State Failure

Failure

Failure refers to several overlapping concepts, unfortunately often confused with each other: collapse, failed, failing, fragile, and weak.

The most narrowly defined category is that of collapsed states. Collapse, the most extreme form of damage, occurs when states can no longer perform their basic functions, defined as enforcing internal and external security, extracting and allocating resources, and providing social services, for some time or where the structure, authority (legitimacy), law, and political order have fallen apart. There are few unambiguous modern cases of the disappearance of a state (Ghana, 1979–1981; Chad, 1979–1985; Lebanon, 1983–1987; Haiti, 1986–1991; Sierra Leone in the mid-1990s; Afghanistan, 1992–2002; and Liberia, 1989–1997—although none have done so as lengthily [Page 2503]and conclusively as Somalia since 1990). State collapse can occur because of but also without civil war, although the collapse of law, order, and legitimate authority does create a security vacuum that opens society to lawlessness. I. William Zartman (1995) has identified some signs of the process of collapse: conflict at the political center, decision failure, a narrow central clique, defensive policies, and privatization of state agents. But there is no notion of any sequence, of necessary and sufficient components, or of the nature of the process. These conceptual weaknesses are present in all other types of state failure analysis.

Equally uncertain is the process of rehabilitation after collapse. Unsolved issues include the need to rehabilitate the state versus a state, the priorities of the process, the relation between security and institutionalization, the role of welfare, the role of the international community, the relation between state building and nation building (see below, under “States”), and the need for a Man on a White Horse or a strongman. Again, these conundrums will appear with regard to other types of state failure, although, there, they are more specifically addressed.

Failed states constitute the next larger circle. The immediate problem with the concept is that it is not clear whether it refers to states that have failed as states—hence being closer to the collapsed category—or to states that have failed in one or more of their functions while still holding onto their state status. In the latter case, how many functions must have failed before the state itself can be termed a failure? Furthermore, some cases of state failure often cited, such as Yugoslavia or old Pakistan, refer to constituted units (states) discarding an overarching federal framework (state) to take over geographic pieces of the formerly larger unit and are scarcely cases where some institutional framework was ever completely absent. Another problem with the concept of failure is its geographic reference: Frequently, states continue to be effective, often strongly effective, in a given part of their territory, leaving the rest beyond their control to a more or less effective opposition; thus, they fail in their duties as rulers of their assigned territory but succeed in ruling a part of it while leaving the rest as a proto- or counterstate. Examples include Colombia and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), Sudan and the SPLA/M (Sudan Peoples Liberation Army/Movement), and Sri Lanka and the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam).

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