Blog Post
The last decades of the twentieth century have revealed wholesale examples of state weakness, especially in Africa. The WPF Program on Intrastate Conflict, Conflict Prevention, and Conflict Resolution held its second Failed States meeting in January, where thirty international experts led by Director Robert I. Rotberg convened to discuss indicators of state failure, how to prevent states from cascading into failure, and how best to restore states that have ceased to function well.
While the first Failed States meeting in June focused on theories of state failure, this second meeting examined a dozen case studies of states that are failing, have failed, or managed not to fail. Participants discussed Indonesia, Fiji, Somalia, the Sudan, Colombia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, the Congo, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka. Somalia was the only state universally considered not only failed, but "collapsed." The others were judged at one place or another on a continuum of vulnerability and failure.
State failure has been considered a normal process throughout history. The Cold War fostered an international system in which the Soviet Union or the United States could be relied on to prop up ailing states. "In the last forty to fifty years," said Jeffrey Herbst of Princeton, "we''ve gotten used to a state system that tries to maintain concrete states, but this has not been the case over most of history. Social, geographic, and other factors are often hostile to states. We may need to look at new remedies."
Other participants recommended that theory should be made policy relevant. "We need to find a way to integrate multiple theories, to form the multilevel, multiactor model needed for policy. Most explanations of why states fail are in isolation, and they''re not sufficient for risk assessment or early warning. . .We need to incorporate early warning and risk assessment into capabilities of states and institutions," urged David Carment, a WPF/ISP Fellow.
A final meeting of the Failed States project is planned for June 2001 in preparation for a multi-volume publication.
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(Debbie Weinberg contributed to this article.)