FUTURE
REGIONAL CRISES: FAILING STATES
Robert I. Rotberg
Failed states are tense, deeply conflicted, dangerous, and
contested bitterly by warring factions. In most failed states, government
troops battle armed revolts led by one or more rivals. Occasionally, the
official authorities in a failed state face two or more insurgencies, varieties
of civil unrest, different degrees of communal discontent, and a plethora of
dissent directed at the state and at groups within a state.[1]
It is not the absolute intensity of
violence that identifies a failed state. Rather, it is the enduring character
and consuming quality of that violence, the fact that much of the violence is
directed against the existing government or regime, and the inflamed nature of the
political or geographical demands for shared power or autonomy which
rationalize or justify that violence in the minds of the main insurgents.
The civil wars which characterize
failed states usually stem from or have roots in ethnic, religious, linguistic,
or other intercommunal enmity. The fear of the other (and the consequent
security dilemma) that drives so much ethnic conflict stimulates and fuels
hostilities between regimes and subordinate and less favored groups. Avarice
also propels that antagonism, especially when greed is magnified by dreams of
loot from discoveries of new, contested, pools of resource wealth such as
petroleum deposits, diamond fields, other minerals, or fast-denuded forests.[2]
There is no failed state without
disharmonies between communities. Yet, the simple fact that many weak
nation-states include haves and have-nots, and that some of the newer states
contain a heterogeneous array of ethnic, religious, and linguistic interests,
is more a contributor to, than a root cause of, nation-state failure. State
failure cannot be ascribed primarily to the inability to build nations from a
congeries of groups of diverse backgrounds.[3]
Nor should it be ascribed baldly to the oppression of minorities by a majority,
although such brutalities are often a major ingredient of the impulse toward
failure.
In most failed states, regimes prey
on their own constituents. Driven by ethnic or other intercommunal hostility,
or by the governing elite’s insecurities, they victimize their own citizens or
some sub-set of the whole that is regarded as hostile. As in Mobutu Sese Seko’s
In contrast to strong states, failed
states cannot control their peripheral regions, especially those regions
occupied by out-groups. They lose authority over large sections of territory.
Often, the expression of official power is limited to a capital city and to one
or more ethnically-specific zones. Plausibly, the extent of a state’s failure
can be measured by the extent of its geographical expanse genuinely controlled
(especially after dark) by the official government. How nominal or contested is
the central government’s sway over peripheral towns and rural roads and
waterways? Who really expresses power up-country, or in districts distant from
the capital?[4]
Citizens depend on states and
central governments to secure their persons and free them from fear. Unable to
establish an atmosphere of security nationwide, and often struggling to project
power and official authority, the faltering state’s failure becomes obvious
even before, or as, rebel groups and other contenders arm themselves, threaten
the residents of central cities, and overwhelm demoralized government
contingents, as in Fiji, Indonesia, Liberia, Nepal, Sierra Leone, and the
Solomon Islands.
Another indicator of state failure
is the growth of criminal violence. As state authority weakens and fails, and
as the state becomes criminal in its oppression of its citizens, so lawlessness
becomes more apparent. Criminal gangs take over the streets of the cities. Arms
and drugs trafficking become more common. Ordinary police forces become
paralyzed. Anomic behaviors become the norm. For protection, citizens naturally
turn to warlords and other strong figures who express or activate ethnic or
clan solidarity, thus offering the possibility of security at a time when all
else, and the state itself, is crumbling. High rates of urban crime, and the
rise of criminal syndicates, testify to an underlying anarchy and desperation.
Failed states provide only limited
quantities of other essential political goods. They more and more forfeit their
role as the preferred suppliers of political goods to upstart warlords and
other non-state actors. A failed state is a polity that is no longer able or
willing to perform the fundamental tasks of a nation-state in the modern world.
Failed states exhibit flawed institutions. That is, only the
institution of the executive functions. If legislatures exist at all, they
ratify decisions of the executives. Democratic debate is noticeably absent. The
judiciary is derivative of the executive rather than being independent, and
citizens know that they cannot rely on the court system for significant redress
or remedy, especially against the state. The bureaucracy has long ago lost its
sense of professional responsibility and exists solely to carry out the orders
of the executive and, in petty ways, to oppress citizens. The military is
possibly the only institution with any remaining integrity, but the armed forces
of failed states are often highly politicized, devoid of the esprit that they
once demonstrated.
