State Failure in the Modern World

Zaryab Iqbal, Harvey Starr

• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804796910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

State failure is seen as one of the significant threats to regional and international stability in the current international system. State Failure in the Modern World presents a comprehensive, systematic, and empirically rigorous analysis of the full range of the state failure process in the post-World War II state system—including what state failure means, its causes, what accounts for its duration, its consequences, and its implications. Among the questions the book addresses are: when and why state failure occurs, why it recurs in any single state, and when and why its consequences spread to other states.

The book sets out the array of problems in previous work on state failure with respect to conceptualization and definition, as well as how the causes and consequences of state failure have been addressed, and presents analyses to deal with these problems. Any analysis of state failure can be seen as an exercise in policy evaluation; this book undertakes the theoretical, conceptual, and analytic work that must be done before we can evaluate—or have much confidence in—both current and proposed policy prescriptions to prevent or manage state collapse.

1

Introduction

STATE FAILURE AND THE STUDY OF WORLD POLITICS

In the contemporary turbulent world of globalization and ever-increasing interdependence across individuals, groups, international organizations, and nation-states,¹ the existence of weak, fragile, or failed states is increasingly seen as a significant concern. In this book, we argue that state failure is associated with a range of factors pertaining to domestic politics as well as international influences, and that it is a phenomenon that is tremendously important to global security and human security in the current international system. More specifically, we demonstrate that the study of state failure, and assessing its impact on internal and international conflict and unrest, are consistent with a large body of international relations literature that engages the relationship between domestic and international politics—especially the study of civil war and development.

As the reader moves through this book, we hope that the strengths of our approach to state failure will become apparent. We provide a more nuanced theoretical analysis of state failure, along with an explicit discussion of its conceptualization, as well as the measurement of state collapse. Thus the book presents a unified conceptual and operational definition of state collapse, which is the foundation for a systematic empirical study of the set of collapsed states from 1946 to 2010. We do so using a multi-method approach, integrating comparative case studies with larger-scale quantitative analyses. The result is a comprehensive analysis of the full range of the failure process (from causes to duration to consequences), concluding with policy implications. These conclusions reflect empirical findings important for policy, including various factors underlying the onset of failure and its duration.

Because state failure is indeed an important issue in the global system, and one without simple answers, we need to set out the proper context for its study. This introductory chapter briefly situates the book amid the burgeoning literature on the importance of domestic political and social phenomena for international relations and foreign policy, as well as the need to “cross boundaries” between basic and applied research, between scholarly investigation and policy analysis (for example, Starr 2006).

The study of failed states would not have been found in the volumes filling the hypothetical library bookshelves dealing with international relations in either the pre–World War II or immediate postwar periods (for example, see Bobrow 1972). We will note why this is the case as we discuss the nature of state failure, outline the problems that exist in its study as well as suggest some remedies, and investigate a number of key questions about the causes and consequences of state failure. However, we must first look at and understand how a range of different scholars in political science as well as other disciplines, and especially in international relations and comparative politics, have come to the study of failed states—with their respective approaches, perspectives, and interests.

In the broad subfield of international relations, many students of conflict have moved to the study of civil war, particularly in the period after the Cold War. This was completely natural, as by that time it was quite evident that the primary arena of conflict in the contemporary world system had moved within states. Soon after the end of the Cold War, intrastate conflicts started emerging across the globe, whereas the incidence of interstate war rapidly declined. And thus students of international security and conflict processes came more and more to focus on internal violence—domestic strife, rebellion, revolution, and civil war—which more often than not would become internationalized in some way. It was equally natural for some of these scholars to become interested in the study of failed states, as most (but not all) of the cases of “failure” involved significant internal and/or internationalized conflict. In turn, the presence of conflict in failed states also accounts for an approach to the definitions, causes, and consequences of failed states that focuses on and stresses conflict; or at least starts with a concern about conflict. And we employ a similar approach to our exploration of state failure in this book.

A number of other scholars have come to the study of failed states through an interest in national or international security. Some of these have started their analytic journey with the broader concepts of “human development” or “human security,” which begin to link both the conflict and political economy approaches to failed states by looking at the well-being of individuals and groups with a state.² Human development and human security approaches also serve as a gateway for the incorporation of issues of legitimacy, stability, and the political survival of leaders to the causes of state failure, and possible choices for policy alternatives.

