What is a failed state? How can a failed state be distinguished from a collapsed state? This first chapter from a book published by Princeton University Press argues that a state’s success or failure can be assessed by looking at how effectively it delivers crucial political goods. If a state fails, or collapses, international actors have a strategic and moral responsibility to intervene.
Political goods are claims made on states by their citizens. There is a hierarchy of these goods. The most crucial is the supply of security, especially human security. If security is achieved, other political goods can be supplied. The most important are the rule of law, and free and full participation in the political process. Others include health care, education and transport links.
Together this bundle of political goods, roughly ranked, can be used as a set of criteria according to which modern nation states may be judged strong, weak or failed. A collapsed state is a rare and extreme version of a failed state. In a collapsed state, political goods are obtained through private or ad hoc means. Other indicators of failed states include:
- Enduring violence – This engulfs significant areas of the state and is mainly directed at the existing government or regime.
- Growth of criminal violence – Arms and drug trafficking become common. Citizens turn to warlords or other figures for protection.
- Flawed institutions – If legislatures exist at all, they exist to ratify the decisions of executives. Democratic debate is absent.
- Effective education and medical systems are informally privatised – Literacy rates fall. Infant mortality rises.
- Declining GDP – Declining real national and per capita levels of annual gross domestic product.
- The government or regime loses legitimacy – Rulers are perceived to be working for themselves and their kin rather than the state. As a result, their legitimacy, and the legitimacy of the state, declines.
Destructive leadership is the most usual explanation for state failure or collapse. The decisive role of human agency means that it is possible to avert failure. However, preventative steps must be taken.
- Three signals of impending state failure are: a rapid reduction in incomes and living standards, a leader and his associates subverting democratic norms, and a precipitous rise in deaths in combat.
- Sometimes state failure cannot be averted and in this case international actors have a strategic and moral responsibility to intervene.
- Effective, enduring resuscitation of a state may take a generation or more and international actors should only relinquish authority to indigenous actors very gradually.
- Security is a vital pre-condition to successful statebuilding.
- Once security is achieved, transitional administrations and international agencies should focus on three primary goals: rebuilding the economy, reintroducing the rule of law and rejuvenating civil society.