Failed states are typified by
deteriorating or destroyed infrastructures. Metaphorically, the more potholes
(or main roads turned to rutted tracks), the more a state will exemplify
failure. As rulers siphon funds from the state coffers, so fewer capital
resources remain for road crews, equipment, and raw materials. Maintaining road
or rail access to distant districts becomes less and less of a priority. Even
refurbishing basic navigational aids along arterial waterways becomes typified
by neglect. Where the state still controls such communications backbones as a
land-line telephone system, that form of political and economic good betrays a
lack of renewal, upkeep, investment, and bureaucratic endeavor. Less a metaphor
than a daily reality is the index of failed connections, repeated dialings, and
interminable waits for repairs and service. If private entrepreneurs have been
permitted by the state monopoly to erect cell telephone towers and offer mobile
telephone relays, such telephone service may already have made the monopoly
obsolete. Even, or particularly, because there is no state to interfere, in a collapsed
state privately provided cell telephone systems prevail over what might
remain of the land-line network, as in Somalia.
When a state has failed or is in the
process of failing, the effective educational and medical systems are
privatized informally (with a resulting hodgepodge of shady schools and
questionable health clinics in the cities), and public facilities become
increasingly decrepit and neglected. Teachers, physicians, nurses, and
orderlies are paid late or not at all, and absenteeism increases. Textbooks and
medicines become scarce. X-ray machines break down and are not repaired.
Reports to the relevant ministries are ignored. Citizens, especially rural
parents, students, and patients, slowly realize that the state has abandoned
them to their own devices and to the forces of nature. Sometimes, where a
failed state is effectively split, essential services may be provided only to
the favored half, but naturally not to the half in rebellion and engulfed in
war. Most of the time the destroyed nation-state completely under-performs.
Literacy rates fall, infant mortality rises, the HIV/AIDS epidemic overwhelms
any health infrastructure that continues to exist, life expectancies plummet,
and an already poor and battered citizenry becomes even poorer and more
immiserated.
Failed states offer unparalleled
economic opportunity—but only for a privileged few. Those clustered around the
ruler or the ruling oligarchy grow richer while their less fortunate brethren
starve. Immense profits are available from an awareness of regulatory
advantages and currency speculation and arbitrage. But the privilege of making
real money when everything else is deteriorating is confined to clients of the
ruling elite or to especially favored external entrepreneurs. The
nation-state’s responsibility to maximize the well-being and personal
prosperity of all of its citizens is conspicuously absent, if it ever existed.
Corruption flourishes, not only in
failed states, but in them it often thrives on an unusually destructive scale.
There is widespread petty or lubricating corruption as a matter of course, but
escalating levels of venal corruption mark failed states: kickbacks on anything
that can be put out to fake tender (medical supplies, textbooks, bridges,
roads, and tourism concessions); unnecessarily wasteful construction projects
arranged so as to maximize the rents that they generate; licenses for existing
and non-existent activities become more costly; and persistent and generalized
extortion becomes the norm. In such situations, corrupt ruling elites mostly
invest their gains overseas, not at home, making the economic failure of their
states that much more acute. Or they dip directly into the coffers of the
shrinking state to pay for external aggressions, lavish residences and palaces,
extensive overseas travel, and privileges and perquisites that feed their
greed. Military officers always benefit from these excessively corrupt regimes,
and feed ravenously from the same illicit troughs as their civilian
counterparts.[5]
An indicator of failure, but not a
cause of failure, is declining real national and per capita levels of annual
gross domestic product (GDP, or GNI, in the World Bank’s latest compilations).
The statistical underpinnings of most states in the developing world are shaky,
but failed states—even or particularly failed states with vast natural
resources—exhibit overall worsening GDP figures, slim year to year growth
rates, and greater disparities of income between the wealthiest and poorest
fifths of the population. High official state deficits (
Sometimes, especially if there are
intervening climatic disasters, the economic chaos and generalized neglect that
is endemic to failed states lead to regular food shortages and widespread
hunger—indeed, even to episodes of starvation and major efforts of
international humanitarian relief. Natural calamities can overwhelm the resources
even of non-failed, but weak, states in the developing world. But when state
competencies have consciously been sucked dry by unscrupulous rulers and their
cronies, as in failed states, unforeseen natural disasters or man-made wars can
drive ignored populations over the edge of endurance into starvation. Once such
populations have lost their subsistence plots and their sources of income, they
lose their homes and their already weak support networks and are forced into an
endless cycle of migration and displacement. Failed states provide no safety
nets, and the homeless and the destitute become fodder for anyone who can offer
food and a cause.