Others in the IR subfield are interested in international political economy (IPE), while students of comparative politics are interested in comparative political economy (or CPE). They come at failed states from an interest in development, modernization, and the economic viability of the large number of states that achieved independence from colonial rule—starting the process with Ghana in 1957 and continuing throughout the 1960s and 1970s (and later). Recall that in the study of dependency-dependencia, and the set of debates that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s over the different models of dependency-dependencia, the point of contention was whether the main causative factors in these phenomena were internal or external. In the study of failed states there is a similar divide, with some political economy scholars who stress internal factors (such as poor governance, kleptocracy, different resource bases, reliance on single crops or resources, and so forth), and others who stress the global economic system, systemic economic hierarchies (for example, Wallerstein 1974), and predatory developed states that continue to pursue neocolonial dominance. We can find an analogous internal-external divide within the community of conflict scholars—those who focus on internal political, tribal/ethnic, separatist, and ideological factors and those who stress neighbors, regions, and the global system’s geopolitical realities as causal factors in the nature, frequency, and intensity of both internal conflict and cross-border conflict. However, as with development and dependency, most scholars now understand that various combinations of both internal and external phenomena are needed to explain and analyze failed states.

Indeed, state failure is exemplary of the sort of contemporary political phenomena that “cross boundaries,” and thereby require scholars (individually and in groups) to cross a variety of analytic boundaries as well (see, for example, Starr 2006 or Werner et al. 2003). It is exemplary in that the study of state failure involves “theories that posit complex causation, or multiple causal paths” (Braumoeller 2003, 209). In a number of ways, academic scholars have come late to the area of failed states, following the lead of international organizations and agencies (such as the World Bank), or the governments of the major aid-providing states (for example, the United States, Britain, Canada). This tardiness rests in part on the problems of crossing boundaries, or the unwillingness to do so. As Starr (2006, 1) has noted:

Boundaries can indicate the limits of some set of phenomena; such simplification and specification can be valuable in the development of theory, concepts, and research design. However, boundaries too often loom as barriers, which can hinder how we think about phenomena, how we theorize about phenomena, and how we study the world about us. As scholars we must be conscious of artificial boundaries or barriers that constrain our thinking, and be just as conscious of finding ways to promote fertile theory and effective research design. In this sense we should think of the crossing boundaries approach not as some new theory or theoretical approach, but rather as a synthesizing device that helps us in organizing theory and research.

As a further example of crossing boundaries, we must also recognize another group of comparative politics scholars interested in state failure. These are Africa specialists who focus on sub-Saharan Africa. They also moved to the study of state failure because that region contains the largest concentration of weak, fragile, failing, failed, or collapsed states. For regional specialists, the two major approaches to state failure—conflict and economics/development—were often merged with a knowledge of local and regional tribal/ethnic relations. Their presence and contributions highlight the methodological dimension of crossing boundaries (including the combination of both quantitative and qualitative modes of analysis), as well as the need to cross the theoretical-empirical boundary to policy advice and evaluation.

The present authors’ own interests in failed states stem from two of these approaches. One of the authors, with a longtime interest in geo-political and spatial factors in international relations, especially as related to conflict, was struck by an article in the March 5, 2005, issue of The Economist, “From Chaos, Order,” which was about state failure. The consideration given to “low-income countries under stress” (LICUS) by the World Bank, and by the British government’s Department for International Development (DFID) to “fragile states” had caught the attention of The Economist. The Economist (2005, 45) noted: “The chief reason why the world should worry about state failure is that it is contagious.” If, as was argued, the extent and effects of state failure were key factors in understanding the global politics of the twenty-first century, then this argument had to be investigated through the lens of diffusion. The other author, who also has interests in the study of conflict, additionally has focused primarily on “human security”—an area concerned more with the security of populations than states. She has investigated a major component of human security—the relationship between violent conflict and the health and well being of populations. In War and the Health of Nations (2010), Iqbal empirically demonstrated that the health of populations was an important consequence of armed conflict. As such, the idea that state failure, with all its possible negative consequences, could spread through spatial contagion was also of great interest. Both of the authors then, with different emphases, have had research programs in which a major component of that research addressed the consequences of war and violent armed conflict. An important consequence of conflict is further conflict—whether elsewhere in the system or repeated conflict by the same actors (see, for example, Most and Starr 1980).

However, as we moved to develop a design to study the diffusion of state failure and its effects, we encountered several fundamental problems. First, we found that a variety of definitions as well as a broad range of indicators of “failure” or “fragility” have been utilized in extant literature. Second, these identification exercises have been quite incomplete in their conceptualization of “failed states” or “fragile states” or “state failure.” And third, not only have these treatments been incomplete, but they are highly problematic in that they have been essentially circular in their linking of concepts and measures, thereby creating considerable difficulties in research design. Thus, before we could move on to diffusion/contagion analyses, we found we had to address conceptualization and measurement issues as well as addressing the factors or conditions that increase the probability that a state will “fail.”

We thus found ourselves engaging in a broad critique of the study of failed states, a natural step in promoting cumulation in an area of investigation. While questions of conceptualization and definition will be addressed below, and in depth in Chapter Two, we decided (as noted above) to deal with many of the conceptual problems by focusing our study on “state collapse.” We think this approach complements that of others who critique a standard “state failure paradigm”: for example, Charles Call (2011), who examines the failure of policy that does not deal with the specific factors (or, in his work, “gaps”) relevant to any individual state. Starting with our conceptualization in the next chapter, our strategy of matching case studies in Chapter Five, and using our approach and findings in regard to policy in Chapter Seven, we believe that we have found a pathway to deal with such critiques.

