**NATION-STATE FAILURE:**

**A RECURRING PHENOMENON?**

**Robert I. Rotberg**

#### 6 November 2003

**The views expressed in this and other papers associated with the NIC
2020 project**

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**NATION-STATE FAILURE:**

**A RECURRING PHENOMENON?**

**Robert I. Rotberg**

# 6 November 2003

Weak states, even seemingly strong nation-states in the developing
world, fail with increasing frequency. The decade plus since the end of
the cold war has witnessed a cascading plethora of state failure, mostly
in Africa but also in Asia. In addition, more and more states are at
risk, exhibiting acute signs of weakness and/or the likelihood of
outright failure. Given new definitions of weakness, failing, failed,
and collapsed, and given a broad acceptance of the criteria on which
nation-states may be judged along these lines in the future, it is
appropriate to prophesy a continuing policy need to monitor and react
wisely to this phenomenon.

The reasons for paying close attention to these kinds of nation-states
will remain relevant for years if not decades. Unless the developing
world becomes much more stable, intercommunal (ethnic, linguistic, and
religious) conflict is reduced or ceases altogether, corruption
vanishes, good governance becomes common, or the war against terror is
won conclusively, the propensity of nation-states to fail will be high
and the policy consequences of that failure will correspondingly be
serious and many. Most of all, every time a nation-state lurches toward
or into failure it poses humanitarian and possible relief issues. It may
also become a breeding ground for terror; the more anarchic and anomic
the nation-state, the more non-state actors and the forces of terror can
take opportunistic advantage of a deteriorating internal security
situation to mobilize adherents, train insurgents, gain control of
resources, launder funds, purchase arms, and ready themselves for
assault on world order.

In order to devise effective policy, state failure and state collapse
should be used precisely, not loosely, and not synonymously with state
implosion and state disaster. During the 1990s, the CIA sponsored two
major studies and other research to discover the causes of state
failure. But the nature of failure was never defined strictly, and the
variables developed on the basis of detailed quantitative analysis
proved less than robust, and not immediately useful.

The new taxonomy includes four categories of nation-state: strong, weak,
failed, and collapsed.[^1] **Strong states** unquestionably control
their territories and deliver a full range and a high quality of
political goods to their citizens. They perform well according to
indicators such as GDP per capita, the UNDP Human Development Index,
Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, and Freedom
House's *Freedom of the World Report.*

**Weak States** include an array of nation-states that may be inherently
weak because of geographical, physical, or fundamental economic
constraints; or are situationally weak because of internal antagonisms,
greed, or despotism. Weak states typically harbor ethnic, religious,
linguistic, or other tensions that may at some near point be transformed
into all out conflict between contending antagonisms. Their ability to
provide adequate amounts of political goods is diminished or
diminishing. Physical infrastructural networks are deteriorated. Schools
and hospitals show signs of neglect. GDP per capita and similar
indicators have fallen or are falling, sometimes dramatically. Levels of
venal corruption are high and escalating. The rule of law is honored in
the breach. Civil society is harassed. Despots rule.

There is a special category of weak state, the seemingly strong one,
always an autocracy, which is secure but at the same time provides few
other political goods. Cambodia under Pol Pot was one such state. Iraq
under Saddam, and today's Belarus, Turkmenistan, Libya, and North Korea
all fit this rubric.

**Failed States** provide only very limited quantities of essential
political goods. They progressively forfeit their role as the preferred
national suppliers of political goods to upstart warlords and other
nonstate actors. A failed state is a hollow polity that is no longer
willing or able to perform the fundamental tasks of a nation-state in
the modern world. Its institutions are flawed. If legislatures exist at
all, they ratify the decisions of a strong executive. Democratic debate
is absent. The judiciary is derivative of the executive rather than
being independent. Citizens know that they cannot rely on the court
system for redress or remedy, especially against the state. The
bureaucracy of the state has long ago lost its sense of professional
responsibility, and helps to oppress citizens.

Failed states exhibit deteriorating or destroyed infrastructures. The
telephones fail, the railways rarely run, water supplies dry up, power
falters, and other normal services vanish. Educational and medical
facilities crumble literally and metaphorically. Literacy rates fall and
infant mortality rates rise. AIDS overwhelms what little there is in the
way of a health infrastructure. The poor become more and more
impoverished, and battered.

