STATE FAILURE AND FRAGILITY INDICES: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL

Shahida Aman*

Abstract

‘Failed states’ and ‘state failure’ have emerged as the dominant themes of discourse and analysis in the post-Cold War period. Ever since the first time usage by Helman and Ratner almost two decades ago, these concepts have inspired conceptual insights from scholars, policy makers and practitioners. Such insights not only attempt at defining the concept of ‘state failure,’ but also focus upon developing indices and indexes for measuring state failure across a broad spectrum of socio-political and economic indicators. This paper argues that the state failure indices, which measure political, economic and social indicators for predicting state’s present status and future risks of failure, reveal a strong pro-Weberian bias. The indices place emphasis on failed states being characterized by lack of monopoly over force, service provision and democratic legitimacy. This is notwithstanding the fact that all these concepts are highly debated and contested. It further criticizes the state failure indices for using dissimilar indicators to predict instability and, therefore, producing indices that are reasonably at variance with each other. It also raises objections on these indices being based on empirical data and therefore, ignoring the socio-political undercurrents in a state, which may burst out and result in complete regime displacements. Therefore, none of the indices could predict authoritarian Arab regimes being challenged by popular discontent and falling like house of cards.

Key words: State failure, failure and fragility indices, Weberian and Western state, socio-political and economic indicators.

Introduction

The state as defined and understood today is a more recent European phenomenon. But, taken as a politically organized community, it has over the centuries existed as a physical reality and construed as an abstract idea. In pre-modern political theory, the state and society were indistinguishable; the Greeks conceived of it as an all inclusive, natural and necessary institution from which an individual derived the meaning of his existence. Plato emphasized the state’s origin from individual’s lack of self sufficiency, which forced him to live in a society; ‘it (the state) springs…from our needs,’ he declared. The state’s naturalness, to Aristotle, stems from its emergence out of other natural associations, including families, households and villages. And since the state to him embodies a whole, it has a clear priority over its parts and therefore, superiority over other earlier forms of associations. It was on the ashes of the Greek City States that the Great Roman Empire arose, whose contribution to the rise of modern statehood was state’s peculiarity from the individuals it represented. The conflation of state and society in Greek political thought was replaced by Roman theory’s distinction of an individual from the state. Rome granted citizenship rights to its citizens and governed them under a systemized code-the Roman Law. The decline of the Roman Empire led to a period of decentralized governance system under feudalism in Medieval Europe. Modern state system grew out of the contradictions of feudalism and the need for a single sovereign to assert his authority over rival lords, the Church and other contenders to his sovereignty.
Modern state system’s rise at the end of medieval period in Europe stimulated political theorizing on the nature and function of the state. It was seen as a relationship of contract between the rulers and the ruled by the contract thinkers. While Hobbes, surrendered individual’s freedom to an absolute sovereign in return for guarantees of peace and security, Locke, conditioned the exercise of sovereign powers by the ruler on popular consent. And Rousseau, explored general will or a shared understanding of common good and well being as the basis of contract between the ruler and ruled and therefore, contended that citizens under such a contract remained free in fulfilling legal obligations and obeying state laws. The state’s perception as a contractual binding between the ruler and the individuals is reflected in definitions of the state as a set of social relations between the political authority/government and the society, which underlines citizen’s acknowledgement of state’s regulatory authority in return for provisions of security and social justice (Lockean tradition). This is the functionalist approach to defining a state.
The nature and character of the state was further theorized by the Marxists, who saw the state as a manifestation of class struggle between the pre-state kinship based social order characterized by low development of wealth and labour, with the new classes that resulted from a progression of growth in productivity of labour, private property and exchange. In the class struggle that is a product of differences of wealth and control over the utilization of the labour powers of others, old kinship based society withers away giving way to the emergence of a new one based on control over the state. This materialistic explanation for state emergence through a class struggle is forwarded by the Marxists as the basis for the origin of the state throughout written history. The state is perceived as a tool of exploitation used for perpetuation of dominant ruling class’s power. And therefore, the revolution by proletariat is supposed to do away with the state and create a basis for a classless, stateless society.
The understanding of the state corresponding to its modern image as the holder of monopoly over force, developed with the rise of the European state system from 15th Century onwards. The state as the ultimate holder of monopoly over force and violence was defined in the early 20th Century by the German sociologist Max Weber. He chose to emphasize the means peculiar to the state-physical force (organizational and structural aspects), rather than the ends and defined it as ‘a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.’ This emphasis on monopoly of violence over a territorially bounded population reflecting the empirical dimension of the state is largely the criteria used for defining a modern state. Laski, for example argues that the state’s binding characteristic of commanding obedience legally and power to enforce its laws on all in its territory gives it primacy over other forms of social groupings. The Weberian definition reflects an institutionalist approach of defining a state, wherein, the institutions of army, police, bureaucracy and judiciary extend state’s monopoly of force and order within its territorial boundaries.
Modern state is further credited with possessing the juridical or external dimension of conducting autonomous relations with other sovereign entities in the international state system. Juridical sovereignty is a function of possessing a territorial boundary recognized by international law, obtained by states, either by declaration, or recognition by other states, which confers on it the right of statehood, even in the absence of empirical attributes. The juridical and empirical dimensions of statehood are combined by international law to define a state to possess a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and a capacity to enter into relations with other states. Since states are the principal subjects of international law, therefore, a state’s recognized capacity to maintain external relations with other states is the most important qualification as far as international law is concerned. The modern state is therefore, understood to have a recognized territory, a population that sees itself as belonging to the state and a government that has a monopoly of legitimate force within its territory and the capacity to enter into formal relations with other entities.
European colonialism diffused modern statehood to other parts of the world but state growth did not follow its Western counterpart experience. Independence, conferred statehood on non-Western states irrespective of the growth of empirical characteristics associated with institutional and functional understanding of the state. To borrow Jackson and Rosberg’s words, empirical attributes of statehood in the form of a stable population and effective government are seriously contested and challenged in these countries. This did not prevent extension of a Weberian concept to define statehood in non-Western societies. Loose state control over territory, patrimonial governance, low service delivery capacity, lesser popular political participation and economic backwardness characterize these states. The prevalence of weak statehood does not affect juridical or external dimension of states because it is not synonym with the loss of sovereignty under international concepts of sovereignty. It is also not a criterion for state’s recognition under international law, or its admission, or withdrawal from the international state system, because otherwise, it would collide with the UN principle of self determination of states.
The above section argued that the concept of state is heavily Western inspired. Its functional meaning originated from the writings of social contract theorists who saw the state as a form of contractual relationship in which the monarch was bound to perform certain duties and the population was in turn meant to obey him. The institutional dimension of monopoly over the legitimate use of force came up as European rulers embarked on a process of state making in Europe. Among the current manifestations, state’s juridical aspect of ability to engage in relationship with other states is significant. But, the extension of state system to non-Western societies created very weak replicas of Western counterpart, who were born with many feeble features of empirical statehood. And that is why a purely Weberian definition and understanding was never a reflection of the state in the non-Western societies.

