Bringing State Theory Back In: Why We Should Let Go of ‘Failed States’

Shahar Hameiri is a lecturer in international politics in the School of Social Science and Humanities at Murdoch University, Australia, and a fellow of the university’s Asia Research Centre.

Scholarly and practitioner interest in failed states and what to do about them has expanded exponentially since the end of the Cold War. For the world’s major governments and international organisations, it appears that state failure and its potential externalities are now core security concerns. For example, the United States’ latest “National Security Strategy”, released in May 2010, proclaims the “dark side” of globalisation—international terrorism, the spread of deadly technologies, economic upheaval and a changing climate—to be the gravest threat to US national security. Rebuilding failed states, whose weakness supposedly permits some of these risks to develop and multiply, is hence seen as a central component in realising the American security strategy:

Our diplomacy and development capabilities must help prevent conflict, spur economic growth, strengthen weak and failing states, lift people out of poverty, combat climate change and epidemic disease, and strengthen institutions of democratic governance.¹

Similar assessments of the global security environment have in the last decade been made by the United Nations, the European Union and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia, to mention but a few.

Indeed, concern over the potentially adverse security implications of state failure has been translated into a greater willingness in the post–Cold War era—particularly since the 11 September 2024 terrorist attacks in the United States—to intervene in states perceived as fragile and at risk of failure. State-building—the supposed solution to the problem of state failure—comprises a varying mix of coercive and non-coercive measures aimed at strengthening the capacity of intervened-in states to perform the functions of modern statehood adequately. It is now applied not only to conflict or post-conflict situations, but as a precautionary measure to “a wide spectrum of developing countries, both in war and peace”.²

A Problematic Concept

Consequently, it is imperative to examine the concept of the failed state and its potential limitations, both for making sense of the situations to which it refers and for the proposed solutions to these. The main argument herein is that the concept of the failed state has been implicitly understood through two dominant notions of state capacity: a neo-liberal institutionalist variant and a neo-Weberian institutionalist variant. Despite some important differences between these occasionally overlapping approaches, they share a number of problematic characteristics.

First, capacity is articulated in a way that obscures the highly political and contested nature of all projects of state-building, whether internally or externally driven. Second, the state and its institutions are abstracted from the social and political conflicts that accompany processes of capitalist development, whether preceding or driven through state-building interventionism. As a result, the notion of the failed state is highly descriptive, seeking to evaluate existing situations not on their own merits, but in terms of an ideal/typical state of either a neo-liberal or neo-Weberian kind. It is thus a “negative” way of understanding the complex social phenomena to which the concept of state failure is applied: it tells us what is not happening, rather than what is happening. The failed state is therefore a concept with very little analytical merit that obscures more than it reveals and that should be dumped unceremoniously by researchers.

A way out of the failed-state cul-de-sac is through a more rigorous integration of state theory into the study of so-called failed states. Particularly useful is the branch of state theory associated with scholars like Nicos Poulantzas and Bob Jessop. These scholars and others working in a similar vein, rather than fetishise the state, view it as a social relation and the functioning of its institutions as an expression of social power and never-ceasing struggles between coalitions of interests—classes, class fractions, distributional coalitions and other societal groups—over power and resources. State capacity in this sense represents the capacity of state institutions to privilege some interests over others—a relational attribute based on particular political and ideological environments formed in the context of particular patterns of economic development.

In what follows, I go on to discuss the limitations of the neo-liberal and neo-Weberian institutionalist conceptions of state failure and then proceed to provide a brief overview of the utility of another approach, which is based on social-conflict theory and grounded in state theory.

State Failure and the Limits of Institutionalism

Morten Bøås and Kathleen Jennings have recently argued that the failed-state label is applied selectively when it is in the interests of powerful governments to do so. While this argument is generally true, it is nevertheless impossible to deny the emergence of a commonsensical notion of what state failure means. Manipulation of the term for political reasons is therefore restricted by the development of a large body of knowledge that shapes both the nature of the problem and the solutions to it.

The typical definition of state failure is based on the idea that there is a minimum set of functions every state must be able to perform adequately. In other words, state failure is defined in terms of the existence or absence of state capacity across various functional, institutional and geographical arenas. This tends to create a spectrum of functionality, with strong states at one end, failed or collapsed states at the other extreme, and various other weak or fragile states in between.

There are, however, two prevalent ways of defining state capacity in the literature: one that could be described as neo-liberal institutionalist, and the other neo-Weberian institutionalist. These are not neatly separated, as many scholars straddle both camps, and indeed the notion of state “capacity” is strongly rooted in the Weberian tradition. Nonetheless, there are important dissimilarities between the two approaches, pertaining to how they define state failure and explain its origins, and to the solutions they prescribe for it. Both, however, are limited by their propensity to treat state capacity as something that stands outside social and political struggle, or any social relation for that matter. This leads to an emphasis on evaluating whether particular states approximate pre-existing institutional