Failed states offer unparalleled economic opportunity for a privileged
few, and nothing much for everyone else. Currency speculation and
arbitrage benefits the ruling class. Corruption flourishes. GDP per
capita levels decline, often precipitously. Growth rates go negative.
Inflation soars. Food shortages, even hunger, may follow.

Failed states are insecure. They cannot project power much beyond the
capital city, or control their national peripheries. Crime rates rise.
Unable to establish an atmosphere of security throughout the nation, 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
Liberia, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Congo, and Cote d'Ivoire.

**Collapsed States** are rare and extreme versions of a failed state.
They exhibit a vacuum of authority. They are mere geographical
expressions, black holes into which failed polities have fallen. There
is dark energy, but the forces of entropy have overwhelmed the radiance
that previously provided some semblance of order and other vital
political goods to the local inhabitants. Political goods are obtained
through private or ad hoc means. Security is the rule of the strong.
Substate actors take over, and parts of the collapsed state exist and
function, if in an unrecognized and disordered manner. Collapsed states
can only return to being failed, and then perhaps to being weak, if
sufficient security is restored to rebuild the institutions and
strengthen the legitimacy of the resuscitated state. Lebanon did so
thanks to Syrian security, Tajikistan because of Russia, Afghanistan
because of the U. S. led invasion, and Sierra Leone because of British
intervention.

This taxonomy of comparative state capacity depends on an analysis of
governance capabilities. Fundamental to the analysis is performance --
the effective delivery by a nation-state of the most crucial political
goods. A political good is that intangible and hard to quantify claim
that a citizen once made on a sovereign and now make on the state. Those
claims , indeed obligations, inform the local political culture, and
give content to the social contract between the government and the
citizen.

There is a hierarchy of political goods. None is as critical as the
supply of security, especially human security. The state's prime
function is to provide the political good of security -- to prevent
cross-border invasions and infiltrations, to eliminate domestic threats
to or attacks upon the national order and social structure, to prevent
crime and any related dangers to human security, and to enable citizens
to resolve their differences with the state and their fellow inhabitants
without recourse to arms or other forms of physical coercion.

Other political goods can be supplied only within a framework of
security. Modern states strive to provide predictable methods of
adjudicating disputes and regulating both the norms and the mores of a
society. The essence of that political good implies codes and procedures
that together comprise an enforceable body of law and contract, an
effective judicial system and norms that encompass the rule of law.

Other political goods typically supplied by states and expected by their
citizens include medical and health care; schools and educational
instruction; roads, railways, harbors and other arteries of commerce; a
money and banking system; a fiscal and institutional context within
which citizens can pursue entrepreneurial goals and prosper; space for
the flowering of civil society; and methods of regulating the sharing of
the environmental commons.

Weak states quickly become failed states, as the case of Cote d'Ivoire
in 2002 demonstrates. In the aftermath of President Felix
Houphouet-Boigny's death in 1993, his successors sought electoral
success by appealing to majority southerners. They began progressively
discriminating against northerners ; consequently, the expectations of
rough equity that had long held the country together vanished. The
legitimacy of the regime in charge also vanished and Cote d'Ivoire,
despite its decades of prosperity and success, and despite it ability to
deliver many political goods, became ripe for failure. When elections
were falsified and northern standard-bearers ousted, a countervailing
movement arose and the state's monopoly of force was soon found
inadequate. Failure came quickly, further deterioration being halted
only by the arrival of French troops.

The Cote d'Ivoire model of leadership error compounded with arrogance
and corruption resulting in instability, extreme weakness, and
subsequent failure, is readily replicable. Witness Bolivia and Nepal,
and the less obvious but potentially disruptive cases of Kyrgyzstan,
Ukraine, and the Central African Republic. Another, more unusual and
distinctive, case is Zimbabwe, where one of Africa's most prosperous
nations and most well educated populations has been transformed into an
all but failed nation-state by the actions of an avaricious leader. In
that country, the government no longer supplies political goods, but
complete failure has so far been avoided by the absence of large-scale
internal violence.

There are many weak states capable of harboring the incubus of failure.
Most of the incipient failures will be in Africa, but as the cases of
Nepal and the Solomon Islands indicate, once stable states in Asia and
Oceania are as susceptible to failure as states that are historically
weak. Likewise, as the ongoing case of Bolivia and the twentieth
anniversary of the U. S. invasion of Grenada suggest, the Americas will
also be the locale of important failures now and well into the future.