State Failure and Fragility Indices: A Critical Appraisal

This section argues that the indices and indexes that predict future risk of state failure and rank states in accordance with their level of performance signify a pro-Weberian bias. The benchmarks for political, economic and social indicators for state performance are set against those present in developed countries. Most indices with the exception of ‘Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance,’ provide rankings across the developing world. The State Failure Task Force (now Political Instability Task Force-PITF), is US government funded (1994) earliest attempt at predicting onset of instability in different regions of the world over a 50 year period. Defining state failure as a severe political crisis on account of revolutionary and ethnic wars, adverse regime change from authoritarianism to democracy and genocides/politicides, the Task Force developed a Global Model for Forecasting Political Instability. The findings of the Task Force Reports suggest regime type as the most frequent type of state failure; Phase III Report (1955-2000) found partial democracies at seven times higher risk of failure than full democracies and autocracies. Phase V (1955-2003) Report found one third of all instability onset occurring in partial democracies that were characterized by factionalism. It also identifies state led discrimination, ethnic diversity, regime type, neighbourhood effects, recent ethnic war or genocide and youth bulge to be significant risk factors for the onset of ethnic wars and state failure.
Other than the PITF, most indexes of state failure provide rankings for potential failures. The following table provides information on these indexes, briefly describing the methodology, major findings and their rankings of top 10 failed states. The end of the table is followed by a critical appreciation of these indexes and indices.

