State Failure Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Since the end of the cold war, scholars and policy makers have become increasingly concerned about state failure. The focus began in the U.S. policy community in the 1990s when the primary concern was forecasting changes of government and humanitarian crises. After al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks in the United States, the focus shifted to preventing terrorism. Since then, both measures of state failure and arguments about its importance have flourished.

Analysts do not agree on a single definition of state failure. Instead, there are different concepts of state failure, numerous indicators of failure, and various lists of states that have failed and are likely to fail. Thus, there is also a lively debate about whether states have been properly classified and what causes states to fail.

Concepts Of State Failure

Analysts have advanced two concepts of state failure: absence of state authority and lack of legitimacy. To understand and evaluate these differences, one must begin by defining the state. The most widely accepted definition of the state was proposed by German sociologist Max Weber. According to Weber, a state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. But scholars disagree about what this definition means and how to determine whether an entity is a successful state.

According to realists, the essence of a state is its monopoly of the use of force. For them, a state is an entity that has the last word on foreign and domestic policy in a territory. A state may not always be authoritative, but it is more authoritative than any other actor in a territory. Should this cease to be the case, the state has died, whether through conquest, union, revolution, disintegration, or collapse. Any of these means of death could be considered state failure.

Historically, realists have primarily been interested in state failure because of its effects on great-power relations. For them, conquest could signal the expansion of a great power, revolution could precipitate new alliances, and collapse could create power vacuums into which other states are drawn. Since the end of the cold war, realists have become more interested in intrinsic aspects of state failure because of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which demonstrated that even great powers can fail to survive, and the terrorist attacks of 2001, which demonstrated that the collapse of a weak state like Afghanistan can create security problems for a powerful state even in the absence of rivals. Seminal works in the realist vein include William Zartman’s edited volume on collapsed states in Africa and Anthony Vinci’s 2008 article exploring the nature of anarchy in collapsed states.

For liberals and constructivists, a state must have more than a monopoly of force over territory. A state must have legitimacy. For some scholars, this means a state must be chosen or at least accepted by its subjects either because it benefits them or because its principles accord with theirs. For other scholars, legitimacy means that a state must be recognized by its peers. In recent years, these ideas have come together in the concept of states’ responsibility to protect, which asserts that states must respect the human rights of people within their borders and that when they fail to do so, it is the responsibility of other states to intervene.

Indicators And Lists Of State Failure

Each of these concepts of state failure can be operationalized to yield a list of states that have failed or could fail. Because concepts of state failure differ, the measures and lists vary greatly.

For realists, weak states are most likely to fail. Weak states lack the military, economic, and political capabilities needed to cultivate domestic sovereignty and deter other states from attacking and conquering them in particular technological eras. To evaluate state vulnerability to failure, realists rank states according to their material capabilities. The most comprehensive list of this type is the Correlates of War National Material Capabilities data set. Realists also explore the effects of relative power in differentiating states that die from those that survive.

By contrast, liberals and constructivists measure and rank states in terms of domestic and international legitimacy. Analysts who emphasize domestic legitimacy focus on public opinion polls and standards of living, and those interested in international legitimacy rank states according to compliance with purported international norms. In practice, the two concepts of legitimacy often are combined. For example, the Failed State Index (FSI) published annually by Foreign Policy and Fund for Peace measures states on twelve dimensions, including the availability of food and compliance with norms of transparency and accountability.

Debates About State Failure

Debates about state failure relate to whether states have been properly classified and why some states succeed while others fail. These questions have both methodological and political strands.

The methodological debate centers on the technique of developing an index by amalgamating individual variables. This makes it difficult to know which variables are associated with which outcomes. In addition, there is the problem of determining whether statistical correlations reveal causes or effects. These problems are especially acute for analysts who combine indicators of authority and legitimacy. For example, although states that score poorly on the FSI indicators are considered unstable, nine of the ten most “critical” countries in 2009 were in the top ten the previous year. Moreover, the top twenty included North Korea and Zimbabwe, neither of which has experienced political crises usually associated with state failure, such as conquest, union, revolution, disintegration, or collapse.

The politics of the state failure discourse are highly charged. At stake is the question of who should determine which states are failing. In 1992, the United Nations Development Program dropped a measure of human freedom in its Human Development Index because developing countries argued it was culturally biased and would deter donors from providing development aid. The notion of state failure has been criticized and advanced as an effort to legitimize neocolonial intervention by powerful states. Why states fail is also contested. Explanations range from predatory rulers to international power politics.

Bibliography:

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