A nation-state also fails when it
loses legitimacy—when its forfeits the “mandate of heaven.” Its nominal borders
become irrelevant. Groups within the nominal borders seek autonomous control
within one or more parts of the national territory or, sometimes, even across
its international borders. Once the state’s capacity to secure itself or to
perform in an expected manner recedes, and once what little capacity remains is
devoted almost exclusively to the fortunes of a few or to a favored ethnicity
or community, then there is every reason to expect less and less loyalty to the
state on the part of the excluded and disenfranchised. When the rulers are
perceived to be working for themselves and their kin, and not the state, their
legitimacy, and the state’s legitimacy, plummets. The state increasingly comes
to be perceived as being owned by an exclusive class or group, with all others
pushed aside. The social contract that binds inhabitants to an overarching
polity becomes breached. Various sets of citizens cease trusting the state.
Citizens then naturally turn more and more to the kinds of sectional and
community loyalties that are their main recourse in time of insecurity, and
their main default source of economic opportunity. They transfer their
allegiances to clan and group leaders, some of whom become warlords. These
warlords or other local strongmen can derive support from external as well as
indigenous supporters. In the wilder, more marginalized corners of failed
states, terror can breed along with the prevailing anarchy that naturally
accompanies state breakdown and failure.
A collapsed state is a rare
and extreme version of a failed state. Political goods are obtained through
private or ad hoc means. Security is equated with the rule of the strong. A
collapsed state exhibits a vacuum of authority. It is a mere
geographical expression, a black hole into which a failed polity has fallen.
There is dark energy, but the forces of entropy have overwhelmed the radiance
that hitherto provided some semblance of order and other vital political goods
to the inhabitants (no longer the citizens) embraced by language or ethnic affinities
or borders. When
None of these designations is
terminal.
The quality of failed or collapsed is real, but need not be static.
Failure is a fluid halting place, with movement back to weakness and forward
into collapse always possible. Certainly, too, because failure and collapse are
undesirable results for states, they are neither inevitable nor unavoidable.
Whereas weak states fail much more easily than strong ones, that failure need
not be preordained. Failure is preventable, particularly since human agency
rather than structural flaws or institutional insufficiencies are almost
invariably at the root of slides from weakness (or strength) toward failure and
collapse.
Weak states include a broad
continuum of states that are: inherently weak because of geographical,
physical, or fundamental economic constraints; or they may be basically strong,
but temporarily or situationally weak because of internal antagonisms,
management flaws, greed, despotism, or external attacks. Weak states typically
harbor ethnic, religious, linguistic, or other intercommunal tensions that have
not yet or not yet thoroughly become overtly violent. Urban crime rates tend to
be high and increasing. In weak states, the ability to provide adequate
amounts of other political goods is diminished or is diminishing. Physical
infrastructural networks are deteriorated. Schools and hospitals show signs of
neglect, particularly outside the main cities. GDP per capita and other
critical economic indicators have fallen or are falling, sometimes
dramatically; levels of venal corruption are embarrassingly high and
escalating. Weak states usually honor rule of law precepts in the breach. They
harass civil society. Weak states are often ruled by despots, elected or not.
Extreme weakness leads to failing and failure.
There is a special category of weak
state, the seemingly strong one, always an autocracy, which rigidly controls
dissent and is secure but at the same time provides very few political goods.[6] In
extreme cases, such as
Collapsed and failed
designate the consequences of a process of decay at the nation-state level. The
capacity of those nation-states to perform positively for their citizens has
atrophied. But, as the foregoing examples indicate, that atrophy is neither
inevitable nor the result of happenstance. To fail a state is not that easy.
Crossing from weakness into failure takes will as well as neglect. Thus, weak
nation-states need not tip into failure. Anarchy, security dilemmas, and
predation all combine synergistically to tip a weak state into a failing or
failed mode. At several stages, preventive or avoidance measures could arrest
the downward movement, but once non-state actors have a cause and a following,
and access to arms, halting the desperate spiral of failure is difficult. By
this time, leaders and states engaged in self-destruction usually possess too
little credibility and too few resources to restore trust and claw back from
the brink of chaos. Many leaders hardly recognize or care about the depths of
their national despair. Instead, they focus on the rents and advantages that
are still to be had as the state succumbs, and warfare spreads.
There are several interesting cases that test the precision of the
distinction between weakness and failure, and how and in what circumstances
weak or even conflict-prone states survive.
A number of other nation-states
belong in the category of weak states that show a high potential to fail.
Likewise, the potential for open
failure exists in those highly regimented states, such as
Other weak states that contain the incubus of failure because of
serious intercommunal antagonisms, but have managed effectively, albeit
possibly only for the moment, to come to terms with or to bridge their
divisions include Fiji, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Philippines,
Lebanon, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, and Paraguay.
