Editor's Note

Failed states—the focus of this issue of Global Dialogue—are said to share certain distinguishing features. They lack control over their territories. They are unable to protect their inhabitants from internal or external violence. They are unable to ensure their populations receive basic necessities and public goods such as food, healthcare, education and sanitation. Authoritarian or dictatorial rule tends to be the norm, and corruption and crime are rife. A further identifying criterion has been stressed since the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001, seemingly devised in the weak, if not absolutely failed, state of Taliban-run Afghanistan: they threaten international security and stability by serving as havens for non-state groups plotting attacks on other countries.

This last purported characteristic of failed states has rendered the concept highly controversial, for if such states genuinely pose a danger to other states, then foreign military intervention in them becomes not only legitimate but obligatory: countries have a right to protect themselves from attack and a duty to protect their citizens from external threat, and these imperatives may require military intervention in states which have either collapsed or are on the verge of doing so, to oust terrorist groups they may voluntarily or involuntarily harbour and to restore the host state to a condition of peaceful stability such that it no longer threatens its own citizens or those of other countries. It was essentially this argument that was used to justify the US invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of the 11 September attacks; the United States was entitled and obliged to invade the country to root out the al-Qaeda organisation which had planned the atrocities and to unseat the Taliban regime which had given it shelter.

The notion of the failed state has consequently been criticised as an interveners’ charter, as the legitimising pretext for invasions that are in fact undertaken for the familiar Realpolitikal goals of territorial aggrandisement, economic gain and regional supremacy. Critics charge that to be dubbed a “failed state” today is to be marked down as a candidate for invasion.

Contributors to this issue of Global Dialogue touch on all aspects of the failed-states debate, discussing questions of definition, the political and security implications of the concept, and what remedial action—if any—is appropriate with regard to fragile or collapsed states. In the course of their debate, the situation in several states deemed to have failed or to be at risk of failure—Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mexico, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan—is examined.

A critical eye is cast on the failed-state notion in our opening contribution: David Sogge, of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, argues that it is defective both as a means of explaining crises and of generating effective responses to them. State failure and fragility are real phenomena, but the idea is typically a pretext for self-serving Western intervention, often taking the extreme form of militarily enforced regime change. Disorder and poor governance are blamed on corrupt and dictatorial local elites. The failed-states idea thus helps mask the role of powerful Western countries and institutions in creating the problems burdening so many weak and impoverished nations.

Joseph Siegle of the University of Maryland and the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., argues the need to stabilise fragile states. The admitted setbacks of the Western interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq should not blind us to the dangers of leaving weak states unattended, or to the success of stabilisation efforts elsewhere. Identifying the three principal roots of state fragility and instability as illegitimate rule, public insecurity, and deprivation and despair, Siegle provides a detailed account of how they may be addressed.

David Carment and Yiagadeesen Samy of Carleton University, Ottawa, discuss how “fragility” may be conceptualised, its various meanings and criteria, so that states as different as North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Honduras may all be considered “fragile” in one way or another. “Fragility”, they argue, is a relative term and has meaning only with respect to state performance over time in comparison with a given state’s peers. They conclude that external intervention, based on a proper conceptual understanding of fragility, is necessary, but has significant difficulties, which they delineate.

Scepticism about the utility of such intervention is expressed in our next article, co-authored by Lothar Brock of the Peace Research Institute, Frankfurt, Germany; Hans-Henrik Holm of the Danish School of Media and Journalism, Arhus, Denmark; Georg Sorensen of Arhus University, Denmark; and Michael Stohl of the University of California, Santa Barbara. They argue that “neither large-scale military interventions nor short-term infusions of money, changes in trading relations, or the mitigation of a current conflict suffice to alter the fundamental problems that characterise” fragile states. The burden of alleviating the problems of such states rests with their peoples and governments; the international community cannot do it for them. They illustrate the difficulties of “fixing” fragile states from the outside by discussing two very different cases, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti.

Good governance was until recently regarded as the key to development assistance. Only those states considered “good performers” moving in the direction of market-oriented democracy were deemed worthy of receiving donor aid. But, as Tobias Debiel, Daniel Lambach and Birgit Pech of the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, note, development policy has since seen a shift towards state-building concerns. It is now recognised that it is neither feasible nor desirable to disengage fully from crisis countries. The authors trace this change in development discourse and analyse what has brought it about. They conclude, however, that while the discourse may have changed, policies on the ground are still based on a prescriptive model of “good governance” rather than on a sound understanding of the complex dynamics of state formation in crisis regions.

States of Lilliputian size like Rwanda and Uganda have been able to invade, occupy and plunder their giant neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is indicative, argues Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, of the Congo’s utter failure to fulfil the three fundamental functions of the modern state: national security,