The state fragility indices delve comprehensively into the question of how to explain state failure, by applying largely a Western and Weberian lens. Inability of a state to deliver core functions in security, service provision, political and economic management and abiding by international transactions are recurrent themes in different indices. Whereas, lack of popular legitimacy constitutes a part of three indices, economic underdevelopment is taken up as a major determinant of weakness by Brookings Index of State Weakness, which strongly emphasizes its co-relation with ‘critical state weakness’ or failure. The rest of the indices either specifically evade economic underperformance as a prominent feature of failure or grant it a lower place below security, order, service provision and legitimacy. CIDCM Peace and Conflict Instability Ledger, adopts the State Failure Task Force Report’s state failure definition of authority deficiency on account of onset of revolutionary, ethnicity, regime change and genocides/politicides related wars in states. The equation of state failure with onset of wars is problematic and fails to account for relatively stable authority structures in some states long beset by civil war conditions. Sri Lanka is one example, where a civil war of 25 years failed to damage the authority and capacity of the central government. It is an exception, but demonstrates that in some cases, civil war and violence may not precipitate breakdown of authority or affect the legitimacy of the regime in power.
The state failure indices by measuring political, economic and social indicators for predicting a state’s present status and its future risks of failure reveal a strong pro-Weberian bias. Most indices explain the phenomenon of state failure in contrast to Weber’s dictum of an institutional, functional and legitimate state. The emphasis on non-provision of security as synonymous with the loss of monopoly over force is a highly debatable and contested concept. It is because monopoly over violence in a defined territory or state is not even the prerogative of the First World, let alone the Third World. Monopoly over violence in the developed world stands challenged by two processes: outsourcing of military tasks to private arms companies; and supra-national control by the UN over deployment decisions of the armed and security forces of these developed states, especially in post intervention conflict regions. This situation is starker for the new members of the international state system who compromise their sovereignty to the forces of globalization in different respects. State’s sovereignty is being shared at a supra-national level with multinational companies and NGOs and at a bottom-up level with sub-national local governments. In the developing world, various actors and structures (including violent manifestations), such as militant commanders and warlords, paramilitary group and criminal gangs, work to decentralize state’s control over violence and security. In some weak and fragile states, they even maintain social orders and perform governance functions. Instead of monopoly over violence, such a scenario is manifested by ‘oligopoly of violence’. The phenomenon of monopoly is also challenged by wars and conflict in neighbouring states, which create conditions for loosening of state’s monopoly over violence too, especially in situations when borders are defined by homogenous populations on both sides.
The state’s exercise of monopoly over violence in the Third World is not only challenged internally by sub-state informal and traditional actors and structures, but also by supra-state International Governmental Organizations (INGOs) and regional organizations that often exercise control over the decisions of where the armed forces of a particular state needed to be deployed for peace keeping and peace building. Globalization and its concomitant effects have increased security predicaments for the developing world by making states address a broad range of environmental, economic, socio-political and security concerns that are largely beyond the control and capacity of their governments. Historically too, several processes in the Third World, have prevented them from achieving this monopoly and it is unrealistic to expect them to deliver on this function in a short period of time, when the Western World took a much longer time to realize the same. The so called ‘Third World’ has been independent for only a few decades and therefore, Milliken and Krause stress that while Europe took hundreds of years to provide security and services to its citizens, it is unrealistic to expect the developing world to acquire it in a short time horizon. In a similar vein, Bilgin and Morton, are highly critical of using Western criteria of statehood to define failed states and call it ‘deception of sovereignty’, which result from comparing a Western institutional transplant possessing conditions and processes that developed over a much longer period. By emphasizing monopoly over violence, these explanations fail to appreciate the different international environment of state formation in the Western and non-Western societies and First World’s role in conflict perpetuation in the Third World. That is why, Lambach, accuses scholars of ethno-centricism, on their attempts to apply Weberian ideal norms to inapplicable empirical situations in non-Western societies.
The emphasis in state failure indices on state’s monopoly over service provision is also a contested issue. Such explanations, not only fail to account for the useful contribution to service provision of indigenous, traditional, kinship and religious institutions, but also paint a wrongful picture of failed states, where absence of formal service provision is supposedly commensurate to total chaos and disorder. Such a picture is hardly true; even in cases of protracted war and violence informal institutions have managed to provide some form of social and political order. Understanding failed states from a liberal legitimacy deficit is further contested. Though, weak and fragile states may be lacking in Western democratic legitimacy features, however, their governance institutions are supported by other forms of traditional, populist or ideological legitimacy.