Examples of other nation-states that, given their geographical and
physical legacy (and future peril in several cases because of global warming
and cataclysmic climatic change), can be considered inherently weak include
Three kinds of signals of impending failure:
economic, political, and deaths in combat, provide clearer, timely, and
actionable, warnings. On the economic front, Lebanon in 1972–1979, Nigeria in
1993–1999, Indonesia in 1997–1999, and Zimbabwe in 2001–2004 each provide
instances of how a rapid reduction in incomes and living standards indicated
the possibility of failure early enough to be noted and for preventive measures
to have been attempted.
Once the downward spiral starts in earnest,
only a concerted, determined effort can slow its momentum; corrupt autocrats
and their equally corrupt associates usually have few incentives to arrest
their state’s slide since they themselves find clever ways to benefit from
impoverishment and misery. As foreign and domestic investment dries up, jobs
vanish, and per capita incomes fall, the mass of citizens in an imperiled state
see their health, educational, and logistical entitlements melt away. Food and
fuel shortages occur. Privation and hunger follow, especially if a climatic
catastrophe intervenes. Thanks to foreign exchange scarcities, there is less
and less of everything that matters. Meanwhile, in the typical failing state,
ruling families and cadres arrogate to themselves increasing portions of the
available pie. They systematically skim the state treasury, take advantage of
official versus street costs of foreign exchange, partake of smuggling and the
rents of smuggling, and gather what little is available into their own sticky
palms. If it were possible reliably to calibrate the flow of illicit funds into
overseas accounts, nation by nation, robust early warnings would be available.
Absent detailed reports of such theft, the descriptors in this paragraph become
very suggestive indicators that can be watched, in real time, and can forecast serious
trouble, if not an end state of failure.
Politically, the available indicators are
equally clear, if somewhat less quantifiably precise. A leader and his
associates begin by subverting democratic norms, greatly restricting
participatory processes, and coercing a legislature and the bureaucracy into
subservience. They end judicial independence, curtail the media, block civil
society, and suborn the security forces. Political goods become scarce, or are
supplied to the leading class only. The rulers demonstrate more and more
contempt for their peoples, surround themselves with family, clan, or ethnic
allies, and distance themselves from their subjects. The state becomes equated
in the eyes of most citizens with the particular drives and desires of a leader
and a smallish coterie. Many of these leaders grandly drive down their
boulevards in motorcades, commandeer commercial aircraft for foreign
excursions, and put their faces prominently on the local currency, on airports
and ships, and on oversize photographs in public places.
Levels of violence provide a third indicator.
If they rise precipitously because of skirmishes, hostilities, or outright
civil war, the state can be considered crumbling. As national human security
rates fall, the probability of failure rises. Not every civil conflict
precipitates failure, but each offers a warning sign. Absolute or relative
crime rates and civilian combat death counts above a certain number cannot
prescribe failure. But they show that a society is deteriorating and that the
glue that binds a new (or an old) state together is becoming fatally thin.
No single indicator provides certain evidence
that a strong state is becoming weak or a weak state is heading pell-mell into
failure. But a judicious assessment of the several available indicators
discussed in this section, taken together, should provide both quantifiable and
qualitative warnings. Then, avoidance maneuvers can occur and efforts at
prevention can be mounted.
That said, research
on failed states is insufficiently advanced for precise tipping points to be
provided. It is not yet correct to suggest that if GDP falls by X amount in a
single year, rulers dismiss judges, torture reporters, or abuse the human
rights of their subjects by X, soldiers occupy state house, or civilian death
rates rise more than X per year, that the state in question will tip for sure
from weak to failing to failed. All we know is that the sum of those actions
suggests that all is not well in the depths of Ruritania, misery is spreading,
and the future shape and fate of the state is at serious risk.
[1] For an instructive discussion of “insurgency”—“a
technology of military conflict characterized by small, lightly-armed bands
practicing guerrilla warfare from rural base areas”—see James D. Fearon and
David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” 7–12, unpub. paper
presented at the 2001 APSA meeting.
[2] Fearon and
[3] Fearon and
[4] Some of these points were earlier made by I. William
Zartman, “Introduction: Posing the Problem of State Collapse,” in idem (ed.), Collapsed
States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (
The
Failed States project at
[5] In addition to Transparency International’s
Corruption Perception Index, and an elaborate Kennedy School of Government
student quantitative measurement of outputs as proxies for Corruption, the World Bank Institute’s 2001 Governance Indicators
http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance/pdf/2001kkzcharts.xls)evaluate the nation states with which this book is
primarily concerned according to their “control of corruption,” as well as rule
of law, government effectiveness, voice and accountability, and political
stability. All of the failed or collapsed states rank at the bottom of the
corruption measure, except for
[6] See Erin Jenne, “
[7] Nasrin Dadmehr, “