This paper proposes a new understanding of political stability. In doing so, it reviews and critiques previous definitions, outlines five operational concepts, and identifies implications important to the practice of stability operations, current US government policy, and academic research.It finds political stability to be the degree to which formal roles and structures coincide with informal roles and structures within a political object. The wider the 'gap,' the greater the instability. Uniquely, this view sees stability and instability as statements of potential, not occurrence.This paper proposes a new understanding of political stability. First, it reviews and critiques previous definitions. Second, it presents five concepts allowing for operational application. Last, it identifies implications important to the practice of stability operations, current US government policy, and academic research.Most work on political stability focuses on the state, though the state is only one example of a political object. International institutions, religious organizations, mass movements, businesses, criminal organizations, and terrorist groups, for example, all struggle with the stability of power relationships. Political stability is more than state stability.For clarity, this article will begin by using the language of state stability to evaluate earlier works within their own paradigm. Later, it will change, emphasizing 'objects' instead of 'states' in an effort to make a broader claim about political stability. 1
APPROACHES TO STATE STABILITYTo date, academic and policy-focused analyses have clustered around five different understandings of state stability. Table 1 summarizes their claims.Each of these has shortcomings. Writing in 1973, Leon Hurwitz reviewed several, two of which have endured: 'absence of violence' and 'absence of structural change.' 8 The 'absence of violence' approach is intuitive and simple; to Hurwitz, too simple. It reduces stability to violence, making the approach less a definition than an analogy. Further, it is an analogy that provides little clarity, instead exchanging one complex concept for another. Conceptualizing violence is just as confounding as conceptualizing stability.Two problems of measurement result. The first is one of classification, or organizing violence into measurable categories. Reviewing one attempt, Hurwitz