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When is a state called failed?

2022-06-26 11:04:33Fokus SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

When is a state called failed?

Afghanistan's former president, Ashraf Ghani, once wrote a book called "Regulation of Failed States". On August 15 last year he gave up efforts to regulate Afghanistan and fled to avoid being captured by the Taliban, a jihadist group that took power that same day.

Afghanistan is often described as a failed state, perhaps the least coveted assessment in geopolitics. However, he's not the only one. In recent months, experts have applied the label to Myanmar, Lebanon and even Nigeria. But what does it mean? When a state slips from fragility to complete collapse?

The term can be traced back to the 1990s. It was initially used to describe Somalia, which was destroyed in chaos after a coup toppled its dictator, Siad Barre, in 1991 and the country's clans began fighting among themselves. When the fighters threatened aid workers, the United States sent troops to protect them. The Americans then got into a battle in Mogadishu, the capital, that left 18 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Somalis dead. The Americans gave up and retreated.

Somalia warned the start of a post-cold war tendency. Political crises in Bosnia, Liberia and Afghanistan soon followed. The Soviet Union stopped helping client states after it ceased to exist. America stopped supporting dictators only to be anti-Soviet (although many dictators found ways to keep the flow of dollars). Without the deep-pocketed masters, several regimes collapsed and several states slipped into anarchy.

The simplest definition of a failed state is one that cannot fulfill its most basic responsibility: to offer security. If the state no longer has a monopoly on violence, everything else is broken, from street currents, schools to health. Most people in a failed state tend to be poor, while elites tend to be predatory and richer.

What is less clear is when a state switches to "failed". Take Nigeria. The parts look very close to failure. Boko Haram, a brutal jihadist group, controls part of the northeast, and the army's efforts to suppress it have resulted in ineffective. In other regions, conflicts between farmers and farmers kill thousands of people. Nigeria, however, remains united.

Elections are dirty and violent, but more or less reflect the will of the people. The government is corrupt, but most Nigerians know it. When they are particularly angry, many Nigerians describe their country as a failure. But you don't really deserve that label.

Jerusalem is a clearer example of the state's failure. Dozens of local groups have been in a terrible civil war since 2014. Unlike Nigeria, the government has completely collapsed. About 16 million people lack enough food. The massive destruction of health services and water infrastructure contributed in 2017 to one of the worst cholera outbreaks in modern history. Efforts to contain Covid-19 are virtually nonexistent.

Syria, too, is a failed state. There is no end in the horizon for her decade-long civil war. President Bashar al-Assad's regime rules the capital, Damascus. But most of the country is controlled by Islamists, remnants of the secular opposition or kurds, who have ambitions to break away. The economy is destroyed. More than 600,000 Syrians are dead or missing; Another 13 million have left their homes.

The Fund for Peace, an American studies index, tries to determine how close a state is to failure in its annual Fragile States Index. It marks each country from "very stable" at best to "very high readiness" at worst, based on indicators including economic decline, security apparatus, public services and human rights and rule of law.

Both Jerusalem and Syria landed in the category of "very high readiness" for 2021. So is Somalia. As for Afghanistan, before the Taliban invaded power, it was placed in the second most fragile category, "high readiness".

In Ghani's book, he argued that preserving the rule of law and ending violent uprisings were two important ways to avoid a state's failure. Unfortunately, he failed.

Translated by The Economist


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