FindArticles / Reference / Harvard International Review / Wntr, 2008

A new approach: the need to focus on failing states

by Stefan Mair

In the post-9/11 security paradigm, failed states are considered one of the main threats to international and regional security. However, there remains much debate over what exactly constitutes a failed state. The first point of contention lies in the problem of identifying the indispensable functions of a state. The second lies in the controversy over the degree of failure in key functions that makes a state a failed state. Most would generally agree that a state must be able to exert a monopoly on the use of force within its borders, provide a legitimate political and legal order, and offer essential services in health, education, and physical infrastructure. The consensus ends here, however, with academics and policymakers disagreeing on the more detailed requirements of the definition. How deep and comprehensive must the monopoly on the use of force be? What constitutes the legitimacy of a political order? Which social services are essential? What factors account for the failure of a state?

In a 2007 study on international state building, Ulrich Schneckener draws a clear distinction between failed states and failing states. Failing states like Colombia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Georgia, and Nigeria are unable to completely control their territories, but they still deliver public services to the majority of the population and have some degree of political legitimacy. In failed states, however, none of the functions mentioned above is effectively performed. The most prominent example of a failed state is Somalia. Although I acknowledge that the breakdown of regional security might have serious repercussions on international security, I argue that ultimately, it is the failing state, not the failed state, that encourages international terrorism and organized crime. The failed state, in contrast, poses more threats to regional security than to international security.

International Security

As crucial as these differentiations between failed states and failing states are for a proper understanding of state failure, decision-makers who are concerned with failed states as security risks to Western societies rarely refer to them. Although their overall perception of failed states has only slightly been influenced by the academic debate on failed states, there have been two exceptions. They have taken into consideration the concrete examples of failed states, such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the total incapability of these states to control their territories.

According to conventional wisdom, these failed states enable international terrorists and organized crime to seek haven and run their training camps and operational bases within their territories. This assumption, however, hardly passes the reality check. Despite the widespread rumors about al Qaeda cells in Somalia, the links between Somali factions and warlords and the terrorist network are rather loose. So far, Somalis have not played a prominent role in international terrorist attacks outside the African region.

The case of Afghanistan also illustrates the threat posed by failing states. Here it must be stated that at the time al Qaeda was most successfully running its training camps in Afghanistan, the country was closer to the model of an effective state than it was in the prior two decades. As illegitimate as the rule of the Taliban was in the view of the Western world, the regime controlled greater pieces of the Afghan territory (where it allowed al Qaeda to operate in exchange for financial and military support), provided a more reliable political and legal order, and offered better social services than the preceding regimes.

The same assumption holds true for organized crime, which cannot flourish in a stateless environment. Organized crime needs a legal order to subvert in order to make real profit as well as a certain minimum of financial, economic, and physical infrastructure in order to flourish. For this reason, it is not the failed state, but the failing state, which has the greatest attraction for international terrorism and organized crime.

The failing state's inability to exert a monopoly on the use of force over its whole territory offers the necessary retreat for terrorists and organized crime to regroup, recover, and prepare their actions. Furthermore, its relative effectiveness in providing a core physical infrastructure in the form of airports, ports, and telecommunication creates the conditions favorable for carrying out these actions. It is not surprising, then, that it is the failing state of Pakistan that probably harbors the majority of al Qaeda training cells, and that it is failing states such as Colombia, Guatemala, and Nigeria that produce the majority of international organized crime.

The potential global health risks emerging from failed states pose similar threats to human security. The inability of failed states to maintain a minimum of health services provides an excellent breeding ground for highly contagious epidemics, as demonstrated by the outbreak of SARS in 2003. But while the breakdown of physical infrastructure in failed states should prevent the spreading of disease beyond a local focus of infection, the lack of capacity of failing states to fight epidemics early and effectively makes it almost impossible to confine outbreaks of diseases to local spots. Therefore, truly failed states do not merit as much attention as they have received in the current literature, as they do not pose as large of a threat to international security as do failing states.

Regional Security

Regional security offers a different picture, as failed states have been the starting points of regional conflicts again and again. The inability of a state to control its territory and exert a monopoly on the use of force opens the space for a great variety of private actors of violence. Classical rebel movements, criminal and youth gangs, and ethnic, tribal or clan militias, vigilantes, traditional hunters, and warlords all fill the vacuum that the state creates. Despite differing in their motives and strategies, these violent groups share a common will to acquire weapons and to use them to meet their ends. The purchase of weapons, in turn, demands the mobilization of financial resources.

Private actors of violence in failed states and those close to failure have several potential sources of income. They can directly exploit the trade of precious raw materials (diamonds, gold, coltan, and timber), trade illegal goods such as drugs, engage in human trafficking, smuggle legal commodities across the border, and raise protection money through a system of alternative taxation.

The use of violence is the essential compelling factor in this system. The efforts of private actors of violence to acquire the financial means to buy weapons and to use these weapons to acquire more money becomes a vicious circle. Ultimately, both those who started as armed groups pursuing political objectives and those who considered themselves merely self-protection units lose sight of their original objectives and intentions. The result is the creation of a rather complex and highly profitable war economy in which the profits are spread in a very unequal way.

Since successful economies have the tendency to expand, failed states become a problem for neighboring countries, especially when these countries are failing on their own. Private actors of violence are most tempted to extend their authority across borders when they find attractive raw materials there. In addition, rebel movements within neighboring countries are able to maintain operational bases in the territories of a failed state controlled by a friendly partner.

This in turn provides governments of more or less functioning states with sufficient reasons for intervening directly in the neighboring failed state. Deposits of precious resources in the target areas of their intervention might be an additional incentive for such military adventures. The exploitation of these resources might even raise enough money to finance the intervention and the establishment of a military occupation. As a result, a comprehensive conflict theater forms in the region.

