State Failure

A. Taylor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137318039
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Andrew Taylor provides an overview of the origins, evolution, and impact of state failure since the 1990s. Avoiding quickly outdated country-based case studies, he focuses on failure as a process rather than an event, putting contemporary usage in a wider historical context.

1

Introduction

During the 1990s the concept and phenomenon of the failed state achieved considerable influence amongst journalists, academics and policy makers and their advisers. There is no agreed definition but the following is typical: a failed state is characterised by the ‘collapse of central government to impose order, resulting in loss of physical control of territory, and/or the monopoly over the legitimate use of force. Crucially, it can no longer reproduce the conditions for its own existence’ (GSDRC 2012). The intellectual and policy impact of state failure has been considerable and remains influential in new guises (e.g. the fragile state); its legacy can be seen in many parts of world. Developed as an explanation for post-Cold War politics and the new world (dis)order, the failed state became a key discourse in the conduct of international politics. This was particularly so after the 9/11 attacks on the US:

The events of September 11, 2001, taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states. Poverty does not make poor people into terrorists and murders. Yet poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states unable to resist terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders.

(Bush 2002, iv)

This, coming from a president who, as a candidate in the 2000 election, set his face against the idea that the US should engage in nation building demonstrates the scale of the policy shift. In the second presidential debate on 11 October 2000 with Al Gore, Bush noted that US involvement in Somalia ‘Started off as a humanitarian mission then it changed into a nation-building mission, and that’s where the mission went wrong ... I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation building’ (http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-250_162-240442.html). However, so great was the threat represented by these states perceived to be that nation building was justified and some advocated the revival of trusteeship and even of formal (or informal) American empire.

The contention of this book is that state failure is so flawed as a concept as to be unusable in academic analysis and deeply dangerous in policy making. The idea of a failed state necessitates a condition of ‘not failed’, the exemplar of which is an association claiming a monopoly of legitimate violence within a defined territory and interacting with like associations in an international system. Increasingly these states are, but need not be, market-liberal democracies. To grasp the emergence and evolution of state failure, it is important to remember that, historically, failure led to state death either by absorption or by fragmentation into new entities, a fate that is now comparatively rare but not unknown. States are preserved by material and ideational influences combined in the idea of sovereignty. States can remain juridically extant despite internal disintegration. Failure is best understood as marked loss of complexity (what triggers the loss varies) whose effects manifest themselves as territorial fragmentation and violence up to, and including, genocide. However, the result is not a Hobbesian state of nature. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and conditions of failure generate political orders that might be unappealing in the extreme but are orders nonetheless, possessing a distinct rationality. Failure is always in someone’s interest.

Anatol Lieven, a noted Pakistan specialist, suggested:

One of the minor curses of writing on world affairs over the past few years has been the proliferating use of the term ‘failed state’. Coined originally for genuinely failed and failing states in sub-Saharan Africa, this term has since been thrown around with wild abandon to describe a great range of states around the world, pretty much in accordance with the writer’s prejudices or the need of his or her publication for a sensational headline.

(2011, 19–20)

Lieven captures the stretching and travelling to which state failure was subjected and hints at three assumptions underpinning state failure: first, that failure can be clearly specified theoretically, accurately measured, and appropriate remedies identified and implemented; second, that state failure is essentially an African phenomenon; and finally, that it is a recent phenomenon. This book explores these three assumptions. By taking a perspective broader than the literature’s predominant focus that failed state equals security threat, it explores the origins and evolution of the concept as well as its intellectual and methodological underpinnings, and it considers some of the concept’s consequences for contemporary politics. It eschews reliance on specific cases for two reasons: first, the list of failed states often changes rapidly even though the ‘inner core’ remains fairly stable; and second, the relatively few cases cover a range of contexts and experiences. Whilst drawing extensively on cases, the book is concerned with the concept and process of state failure.

Current usage of state failure rests directly on a distinct notion and place of origin of the state. From the fifteenth century, three striking changes occurred:

First, almost all of Europe formed into national states with well-defined boundaries and mutual relations. Second, the European system has spread to virtually the entire world. Third, other states, acting in concert, have exerted a growing influence over the organization and territory of new states. The three changes link closely, since Europe’s leading states actively spread the system by colonization, conquest, and penetration of non-European states.

(Tilly 1992, 181)

By the seventeenth century the European state – autonomous, centralised and bureaucratically differentiated – had been established and was spreading beyond Europe. The state, then, is a Western European form of political association, a political form that went global and was characterised by sovereignty. During the global diffusion of this ‘standard’ state model, the process of state formation shifted from internal to external formation (the rise and fall of empire). As empires grew, the Western European state remade the world in its image and the final great shift came after 1945 with the collapse of formal empire. The European model of state formation created the patterns of underdevelopment, exploitation and violence that by the 1990s constituted the failed state (Tilly 1992, 195, 198, 202–203).