Three dozen states in the developing world can be called weak. Some,
such as Haiti and Niger, are endemically weak, and need never slide from
weakness into failure. These states lack the kinds of insurgencies which
could produce score-settling strife. Class conflict may exist, but other
cleavages which can sharply differentiate contending groups are absent.
Another category of weak state, such as Chad and Papua-New Guinea, often
appears on the brink of failure; during civil wars such states become
failed. A third category may contain ethnic, religious, or linguistic
divisions sufficient, and sufficiently strong, to cause the kinds of
strife which automatically accompany failure. Nigeria bears watching for
many of these and other reasons.

Since human agency is the intervening variable of nation-state failure,
observing how leaders behave is one of several indicators of impending
failure. Preying on their own people is a sign; so is intensifying
autocracy, the number of political prisoners, unexplained
assassinations, and the denial of fundamental human rights and civil
liberties. Judicial independence is often the first to be eroded by new
dictators and similar forces. Other indicators of impending failure
include massively declining GDPs per capita, soaring inflation,
decreasing life expectancies, the growth of large-scale corruption,
electoral fraud, border incursions, the rise of powerful nonstate
actors, escalating rates of crime, desperately deteriorated roads, rises
in the rates of emigration and smuggling, the informal adoption of
outside currencies as acceptable tender, and the privatization of
education and health services. Harder to notice casually, but often
present along with corruption and smuggling, are conditions conducive to
terror. The more anarchic and disrupted the country, the more hospitable
the ground will be for the creation and training of rebels and
revolutionaries. Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Congo -- not to mention
Afghanistan -- were perfect settings for resource depredations and
swaps, money laundering, training experiments, and (to quote George
Padmore) fishing in troubled waters.

The presence of internal strife is a necessary but not sufficient
indicator of failure. All failed states present policy choices for
Washington; all failed states are places where antagonism has turned
violent. But civil wars alone do not in and of themselves produce
failure, witness Colombia, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. In those places the
delivery of political goods in sufficient quantity and quality to a
substantial majority of citizens inoculates against failure. But those
and similar states deserve to be watched closely.

The failed state problem remains an enduring policy issue. Failed states
breed regional instability and regional failure, as the Sierra
Leonean-Liberian-Guinean-Cote d'Ivoirian quadrangle illustrates so well.
The Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan duo has a similar potential, particularly
given next door Afghanistan, and the possibility that the Turkmen and
Uzbek dictatorships will not last forever. The Australians and their
Pacific Island allies acted in the Solomons to avert a similar cascade
of destruction throughout the mini-nations of their region.

In addition to the possibility that collapsed and failed states will
continue to serve as ample reservoirs of terror, as Somalia does, a
plethora of civil wars is neither helpful for indigenous economic
development nor for the struggle against the spread of the AIDS
pandemic. Just as it is in the U. S. direct national interest to
throttle terror, so it is in our interest to reduce AIDS and poverty
worldwide. War anywhere, particularly wars with the kinds of civilian
casualties that have been witnessed during and since the 1990s, are
harmful to the strengthening of a U. S. led peaceful world. A global
superpower cannot prosper at home if its attention and energies are
endlessly distracted by threats from and instability abroad.

From a cost-benefit analysis, too, it is much less expensive to prevent
state failing and failure than it is to provide post-conflict
humanitarian relief and/or funds for post-conflict reconstruction.
Afghanistan and Iraq are only the latest examples of how costly
intervention can be, followed by an even more expensive process of
societal rebuilding. It is in the U. S. interest to recognize the
obvious tocsins of deterioration in weak nation-states so that it can
help avert the slide toward failure and the enormous costs and
consequences of such a slide. Thus the failed state problem is very much
a problem, and a problem for the next two decades, for Washington, not
just for neighbors, regions, the UN, and humanitarians. There will be no
end of cases and instances; the policy choices will concern where and
when to intervene, and how early. A strong argument can consequently be
made for increasing the capacities and capabilities both of the UN, and
of U. S. intelligence, to judge and deal with impending failure. The
larger question is how to engage the forces of world order appropriately
to strengthen weak states and deter -- globally -- those factors that
everywhere in the developing world impel or motivate failure.

# 

[^1]: \- The new definitions and explanations contained in this paper
    are elaborated upon at much greater length in Robert I. Rotberg,
    "The Failure and Collapse of Nation-States: Breakdown, Prevention,
    and Repair," in Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), *Why States Fail: Causes
    and Consequences* (Princeton, 2004), 1-45.