed states, and hundreds of millions more have been deprived of fundamental rights. The threat of terrorism has only heightened the problem posed by failed states. When States Fail is the first book to examine how and why states decay and what, if anything, can be done to prevent them from collapsing. It defines and categorizes strong, weak, failing, and collapsed nation-states according to political, social, and economic criteria. And it offers a comprehensive recipe for their reconstruction. The book comprises fourteen essays by leading scholars and practitioners who help structure this disparate field of research, provide useful empirical descriptions, and offer policy recommendations. Robert Rotberg's substantial opening chapter sets out a theory and taxonomy of state failure. It is followed by two sets of chapters, the first on the nature and correlates of failure, the second on methods of preventing state failure and reconstructing those states that do fail. Economic jump-starting, legal refurbishing, elections, the demobilizing of ex-combatants, and civil society are among the many topics discussed. All of the essays are previously unpublished. In addition to Rotberg, the contributors include David Carment, Christopher Clapham, Nat J. Colletta, Jeffrey Herbst, Nelson Kasfir, Michael T. Klare, Markus Kostner, Terrence Lyons, Jens Meierhenrich, Daniel N. Posner, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Donald R. Snodgrass, Nicolas van de Walle, Jennifer A. Widner, and Ingo Wiederhofer.

What do we mean by failed states and why is this concept important to study? The “failed states” literature is important because it aims to understand how state institutions (or lack thereof) impact conflict, crime, coups, terrorism and economic performance. In spite of this objective, the “failed state” literature has not focused enough on how institutions operate in the developing world. This book unpacks the state, by examining the administrative, security, judicial and political institutions separately. By doing so, the book offers a more comprehensive and clear picture of how the state functions or does not function in the developing world, merging the failed state and institutionalist literatures. Rather than merely describing states in crisis, this book explains how and why different types of institutions deteriorate. Moreover, the book illustrates the impact that institutional decay has on political instability and poverty using examples not only from Africa but from all around the world.