The study of failed states is strongly ‘presentist’, as one would expect from a heavily policy-oriented literature. What is impressive is the overall stability of the state system, but this really only dates from the post-1945 break-up of the colonial empires (Herbst 2004, 303–304). The ebb and flow of political organisation is impossible to chart accurately, and simply listing no longer extant political entities over the span of human history would tell us little. Some entities existed briefly, some lasted hundreds of years and not all ‘failed’ or ‘collapsed’. Even those that did were absorbed, or their fragments were recombined or they formed the basis for new states, but this demonstrates – and this is often forgotten – that failure is not new. This book sees state failure as history’s default setting. It is not concerned with defeat in war, revolutions or regime change, although these can be aspects of failure; rather, failure must have territorial effects, such as secession or break-up, or the emergence of ‘ungoverned territories’ (which, as we shall see, is a misnomer). We are concerned with cases ranging from a situation where ‘political organisms ... lose the capacity to function effectively, but do not necessarily collapse completely’; at the other end of the spectrum is ‘the more drastic phenomenon of states that cease to exist’ (Davies 2011, 728). This raises the question of what follows extinction.

States fail because of internal and external problems, or a combination of the two. This book does not consider cases where a state is invaded and absorbed by a conqueror; war represents the most severe test for a state and defeat is eloquent testimony of a regime’s failure. Instead, this book focuses primarily on the internal processes of failure, which may have external causes and which may precipitate external intervention. Why states fail has long fascinated, and one of the most elegant descriptions comes from Edward Gibbon, who wrote of

the licentiousness of private war, which violated with impunity, the laws of the Code and the Gospel ... In a dark period of five hundred years, Rome was perpetually afflicted by the sanguinary quarrels of the nobles and the people ... At such a time, when every quarrel was decided by the sword and none could trust their lives or properties to the impotence of the law, the powerful citizens armed for safety or offence against the domestic enemies whom they feared or hated.

(Gibbon 1998, 1079)

Comparing the destruction and anarchy wreaked by barbarian invaders with that of domestic perpetrators, Gibbon believes the latter to be far more ruinous. Four aspects of Gibbon’s account resonate today: first, the consequences of a loss of a monopoly of violence; second, where there are competing entrepreneurs of violence there will be no rule of law (and vice versa); third, conflict in any social collectivity is inevitable but here competing groups resolve conflict violently; and finally, when social cohesion and trust erode, the perceived threat from others increases, encouraging groups to ‘get their retaliation in first’. These themes, along with the threat of territorial fragmentation, recur throughout this book.

Chapter 2 (‘Definitions’) examines the emergence of the concept of state failure in the 1990s as a response to, and explanation of, the perplexing post-Cold War world. Two contrasting features stand out: first, the description of failure as a global phenomenon; and second, its geographical concentration in Africa. Reconciling these two aspects has bedevilled the study of failed states. Is it a potential feature of ‘the state’ per se or is it a feature of underdevelopment? If the former, why are there not more cases? If the latter, what added value does state failure bring? To understand state failure we need a definition of the state; moreover, we need a definition that is trans-historical and trans-cultural. This book uses an essentialist definition, which is essentially Weberian, to capture the core features of the state in order to delineate areas where failure might occur.

Chapter 3 (‘Measurement’) pursues the theme of definition by considering the measurement of state failure. Measuring failure is closely related to definition because the debates about state failure are dominated by a policy dimension and any effective response depends on developing appropriate and accurate metrics. The chapter focuses on some measures and weaknesses, such as the reliance on proxies, in the measurement of complex phenomena. However, the quality of data and the methodologies used are incapable of grasping the complexity of state failure, which makes it a dangerous guide for policy.

Chapter 4 (‘History’) draws on material from archaeology, which is centrally concerned with failure. Archaeologists have written a great deal on the collapse of archaic states, providing a range of examples that have influenced the contemporary study of failure. Scholars have developed sophisticated theories dealing with complexity, differentiation and failure, as well as exploring what happens after collapse, notably state formation and resilience. They have also examined single-cause (notably environmental) explanations of collapse and have found them wanting.

Chapter 5 (‘Sovereignty’) considers why so few contemporary states die. Failure is historically common but we live in an epoch when state death is increasingly rare, which is why state failure seemed to capture a radical change in the international state system. The focus of the chapter is on sovereignty. This is a major reason for the preservation of states that in earlier periods would have disappeared by absorption or fragmentation. One consequence of the failed state was the sense that sovereignty was conditional, dependent on states exercising internal sovereignty in accordance with norms approved by the international community. Intervention was justified variously by, for example, humanitarian intervention, liberal-interventionism and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), but there is little evidence that state failure modified significantly the doctrine of state sovereignty.

