Introduction

STATE FAILURE AND THE STUDY OF WORLD POLITICS

In the contemporary turbulent world of globalization and ever-increasing interdependence across individuals, groups, international organizations, and nation-states, the existence of weak, fragile, or failed states is increasingly seen as a significant concern. In this book, we argue that state failure is associated with a range of factors pertaining to domestic politics as well as international influences, and that it is a phenomenon that is tremendously important to global security and human security in the current international system. More specifically, we demonstrate that the study of state failure, and assessing its impact on internal and international conflict and unrest, are consistent with a large body of international relations literature that engages the relationship between domestic and international politics — especially the study of civil war and development.

As the reader moves through this book, we hope that the strengths of our approach to state failure will become apparent. We provide a more nuanced theoretical analysis of state failure, along with an explicit discussion of its conceptualization, as well as the measurement of state collapse. Thus the book presents a unified conceptual and operational definition of state collapse, which is the foundation for a systematic empirical study of the set of collapsed states from 1946 to 2010. We do so using a multi-method approach, integrating comparative case studies with larger-scale quantitative analyses. The result is a comprehensive analysis of the full range of the failure process (from causes to duration to consequences), concluding with policy implications. These conclusions reflect empirical findings important for policy, including various factors underlying the onset of failure and its duration.

Because state failure is indeed an important issue in the global system, and one without simple answers, we need to set out the proper context for its study. This introductory chapter briefly situates the book amid the burgeoning literature on the importance of domestic political and social phenomena for international relations and foreign policy, as well as the need to "cross boundaries" between basic and applied research, between scholarly investigation and policy analysis (for example, Starr 2006).

The study of failed states would not have been found in the volumes filling the hypothetical library bookshelves dealing with international relations in either the pre–World War II or immediate postwar periods (for example, see Bobrow 1972). We will note why this is the case as we discuss the nature of state failure, outline the problems that exist in its study as well as suggest some remedies, and investigate a number of key questions about the causes and consequences of state failure. However, we must first look at and understand how a range of different scholars in political science as well as other disciplines, and especially in international relations and comparative politics, have come to the study of failed states — with their respective approaches, perspectives, and interests.

In the broad subfield of international relations, many students of conflict have moved to the study of civil war, particularly in the period after the Cold War. This was completely natural, as by that time it was quite evident that the primary arena of conflict in the contemporary world system had moved within states. Soon after the end of the Cold War, intrastate conflicts started emerging across the globe, whereas the incidence of interstate war rapidly declined. And thus students of international security and conflict processes came more and more to focus on internal violence — domestic strife, rebellion, revolution, and civil war — which more often than not would become internationalized in some way. It was equally natural for some of these scholars to become interested in the study of failed states, as most (but not all) of the cases of "failure" involved significant internal and/or internationalized conflict. In turn, the presence of conflict in failed states also accounts for an approach to the definitions, causes, and consequences of failed states that focuses on and stresses conflict; or at least starts with a concern about conflict. And we employ a similar approach to our exploration of state failure in this book.

A number of other scholars have come to the study of failed states through an interest in national or international security. Some of these have started their analytic journey with the broader concepts of "human development" or "human security," which begin to link both the conflict and political economy approaches to failed states by looking at the well-being of individuals and groups with a state. Human development and human security approaches also serve as a gateway for the incorporation of issues of legitimacy, stability, and the political survival of leaders to the causes of state failure, and possible choices for policy alternatives.

Others in the IR subfield are interested in international political economy (IPE), while students of comparative politics are interested in comparative political economy (or CPE). They come at failed states from an interest in development, modernization, and the economic viability of the large number of states that achieved independence from colonial rule — starting the process with Ghana in 1957 and continuing throughout the 1960s and 1970s (and later). Recall that in the study of dependency-dependencia, and the set of debates that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s over the different models of dependency-dependencia, the point of contention was whether the main causative factors in these phenomena were internal or external. In the study of failed states there is a similar divide, with some political economy scholars who stress internal factors (such as poor governance, kleptocracy, different resource bases, reliance on single crops or resources, and so forth), and others who stress the global economic system, systemic economic hierarchies (for example, Wallerstein 1974), and predatory developed states that continue to pursue neocolonial dominance. We can find an analogous internal-external divide within the community of conflict scholars — those who focus on internal political, tribal/ethnic, separatist, and ideological factors and those who stress neighbors, regions, and the global system's geopolitical realities as causal factors in the nature, frequency, and intensity of both internal conflict and cross-border conflict. However, as with development and dependency, most scholars now understand that various combinations of both internal and external phenomena are needed to explain and analyze failed states.

Indeed, state failure is exemplary of the sort of contemporary political phenomena that "cross boundaries," and thereby require scholars...