Why is today’s international system less conducive to the maintenance of the state than it was during the Cold War? How can the phenomenon of state collapse be explained? This study by the Graduate Institute of International Studies sketches out some of the issues surrounding modern state formation and examines the phenomenon of state collapse. It gives an insight into recent and emerging cases of state collapse, and looks at the key conceptual and political issues surrounding the present and the future of the contemporary state.
Practically and conceptually, the ‘state’ is again under seige. Less than two decades after its ‘rediscovery’ by scholars, the central unit of analysis in international relations and comparative politics is again in crisis. However, it should not be assumed that there is an ever-widening crisis of state collapse in which globalisation and declining interest in propping up corrupt and violent regimes are causing increasing numbers of states to fail and some even to collapse. Although state collapse appears to be increasing, the scope of the phenomenon depends in large part on how it is defined.
Cases of complete state collapse, which involve the extreme disintegration of public authority and the metamorphosis of societies into a battlefield of all against all, remain relatively rare. Maintaining some form of a state – in a weakened or decayed capacity – remains the norm. However, many more states today are failing to provide security and public order, legitimate representation and wealth or welfare to their citizens.
The modern state continues to be a work in progress and the potential for failure or reversal remains present. However, state failure and state collapse must be distinguished from each other and must not be subsumed under the vague, broad, and ambiguous headings of political conflict or civil war.
- State collapse poses challenges to the narrative of a progressive worldwide march towards modern statehood.
- It also challenges the ‘anti-statist’ vision that the erosion of state forms is an opportunity for new forms of political community to emerge at the local or global level.
- Post-modern political forms of authority and legitmacy may emerge in different parts of the world, but these are just as likely to be dystopic as celebratory.
- They still need to answer the fundamental questions of political order that animated the emergence of the modern state in Europe.
To understand some of these broader reshapings of the global political order in the twenty-first century requires a close study of:
- The processes that can lead to state collapse.
- The dynamic interplay of global and local forces in state collapse.
- The normative and practical underpinnings of the international community’s efforts to recreate states after collapse.