The Deterioration of Security in Africa

In West Africa, Charles Taylor not only used the resources he acquired in Liberia's war economy to overcome most of his Liberian opponents but also to elect himself as Liberia's president. Early in his career as a warlord, Taylor directed a quasi-rebel movement in neighboring Sierra Leone that concentrated its military efforts on the diamonds fields there. Indeed, it appeared as if Taylor would be able to extend his territorial control via proxies to Guinea. Taylor also established criminal links to the Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso. When the North-South conflict in the Ivory Coast escalated to a civil war, Taylor seized the chance to send some of his forces in the disguise of Ivorian rebels across the border to take a slice of the neighboring country and contribute to its destabilization.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire, President Mobutu's inability to control the eastern territory invited Rwanda and Uganda to support a local warlord, Laurent Kabila. However, Kabila soon found himself repeating Mobutu's mistakes and was eventually ousted as well. These events culminated in what is called Africa's First World War: a multitude of rebel groups, ethnic militias, and armies of eight African countries enmeshed in a low-intensity war. Soon the war resulted in a de facto partition of the country into three parts: Rwanda-friendly forces controlled the east, Uganda-friendly forces had the northeast, and the regime, with the help of Angola and Zimbabwe, held the rest.

The regime in Kinshasa paid Zimbabwe with mining concessions in the South and tacitly allowed Angola to move its border posts forward to some diamond fields. Rwandan and Ugandan security forces engaged themselves in the exploitation of resources in the territories that they directly or indirectly controlled, so that the military occupation of parts of the neighboring countries financed itself. Years after a peace settlement had been concluded and foreign forces were officially withdrawn, Rwanda and Uganda still exert control over resources in Kivu and Ituri.

The collapse of Somalia had similarly destabilizing effects on the Horn of Africa region. On the one hand, Somali warlords and bandits extended their area of operation to the northeast of Kenya and to its capital of Nairobi. The influx of small arms from Somalia and of people capable and willing to use them extensively increased the threat of organized crime in Kenya.

In addition, Somali Islamists were involved in acts of international terrorism in Nairobi, Mombassa, and Dar es Salaam. The collapse of the Somali state and the proximity of some of the militias there to al Qaeda provided the Ethiopian government with good reason to send their troops beyond the border and equip their proxies with better arms. In doing so, the Ethiopians were certainly less concerned about the situation in Somalia than about the threat that Somali warlords would encourage their kinsmen in Ogaden to contribute to the creation of a Greater Somalia and hence to an expansion of the Somali war economy into Ethiopia.

As the examples of Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia show, failed states have the potential to become the nucleus of complex regional conflict theaters and cross-border war economies. Thus, the effects on regional security are tremendous, and if these effects consolidate, they might come to bear international security implications. War economies and the permanent threat or use of arbitrary brutal violence robs a society of economic perspectives, destroys social networks and control, and undermines both the civilized behavior and validity of societal norms. This might finally result in the formation of violence-prone communities. These groups see the cause of their misery less in local circumstances than in the exploitation of their resources by multinational companies and the Western world.

Such suspicions are actually quite widespread throughout the West, Central, and the Horn of African regions. In the DRC, the Rwandese army was seen as a proxy for US and British companies whose main task would be to organize the provision of essential resources, especially coltan, for the markets of the industrialized world. It is difficult to forecast the future of such constructions. It might well be that in the distant future, the focus of international terrorism will be less on Islamic fundamentalism and more on the perceived exploitation of impoverished and desperate societies by the West.

How to Deal with Failed States

The long-term consequences, rather than the immediate effects of failed states, make them threats to international security. In this sense, counteracting state failure and rebuilding failed states are important tasks for the international community. But this is easier said than done. Rebuilding states that have collapsed into mosaics of local authorities is extremely difficult, as the case of Somalia illustrates. The failure of efforts to rebuild the state from the top, through international intervention, suggests the need to support efforts that start at the bottom. A starting point is the creation, expansion, or integration of networks of local actors, without any preconceived plan to restore the state as it was in the past. Support for proto-state formations, such as the one that is emerging in Somaliland, can also be a way to restore security and order. From that point of view, a relatively functioning Somaliland is good enough and is probably easier to achieve than a restored Somalia.

A major problem that the international community faces in the attempt to deal with failed states is the choice of partners. Quite often, there are actors who seem to respect essential rules of civilized behavior, such as democratic non-governmental organizations or village elders. These actors, however, generally have very little access to means of coercion, and thus retain little power and effectiveness in the rough world of collapsed states. Yet the real power-holders, no matter how distasteful a bunch they might be, cannot be ignored, since they have the capacity to spoil any effort at reconstructing new viable political entities. Efforts to build the state from below, then, must deal with these non-civil forces. The options range from co-opting to controlling or fighting them. The choice of the adequate strategy depends on the character of the non-civil forces and the resources available for intervention.

If these non-civil forces are determined to resist any kind of foreign intervention, most industrialized countries might shy away from engaging themselves in such failed states--as they did in Somalia after the first attempt of humanitarian intervention ended in a disaster. The case of Afghanistan shows that even the investment of massive resources to re-stabilize and rebuild a failed state might not lead to optimal results if the resistance of armed groups cannot be overcome.

Rebuilding failed states, after all, is a fairly expensive and risky business. Considering that there are fewer failed states than failing states, and that failing states seem to be an immediate threat to international security while the main impact of failed states is on regional security, it might be more appropriate to concentrate scarce resources of development aid and military assistance on failing states. This allocation will reduce the degree of state failure in these countries and immunize them against the cross-border effects of failed states in the neighborhood.

STEFAN MAIR is Director of Studies at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP).