Failed States

Academic Debate

The nature of the African state in particular has been questioned for some time. Among others, Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg have focused on problems of limited forms of sovereignty, which they labeled quasi states—that is, those states which merely display symbols of stateness but do not enjoy their empirical substance. These states survived during the Cold War because the principles of international law protected their very existence (under sovereignty, territorial integrity, or noninterference). William Reno referred to these cases as “weak states.” But once the regime-stabilizing function of the Cold War had come to an end and the first violent conflicts developed in Africa, these states came under stress. Numerous authors tried to label these developments and, in doing so, gave meaning to the processes unfolding at that time. Some simply described their observations using the term state collapse or state failure. Others tried to develop a more analytical language and referred [Page 544]to processes of state inversion, state dysfunctionality, or state decay. From a more general, global perspective, which also takes into account developments in the Balkans and in the territories of the former Soviet Union, some authors imagined these developments as complex political emergencies or new wars—the latter pointing to an erosion of the state monopoly of violence, the rise of interstate wars (as opposed to intrastate wars), and the precedence of wars over questions of identity (rather than ideology). Concerning Africa, Christopher Clapham highlights the apparent existence of “degrees of statehood,” stopping short of developing a systematic typology. Gero Erdmann tries to close this gap when he combines territorial and functional variables to define three degrees of “incomplete stateness”: state failure, state decline, and state decay, the latter characterized by a partial or total loss of the monopoly of violence.

...