One. The Failure and Collapse of Nation-States: Breakdown, Prevention, and Repair

Abstract

NATION-STATES FAIL when they are consumed by internal violence and cease delivering positive political goods to their inhabitants. Their governments lose credibility, and the continuing nature of the particular nationstate itself becomes questionable and illegitimate in the hearts and minds of its citizens. The rise and fall of nation-states is not new, but in a modern era when national states constitute the building blocks of world order, the violent disintegration and palpable weakness of selected African, Asian, Oceanic, and Latin American states threaten the very foundation of that system. International organizations and big powers consequently find themselves sucked disconcertingly into a maelstrom of anomic internal conflict and messy humanitarian relief. Desirable international norms such as stability and predictability become difficult to achieve when so many of the globe's newer nation-states waver precariously between weakness and failure, with some truly failing, and a few even collapsing. In a time of terror awareness, moreover, appreciating the nature of and responding to the dynamics of nation-state failure motivate critical policy debates. How best to understand the nature of weak states, to strengthen those poised on the abyss of failure, and to restore the functionality of failed states, are among the urgent policy questions of the twenty-first century. This book explores the nature of failure and collapse among developing world nation-states and examines how such faltering or destroyed states may be resuscitated. 1 It establishes clear criteria for distinguishing collapse and failure from generic weakness or apparent distress, and collapse from failure. The volume further analyzes the nature of state weakness, and it advances reasons why some weak states succumb to failure, or collapse, and why others in ostensibly more straitened circumstances remain weak and at risk without ever destructing. Characterizing failed states is thus an important and relevant endeavor, especially because the phenomenon of state failure is underresearched, with the literature hitherto marked by

The Afghan Local Police – Closing the Security Gap?

“…Although Weber intended his ideal types as 'pure' logical categories for analytical purposes that had 'no connection with value judgments ' (Weber 2011' (Weber [1904: 98; emphasis in the original), his formulation has in recent decades become a normativeteleological benchmark dominating both the scholarly and policy discourses (Migdal and Schlichte 2005;Hagmann and Péclard 2010;Weigand 2015). The view that deviation from this condition is a dangerous pathology threatening the wider community of states has underpinned the tendency to categorise states with a low degree of monopolisation of force as 'fragile' or even 'failed ' (Fukuyama 2004;Rotberg 2004). As the problems besetting such places came to be defined in terms of state failure, so the view emerged that the solution lay in concerted international efforts to establish supposedly Weberian ideal-typical state structures.…”

Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa

“…Consequently, many academic works portray post-colonial African states in virtually pathological categories. They are perceived to be threatened by 'collapse' (Zartman, 1995), 'failure' (Rotberg, 2004), 'fragility' (Stewart and Brown, 2009) and 'weakness' (Jackson and Rosberg, 1982) as they degenerate into nightmarish 'shadow' (Reno, 2000) or 'quasi' (Hopkins, 2000;Jackson, 1990) states, void of popular legitimacy and administrative capacity. Rebuilding the deficient bureaucratic apparatuses of sub-Saharan African governments then becomes a major preoccupation and challenge for international donors (Englebert and Tull, 2008).…”

Categorization of States Beyond Strong and Weak

“…Using C > 6.5 as the threshold capacity value, twenty-eight impoverished states were identified by their average weak capacity while exhibiting stronger levels of authority and legitimacy. States that are weak in legitimacy, but not in authority and capacity, are labelled 'Brittle' (B) given their susceptibility to political instability, similar to the distinction noted by Rotberg (2004). Sixteen brittle states were identified by weak legitimacy (using L > 6.5) while exhibiting stronger levels of authority and capacity.…”

“…These various types derive their dysfunction from different sources, both internal and external, and consequently require different policy prescriptions. In a compilation work drawing on disparate research agendas, Rotberg (2004) derived a slightly less negative ranking that includes fragile, weak, failing, failed, collapsed, and recovering states. However, neither of these taxonomies, drawn mostly from case-based evidence, represents an effort to construct mutually exclusive categories quantitatively nor do they provide a clear demarcation or break point that unambiguously separates categories of state functions from one another.…”