Chapter 6 (‘Violence’) focuses on violence, which is presented as both cause and consequence of sovereignty’s breakdown. Contemporary usage and description rely, implicitly and explicitly, on a Hobbesian state of nature metaphor, but this chapter moves away from metaphor to explore what Hobbes actually wrote about failure. As the pre-eminent theorist of failure, Hobbes is of direct relevance. The chapter then supplements Hobbes with a range of writing on the African state, the nature of infrastructural and despotic power, and the complex political emergency in order to map out the nature of instability, violence and political order in the failed state.

Chapter 7 (‘Environment’) takes two distinct aspects of the state failure literature and subsumes them under the broad category of environmental influences. First, do environmental factors such as climate change have the ability to induce state failure? Second, what are the implications of large-scale disease (in this case HIV/AIDS) for the stability of already stressed states? Failed states have been identified as vulnerable to, and sources of, environmental catastrophe and disease, and Malthusian ideas influence thinking on both. Climate change and disease have been cited as capable of inducing failure, even undermining the stability of the international system. Environmental degradation and disease blight and destroy millions of lives but history and the contemporary world show the causal chain to be extremely complex, with little evidence of a direct causal link. Death on a large scale often testifies to the resilience and adaptability of populations and may actually promote state capacity.

Chapter 8 (‘Governance’) moves from macro- to microinfluences. Life in these states is unpleasant certainly, even ‘nasty, brutish and short’, but the Hobbesian state of nature is mythical and this artifice adds little to our understanding of the effects upon/responses by ordinary people of/to failure. Using insights from the collapse of archaic states and the contemporary humanitarian intervention literatures, this chapter uses the livelihoods approach to understand the development of multiple non-state political orders within a ‘sovereign’ territory, rather than the anarchy/order binary view characteristic of much of the state failure literature.

Chapter 9 (‘Consequences’) considers the thinking on how to respond to state failure. Irrespective of its shortcomings, government policy has been greatly influenced by state failure, especially since 9/11. Failed states are identified as hosting threats about which ‘something has to be done’ by the international community; this something ranges from humanitarian intervention to nation building, the revival of UN trusteeship and calls for empire. Neither humanitarian intervention nor externally sponsored state building are new but siren calls for UN trusteeship (let alone empire) have been utterly unrealistic and even hysterical. The experience of Iraq and Afghanistan has reduced dramatically the West’s appetite for intervention on a grand scale, fuelling calls for a more realistic appraisal of what could, and should, be attempted. These and other experiences have inspired a growing scepticism about state failure’s use as a guide to policy.

There is a powerful case to be made in favour of rejecting state failure and failed states as a major source of instability and even as sources of terrorism. Moreover, these states cannot be blamed for the instabilities of global capitalism. Many people confused a problem (a failed state) with a threat (terrorism), assuming that the latter was based on both intention and capability. This is not to deny that problems, such as humanitarian crises, terrorist groups, and ineffective and unstable states, exist and that these demand a response, but state failure as a concept obscures more than it clarifies.

There is a group of states that suffer serious problems of poverty, violence, disease, environmental degradation, and economic, social, territorial and political fragmentation. Sometimes they host terrorist groups with global ambitions, but the evidence is that they do not as a group, or category, pose an existential threat to the West or the international system. The threat they pose is to their own populations and their immediate neighbours and, as such, they cry out for a response. However, that offered by the concept of the failed state is inadequate.

2

Definitions

Every construction requires a foundation. During the mid-1990s, ‘state failure’ and ‘the failed state’ (and variants thereof, such as ‘the collapsed state’) entered the political lexicon. The first section of this chapter examines how state failure became a core concern of international politics, with profound consequences for foreign, security and defence, and development policy. What made the 1990s receptive to this ‘new’ concept? The second section examines the evolution of the concept and its relationship to ‘post-modern’ conflict and to major geo-political and humanitarian crises, such as Yugoslavia’s collapse and the Rwandan genocide. Such events were interpreted as signalling the emergence of a new and broader set of security threats radically different from those of the Cold War. The third part of the chapter examines the geographical distribution of failed states. Whilst the term ‘failed states’ refers to an empirical phenomenon, the relatively small number of cases and their concentration in Africa prompts the question: Is this is no more than a relabelling of underdevelopment? The final section offers an essentialist definition of the state that is transcultural and trans-historical, which is Weberian in derivation. This definition underpins the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Definitions
• 3. Measurement
• 4. History
• 5. Sovereignty
• 6. Violence
• 7. Environment
• 8. Governance
• 9. Consequences
• 10. Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index