Theory of Regimes and Failed States Theory: A Common Issue or Talking Across Purposes? (original) (raw)
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Conceptualising state collapse: an institutionalist approach
Third World Quarterly, 2015
This paper proposes a theoretically grounded and methodologically rigorous conceptualisation of state collapse. It seeks to overcome several key deficits of research into fragile, failed and collapsed states, which is often criticised as normatively problematic and methodologically deficient. We argue that this is a worthwhile topic to study but that scholarly inquiry needs to become more systematic and focus on extreme cases of state collapse. Following a Weberian institutionalist tradition, we disaggregate statehood into three dimensions of state capacity: making and enforcing binding rules, monopolising the means of violence and collecting taxes. We then propose a set of indicators as well as a mode of aggregation based on necessary and sufficient conditions. Our framework identifies 17 cases of state collapse in the postcolonial era.
An Analysis of the Notion of a "Failed States"
In the post-Cold War era, it has become increasingly evident that one of the most important challenges for the world community is that posed by so-called failed states. Many serious problems that contemporary societies face with highly significant international connections are described on the basis of this phenomenon within multiple academic disciplines. On the other hand, there are theoretically developed different definitions on this concept which are usually extremely brief and in some cases even very ideological. This paper, introducing theoretical concepts behind its differing definitions, is trying to analyze the notion of failed states, while also searching for possible sociological standpoints. Keywords: Failed states, international politics, European colonialism, critical approach.
Making State Failure Work: Modelling Criteria and Competition for Sovereignty.
Media and politicians employ the notion of ‘failed states’, because it is appealingly simplistic: it invokes a clear image of a rock-bottom, broken-down-into-absolute-anarchy situation. Hence, its frequent use and that clarity of image make the concept of state failure as seductive for academic analysis, as it makes it unsuitable.1 On the other side of the spectrum, ‘sovereignty’ to states or peoples sounds like a noble and practical principle given its absolute character. Claiming however that a failed state is the highest authority over a people or territory, is a contradictio in terminis, or simply a “legal fiction”. The contribution of this article is fivefold. The first section outlines the problems in the current state failure literature, and thus sets the scene for what a new model of understanding and responding to poor state performance has to deal with. Section II explains how sovereignty should be considered in this context. Different defects of sovereignty lead to different situations lumped together under the definition of failed states. Third, it structures the discourse on state failure and sovereignty by sorting the different definitions and processes that are capturing by those terms, ordering their relation and pointing out why so much confusion emerges. Fourth then, this structure serves as a model to assess whether a) there is a political organisation that can effectively claim sovereignty over a situation; b) if there are contesting parties meeting that threshold, which one could be sovereign. Fifth, the existence of such assessment models leads to several considerations regarding its implementation and consequences for further research.
… the vast majority of autocratic governments, whether in recent times in Africa and Latin America or on all continents in earlier times, have not succeeded in bringing economic progress or in alleviating poverty. … Moreover, many of the most remarkable periods of economic progress … appear to have occurred in relatively nonautocratic, or somewhat democratic, jurisdictions that have soared ahead of the absolutist regimes around them (Olson, 1997: 51) Abstract Democratisation should produce equitable developmental transitions, but often fails when power is heavily contested, state and economic capacity is too weak and societies are divided by antagonistic sectarian, ethnic or class conflicts. Mature authoritarian regimes have made rapid democratic transitions, but weak predatory states confront a difficult choice between contested autocracy and contested democracy. We emphasise the role of social conflict and political organisation and agency in blocking or facilitating shifts from weak to strong autocracies, and examine their role in revolutionary China, and in the contested political transitions going on in African states.
Conceptualising the Causes and Consequences of failed states: a Critical review of the literature
2008
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Social and Legal Studies, 2020
In the last three decades, the categories of fragile and failed states have gained significant importance in the fields of law, development, political science and international relations. The wider discourse plays a key role in guiding the policies of international community and multilateral institutions and has also led to the emergence of a plethora of indices and rankings to measure and classify state fragility. A critical and theoretical analysis of these matrices brings to light three crucial aspects that the current study takes as its departure point. First, the formulas and conceptual paradigms show that fragility of states is far more ubiquitous than is generally recognised, and that the so-called successful and stable states are a historical, political and geographical anomaly. Second, in the absence of an agreed definition of a successful state or even that of a failed or fragile state, the indicators generally rely on negative definitions to delineate the failed and fragile state. They generally suggest that their reading is built on a Weberian ideal–typical state, which takes the idea of monopoly over legitimate violence as its starting point. The third and final point suggests that the indicators and rankings, misconstruing the Weberian ideal–typical state, actually end up comparing fragile states against an ideal–mythical state. The article argues that this notional state is not only ahistorical and apolitical, but it also carries the same undertones that have been the hallmark of theories of linear development, colonialism and imperialism.