- Editor's Note
Fragile states—the topic of this issue of Global Dialogue—are said to share certain distinguishing characteristics. They lack control over their territories. They cannot protect their inhabitants from internal or external violence. They are unable to provide their populations with basic necessities and public goods such as food, healthcare, education and sanitation. Authoritarian or dictatorial rule tends to be the norm, and corruption and crime are rife. A further identifying criterion has been stressed since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States: they threaten international security and stability by serving as havens for non-state groups plotting assaults on other countries.
This last purported characteristic of failed states has rendered the concept highly controversial, causing it to be seen as an interveners' charter, as the legitimising pretext for invasions that are in fact undertaken for the familiar goals of political and territorial gain.
Contributors to this issue of Global Dialogue touch on all aspects of the failed-states debate, discussing questions of definition, the political and security implications of the concept, and what remedial action—if any—is appropriate with regard to fragile or collapsed states. In the course of their debate, the situation in several states deemed to have failed or to be at risk of failure—Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mexico, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan—is examined.
|
|
- Weak States and the Savage Wars of Peace
State failure is real, but the notion is defective both as a means of explaining crises and of generating effective responses to them. The idea is frequently a pretext for self-serving Western (military) interventions. Disorder and poor governance are blamed on corrupt and dictatorial local elites. The failed-states idea thus masks the role of powerful Western countries and institutions in creating the problems burdening so many weak and impoverished nations.
David Sogge
|
|
- Stabilising Fragile States
Attempts must be made to stabilise fragile states, as they pose a threat to international security that cannot be ignored. The difficulties of the Western interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq should not blind us to the dangers of leaving weak states unattended, or to the success of stabilisation efforts elsewhere. A detailed account is given of how the three principal roots of state fragility—illegitimate rule, public insecurity, and deprivation and despair—may be addressed.
Joseph Siegle
|
|
- Engaging Fragile States: Closing the Gap between Theory and Policy
“Fragility” has various meanings and criteria, so that states as different as North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Honduras may all be considered “fragile” in one way or another. “Fragility” is a relative term and has meaning only with respect to state performance over time in comparison with a given state’s peers. External intervention, based on a proper conceptual understanding of fragility, is necessary, but has significant difficulties.
David Carment and Yiagadeesen Samy
|
|
- Fragile States and Violence: The Limits of External Assistance
The fundamental problems besetting fragile states cannot be resolved by external intervention, be it military or economic. The burden of alleviating the lot of such states rests with their peoples and governments; the international community cannot do it for them. The difficulties of “fixing” fragile states from the outside are illustrated through an examination of two very different cases, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti.
Lothar Brock, Hans-Henrik Holm, Georg Sorensen, and Michael Stohl
|
|
- Goodbye to Good Governance? How Development Discourse Copes with State Failure
Until recently, only those states considered “good performers” moving towards market-oriented democracy were deemed worthy of receiving donor aid. Today, however, it is recognised that it is neither feasible nor desirable to disengage fully from crisis countries. This change in development discourse is traced and its causes analysed. But while the discourse may have changed, policies on the ground are still based on a prescriptive model of “good governance” rather than on an understanding of the dynamics of state formation in crisis regions.
Tobias Debiel, Daniel Lambach, and Birgit Pech
|
|
- The Failing State in the Democratic Republic of Congo
The Democratic Republic of Congo has failed utterly to fulfil the three fundamental tasks of the modern state: upholding national security, provision of basic goods and services, and revenue collection. The reasons for this failure are discussed, and its remedy outlined in the form of two capacity development strategies for restructuring the state: one for the restoration of state authority over the entire national territory, and the other for strengthening service delivery. The ultimate aim is to increase democratic procedures and accountability in the Congo, and to improve the security and wellbeing of its people.
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
|
|
- Afghanistan: A Seriously Disrupted State
Afghanistan may be considered a type of “disrupted”, as opposed to “cohesive”, state. The internal and external sources of its “disruption” are examined via a survey of its recent history, from the pro-Soviet coup of April 1978 and the subsequent Soviet invasion, through to the US intervention in October 2001 and the ongoing NATO-led occupation. A number of realistic and historically informed measures are proposed that might allow Afghanistan to escape its current dysfunctional spiral and become a moderately cohesive state.
Amin Saikal
|
|
- Failed-State Status and the War on Drugs in Mexico
Much political and academic thinking about failed states reflects the belief that state fragility is a form of deviancy from the putatively universal norms of Western statehood. The difficulties of poor, post-colonial countries are typically seen as aberrations from Western political standards—deficiencies which demand external intervention. The state crisis in Mexico, however, occasioned by the power of its numerous and deadly drug cartels, cannot be understood in isolation from underlying historical and politico-economic patterns of development.
Adam David Morton
|
|
- Giving a State a Bad Name? Kyrgyzstan and the Risk of State Failure
State failure has long been predicted for Kyrgyzstan. What are the implications of being labelled a potential failed state? In practice, it is to be branded as a threat to the interests and security of other states. Any consequent assistance or intervention is designed to contain this threat rather than to aid the state or its inhabitants. The case of Kyrgyzstan shows that the concept of state failure represents not a considered evaluation of a state’s viability and capacity to provide for its citizens, but a normative measure of its conformity to Western criteria of statehood.
Cai Wilkinson
|
|
- Bringing State Theory Back In: Why We Should Let Go of ‘Failed States’
The failed-state concept “should be dumped unceremoniously by researchers”: it has “very little analytical merit” and “obscures more than it reveals”. The failed-state idea has been implicitly understood through two dominant notions of state capacity, both of which fail to ground the latter in any actual social and political relations. An account of events in the Solomon Islands, where an Australian-led state-building intervention has been under way since 2003, is used to indicate the advantages of an alternative, historically minded approach to understanding the nature of the state and state capacity.
Shahar Hameiri
|
|
- Nation-Building Interventions and National Security: An Australian Perspective
The prerequisites of nation-building in failed or failing states are explored, in particular, how assistance may be delivered to halt a fragile state’s slide towards collapse before it reaches the point of no return. Australia should consider nation-building as a major pillar of conflict prevention and as an integral part of its national-security strategy. A pre-emptive, co-ordinated and long-term nation-building approach by Australia to regional fragile states, principally in South-East Asia and the south-west Pacific, would benefit such states and Australia alike.
Michael G. Smith and Rebecca Shrimpton
|
|
|
