Weak States and the Savage Wars of Peace

David Sogge works as an independent researcher based in Amsterdam, where he is affiliated with the Transnational Institute [http://www.tni.org/].

Bombs made in Yemen. Piracy made in Somalia. War crimes made in the Congo. Fanatic insurgency made in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A parade of abominations from troubled places routinely marches across the screens of our media’s global village. That attention is driving today’s politics of fear, and the “solutions” that follow from those politics: endless wars and loss of civil freedoms.

Official talk of “state failure” emerged in the early 1990s as Western policy elites and opinion-formers struggled to make sense of violent upheavals in Somalia, Haiti, the Caucasus, the Balkans and Rwanda. The events of 11 September 2024 catapulted the idea into policy pre-eminence. In the United States’ “National Security Strategy” of 2002, it had become an official axiom: “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones.”¹ Policymakers across the Atlantic quickly took their cue from Washington; as of 2003, state failure became one of the five “key threats” identified in the European Union’s official “Security Strategy”. France’s Economic Council for Defence echoed these fears, stating: “there are no more threats to our borders” but now “no borders to our threats”.² America’s top spy mandarins, in a projection published in 2004, saw an approaching “perfect storm” of conflict in certain regions, made possible by “the continued prevalence of troubled and institutionally weak states” that yield “expanses of territory and populations devoid of effective governmental control. Such territories can become sanctuaries for transnational terrorists (such as al-Qaeda in Afghanistan) or for criminals and drug cartels (such as in Colombia)”. In conclusion, the spymasters predicted a world in 2020 beset by a “pervasive sense of insecurity”.³

Thus a new paradigmatic menace has been conjured up. As a powerful imaginary, it fills the place left by the former Soviet Bloc. It is another kind of barbarism, now much closer to hand. Lurking in the back streets of Mogadishu or the tribal areas of Pakistan, the barbarians may be far away, but thanks to low-cost telecommunications, cheap air travel and porous national borders, they are in effect at the gates.

‘The Problem’

What drives the idea of state failure and how did it first gain traction? As a contemporary geopolitical concept, it seems out of keeping with the times. During the Cold War, Western strategists never worried much about dysfunctional states. Rather, they were gripped by fears of “strong, internally stable governments”, that is, states tending to be led by “one-party Communist totalitarian governments”.⁴ Nightmare scenarios for Washington were about well‑ordered, disciplined and autonomous nations—not weak and troubled ones.

Yet a longer view reveals old, deep-running currents in the Western imaginary of non-Western places. Narratives of primordial savagery and irrationality go back to the Conquistadors of Latin America in the sixteenth century and to Europe’s scrambles for Africa and Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. Imperial glory and material gain were the impulses of domination, but these had to be justified by more noble intentions, such as ending disorder among the “lesser breeds without the law.” Hence, it was “the White Man’s burden”, as Kipling famously expressed it, to pursue “the savage wars of peace”.

A couple of decades after decolonisation, notions of “soft” states and disordered politics began to appear among area-studies scholars, especially Africanists. Anglo-Saxon economists allied to the anti-Keynesian “counter-revolution” began to churn out studies about rent-seeking, corruption and other government practices in non-Western places—practices that were thought to nullify enterprise and economic growth.

Helping sound the alarm were a handful of shrewd and well-placed public intellectuals on the right, such as the American travel journalist and pundit Robert Kaplan. His lurid observations about “re-primitivised man” in Africa and aboriginal hatreds in the Balkans captivated many readers, including people in high places. Every US embassy in Africa got copies of his 1994 Atlantic Monthly article, “The Coming Anarchy”, depicting a planetary future of criminality and mayhem. President Bill Clinton is said to have found that article “stunning”. Kaplan’s writings reportedly moved Vice-President Al Gore to ask the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to set up a major research effort, the State Failure Task Force.

Yet towards the end of the 1990s, the idea of failing states lost momentum. Official concern about disorder in non-Western lands waned and aid for them shrank. The Clinton administration, convinced of their neo-liberal efficacy, let the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank steer policy on poor countries. As presidential candidate in 2000, George W. Bush said, “I don’t think nation-building missions are worthwhile.” Obscure, troubled places were just not worth bothering about.

Then abruptly in September 2001, America’s leaders found they had been blindsided. Officials and pundits who had smugly regarded themselves as hard-nosed realists attuned to exactly what was going on in the world had been caught in deeply humiliating postures. Those narratives of societies driven by primitive compulsions and of inexplicably dysfunctional states had clearly been of no help whatsoever. 

What Is at Stake?

When it is clear why states exist, in whose interest they should function and thus for whom they fail or succeed, talk about state failure can become meaningful. Should states exist chiefly to ensure better life-chances for all citizens? Or are their tasks mainly to promote globalisation’s winners and police its losers? For Western powers, the latter question has commanded most attention, especially since 2001. Most Western geostrategists answer it in the affirmative, holding that non-Western states have, above all else, responsibilities in defence of the West and its interests. Policies meant to shore up the governance and security of faraway poor countries have been conflated with policies to promote the security of rich and powerful countries.

Also at stake are claims to economic and strategic advantages gained in controlling hydrocarbons, rare minerals and other natural resources—things that awaken the animal spirits of powerful outsiders. Just which countries get the labels “weak” and “failing” can be selective. World energy politics illustrates this. Hydrocarbon exporters in Central and West Asia and North Africa show