THE APPEARANCE OF STATE FAILURE IN THE POST–WORLD WAR II INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM

Why does the phenomenon of state failure now seem so prevalent? The number of states in the international system has roughly quadrupled since the end of World War II. With the dismantling of the Western colonial empires, the large number of artificial national entities created by colonialism became independent, joining the global system through membership in the United Nations as sovereign states. Most of these new states remained poor, weak, or unstable, reflecting their colonial heritage as well as other internal and external factors.

At the same time, these states emerged into an international system that was in the process of creating more and more constraints on the use of military power. As discussed in depth by scholars such as John Mueller (for example, 1989, 1995, 2011), a number of other circumstances acting to reduce the utility and practice of state-to-state violence and conquest took effect. The creation of postwar liberal institutions, both economic and political, with the UN Charter and attendant international law in the lead, along with the growth of the number of democracies in the international system, generated strong norms against the aggressive use of force and conquest.³ While the power of the norm against the aggressive use of force to take territory has been used to help understand the lack of support in the General Assembly for Argentina after its attack on the Falklands/Malvinas (for example, see Franck 1985), it is perhaps best illustrated by the First Gulf War to prevent the Iraqi absorption of Kuwait. Mueller’s argument for the “obsolescence of war,” or Zacher’s idea (2001) of the “territorial integrity norm” thus also meant that the newly independent and weak postcolonial states would be spared the possibility of being taken over by neighbors, or become part of multinational empires. We find few, if any, “failed states” in pre–World War II Western history, because they would simply have been swallowed by more powerful neighbors or imperial powers. Failed states appear only after the surge of independence in the 1960s and 1970s because the growth and spread of liberal norms have prevented the conquest or disappearance of weak states, as well as promoted efforts to keep them afloat (see Helman and Ratner 1992–93). All of these “territorial integrity” factors have been magnified in the post–Cold War global environment. Although weak or failed states exhibit what Krasner (2004) calls “failure of conventional sovereignty,” an inability to meet the requirements of “conventional sovereignty” has not led to their actual demise.

Thus, it is clear that state failure is a post–World War II phenomenon, but also one that has been recognized for several decades. To take but one example, in 1994, the U.S. government established a State Failure Task Force (SFTF) (now called the Political Instability Task Force—PITF) to study the causes of state collapse. An equal amount of attention has been paid to the issue of state failure by nonstate actors. For example, the July/August 2005 issue of Foreign Policy presented the results of a study by the Fund for Peace (under the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) that ranked states on a variety of indicators of instability. That study also cites the conclusion of the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy that “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones.” This warning was repeated by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates in a 2010 Foreign Affairs article: “In the decades to come, the most lethal threats to the United States’ safety and security—a city poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack—are likely to emanate from states that cannot adequately govern themselves or secure their own territory. Dealing with such fractured or failing states is, in many ways, the main security challenge of our time.” Other diplomatic warnings were raised by Kofi Annan, that “ignoring failed states creates problems that sometimes come back to bite us,” or Jacques Chirac, who warned of the threat failed states carry for the world’s equilibrium.

Scholars have picked up on the threats that failed states might pose for international order and development as well. For example, it is in the context of weak/fragile/failed states that Mueller (2004) emphasizes the need for “policing the remnants of war.” Mueller calls for developed states to contribute/devote disciplined police and military forces in order to promote peace, order, and good government in fragile or collapsed areas. Similarly, Rotberg (2002) warns of the linkages between state failure and terrorism, and stresses the importance of preventing state failure rather than reconstructing states after collapse. And, of course, as part of the human security approach, these states have been seen as having a wide range of negative effects on their own people as well as their neighbors, their regions, and the global community. One important theoretical reason, then, for studying state failure is the potential for the negative consequences of state failure—as well as state failure itself—to diffuse across neighborhoods or regions. Patrick (2006, 27) sums up this view of state failure in the global system: “It has become a common claim that the gravest dangers to U.S. and world security are no longer military threats from rival great powers, but rather transnational threats emanating from the world’s most poorly governed countries.”

PROBLEMS AND ISSUES

While the issue of state failure is clearly an important one in the contemporary global system and of concern to policy-makers, IGOs, NGOs, as well as academics, there exist substantial problems in the study of failed states. There is, in much of the literature, confusion over the meaning and nature of state failure caused by weaknesses in conceptualization and measurement. These weaknesses, in turn, lead to problems in research design and the meaning of the findings generated by that research.

Some of the problems stem from a point noted above—that the initial interest in state failure came from national governments or international organizations, and was addressed as a policy problem. In an article originally published in the Winter 1992–93 issue of Foreign Policy, Helman and Ratner described the failed nation-state as a “disturbing new phenomenon” and discussed the approach of the international community to such crises, particular...