Should we care about failed and weak states?

This will be my last guest post, and I want to thank Henry for the opportunity to contribute (I even got Andrew Exum to deign to “not begrudge” academics studying civil war; gee, thanks!). Since 9/11, there has been a growing emphasis on the security risks of weak failed states and “ungoverned spaces,” which can breed terrorism, refugee flows, and internationalized conflicts. In response, policymakers, scholars, and analysts have advocated thoroughgoing international efforts to strengthen weak states and bring order to failed states. Articles and books abound with titles like State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World, “Sharing Sovereignty: New Institutions for Collapsed and Failing States,” “The Case for American Empire,” and “The Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire.” Proposals have been made for an expeditionary civilian state-building capacity that can both bolster US counterinsurgency and prevent/react to state weakness all over the world. Dealing with state weakness/failure has been a goal embraced both by the right (with the Bush freedom agenda) and the left (with its “soft” and “smart” power).

This link between state weakness/failure and US security interests is worth probing a little more thoroughly, however, because it’s actually extremely unclear that most failed and weak states pose any real security threat to US interests. They matter for humanitarian reasons, and should be dealt with as such by concerned states and international organizations. But that’s not a good reason for the United States to build up an “expeditionary” state-building capacity for a neo-imperialist foreign policy.

Is State Failure a Core Security Threat?
Logan and Preble persuasively said “no” four years ago, and there aren’t great reasons to disagree with their analysis now (on ungoverned spaces, see this CFR piece). Foreign Policy just released its 2010 Failed States Index. It frankly may be useless in terms of validity (is #19 North Korea equally failed, or failed in the same way, as #20 Niger?), but as a very rough cut it’s worth examining the 25 most-failed states to assess their relationship with US foreign policy.

As far as I can tell, there are four truly major security challenges in the top 25: North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It seems clear that North Korea is primarily a problem because of its coercive, internally predatory regime. If anything, North Korea’s state is too strong, rather than not strong enough (a similar issue can be found in #16 Burma). Iraq became a failed state after the 2003 US invasion, so the causal arrow is flipped around there. And Afghanistan on 9/11 was not a failed state in terms of coercive power, but instead a state largely (excluding the Northern Alliance areas) ruled by people hostile to the United States. The Taliban wouldn’t have been a friendlier bunch if they had a better tax system, a larger army, or more effective food distribution (Thomas Friedman runs into a similar issue, proclaiming the existence of “a Hamas-run failed state in Gaza, a Hezbollah-run failed state in south Lebanon and a Fatah-run failed state in Ramallah” – failed states are either not run, or they are not failed states).

So only Pakistan really poses a problem because of state weakness itself. Which is a good reason to have policies aimed at bolstering the Pakistani state (or, at least, its civilian side – the military is plenty strong already), but not a good reason to decide to state-build anywhere else and it’s not even a good reason to create an intrusive American footprint on the ground in Pakistan. Moreover, given Pakistan’s particular historical context, it’s not clear that experiences there would be applicable to the Democratic Republic of Congo or Laos.

In Somalia (#1) and Yemen (#15), there are potential threats to US interests derived from weaknesses in state infrastructural power, but both have been reasonably managed without a group of earnest Americans trying to run the place. If we go farther down the list, we see some other states of interest – Iran, for instance, is at #32, but it’s not a problem due to state weakness or failure as opposed to a regime we don’t like.

The major threats to US interests are thus primarily derived from regimes that view the US as its enemy – not regimes too weak to control their territory. Bolstering state capacity in Pyongyang, Tehran, or Naypyidaw (or Rawalpindi) would not be a recipe for Renewing American Leadership.

There are important humanitarian reasons to be interested in weak and failed states, whether or not they directly impinge on US interests – famine, disease, mass sexual violence, civil war, genocide, refugees. But as I’ll argue below, the best way to deal with these problems is not likely to involve big state-building missions, as opposed to cheaper and less ambitious but effective peacekeeping and aid initiatives.

Can International Interventions Help?
Yes, to some extent and under some circumstances. Page Fortna has persuasively shown that peacekeeping can reduce the risk of a return to civil war. Barbara Walter has noted that third-party guarantees can help keep the peace (though see Toft on the virtues of military victory rather than settlements). But note that, while important, these are relatively restricted policies – basically trying to hold together a settlement agreed on by warring parties. Peacekeeping can be engaged in by a whole variety of states, not just the US. The same applies to humanitarian aid missions, which can provide basic necessities without trying to restructure the basic relations of power in a foreign society. These, as well as low-key development and advising projects, can improve governance.

But more ambitious policies overseas are much riskier. There are moral hazard risks to ambitious military interventions (see Kuperman and Greenhill on how the KLA played NATO in Kosovo). Genocide prevention is a worthy goal, but genocides are quite rare and their prevention even more rarely has anything to do with state weakness, state failure, or capacity-building (Valentino shows that many mass killings were done by motivated, powerful states). Doyle and Sambanis argue that UN interventions during civil wars, i.e. when the state is most failed, are not very successful.

Large state-building missions are notoriously unsuccessful in achieving maximalist goals. Bosnia and Kosovo remain profoundly ethnically divided, East Timor continues to struggle, and Roland Paris has found a consistent pattern of failure in “deep” state-building efforts. Brownlee has found that US state-building primarily succeeds when it is not ambitious and relies on local capacity. It’s incredibly hard to reshape society, to figure out and then manipulate the incentives of key players, and to build new institutions imported from a totally different context. The prospective state-builder, and the NGOs, academics, and pundits who favor aggressive internationalism, would do well to remember Adam Smith’s critique of the imperial “man of system” (quoted in Jennifer Pitts’ A Turn to Empire):

“He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board”

Rarely, in Smith’s view, do such efforts succeed and recent empirical research seems to agree. There are few reasons to devote huge American effort to state-building initiatives as a tool of security. Basic security interests can be achieved with basic policy tools, and the pursuit of ambitious or transformative goals is a recipe for costly disappointment.

1 comment