State Failure, State Collapse, and State Reconstruction: Concepts, Lessons and Strategies

Practically and conceptually, the ‘state’ is again under siege. Less than two decades after its ‘rediscovery’ by scholars (Evans et al., 1985; Hall, 1986), the central unit of analysis in international relations and comparative politics seems once again in crisis. Some authors, such as Robert Kaplan, present a vision of future chaos resulting from (in a dystopic twist on Marx) the withering away of the central governments of modern states in favour of tribal domains, ‘city-states, shanty-states, [and] nebulous and anarchic regionalisms’ (Kaplan, 1994: 24). Others welcome the weakening of the state in favour of either a more cosmopolitan (global) or more representative (local) vision of politics (Held, 1995, 1997; Rosenau, 1990, 1997). Still others, often accused of being anachronistic (or even reactionary), argue that in the absence of global or regional hegemons, the sovereign state remains the most appropriate solution to the problem of political order (Jackson, 2001; Krasner, 1999). Perhaps it was always so. The modern state, since it emerged out of the ashes of the medieval order, has always been a work in progress. The aspirations of its most ardent defenders for legitimate, representative, redistributive or just governance have shimmered on the horizon distant from the reality of contemporary states, whether in their eighteenth century absolutist, or twentieth century authoritarian, versions. But it is against this backdrop that the current discourse of ‘failed’ or ‘collapsed’ states must be understood. For every claim that a state has collapsed, is failing, or is going to fail, contains two usually implicit definitions or benchmarks. One concerns the ‘stateness’ against which any given state should be measured as having succeeded or failed (the institutional dimension of state collapse), and the other concerns the normative and practical implications of such a failure (the functional dimension of state failure). Concern over the possibility of state failure thus often has as much to do with dashed expectations about