 As for the use of indicators to predict fragility, all the indexes use a combination of political, social and economic indicators, with differences in the use of sub indicators. The use of differing sub-indicators provides different rankings for states as well as their failure predictions. The differences are especially stark when ranking regimes that are designated as authoritarian and autocratic. The indices that define state failure to embody loss of regime legitimacy, accord states which are deficient in democratic legitimacy, a descending position in order of merit, despite their relatively stable structures of authority. It is because regime legitimacy is measured through sub-indicators of popular political participation, civil society growth, media independence, regular and periodic elections and guarantee of fundamental rights, including women and minority rights. Other indices accord a first place to states deficient in authority and capacity, or economic growth, rather than democratic legitimacy and, therefore produce results that are conflicting with each other. Over all, the various indices provide more weightage to coercive apparatus strength and development of legal and juridical structures for predicting stability and failures.
The use of dissimilar indicators for measuring state effectiveness in service delivery, monopoly over violence, territorial control, legitimacy and economic development makes the concept of state failure difficult to quantify. For example, the economic position of a state may be aggregated by using statistics on GDP, GNP, per capita, openness to international trade, balance of payments and others, therefore, each list producing a different set of economically fragile states. Ziaja and Mata, criticize the fragility indices on using simple, additive aggregation methods for risk estimates and argue that since security is the most essential condition for stabilizing states, indices should not allow other dimensions such as economic or social to compensate for insecurity. They also argue that the thresholds for determining categorization of states are not theoretically or empirically justified, but are mostly simple fractions used by the index on a 0-10 scale. ‘These could be either theorized e.g. which fraction of its terrain must a state control to plausibly claim the monopoly of legitimate violence? Or empirically verified e.g. at which level of income has civil war never occurred?’ The aggregate sources may poorly reflect how states are actually performing across varied functions. Brinkerhoff, points to another weakness in these indices. He argues that the indices by using combinations of socio-political and economic indicators to predict failures, neglect root causes that failed the state in the first place and fail to highlight solutions for addressing fragility, including international intervention for rebuilding such states. The fragility indices also suffer from problems of finding reliable data to base their indicators on. Online government websites in developing states are usually relied upon to determine socio-economic and political data, however, these may suffer from reliability problems. Reliability issues arise on account of tendency to play around with such figures for reflecting a government’s stand point or because of data collection problems that stem from weak administrative capacity for conducting surveys and other techniques.
The rankings place Afghanistan among the list of the top failed, most fragile or critically weak states. Afghanistan’s relative position in CIDCM Peace and Conflict Instability Ledger 2012 is at the top in terms of estimated risk levels in all governance indicators, whereas, in other indexes, it stands among the top 5 most fragile states. The countries ahead of Afghanistan in terms of risk assessment are all African and mostly Muslim (Somalia and Sudan). In most indices, Afghanistan’s position has remained stagnant, but in CIFP State Fragility Index 2011, it went up from 3rd position (in previous indices) to being the 2nd most fragile state in the world. This reflects a highly volatile state building process, which despite the passage of more than a decade of state building and the presence of large numbers of external security forces has largely failed to give a stable policy to Afghanistan. Worrying trends of insecurity, lack of authority, low state capacity, rising militancy, violence, unstable economy and declining legitimacy, characterize in varying degrees the post 2001 state building process in the country.
The main findings of the reports attached to these indices, reflect interesting conclusions on the rankings as well as the estimated risk of failure and instability for future states. An interesting finding is that entrenched autocracies are less vulnerable to instability than partial democracies (anocracies) and in some instances, full democracies. Such a prediction is in itself challenged by the US invasion of Iraq, which not only dislodged the autocratic regime of Saddam Hussain, but also ushered in a period of extreme instability for the state. Therefore, these indices fail to provide external invasion as a factor for adverse regime change and instability while predicting risks of state failure. Similarly, internal pressures for popular participation and accountability that led to the breakdown of some Arab regimes (termed in literature as Arab uprising or Arab spring) is also unaccounted for in these indices. In the light of findings of these indices, the autocratic regimes were strong and maintained a semblance of order associated with state strength and stability. The experience of Arab spring shows that quantitative measurement of monopoly over force and order may conceal the qualitative underpinnings of the system in terms of popular dissatisfaction with regime performance, and popular notions of greater participation and accountability of such regimes.
With the exception of Index of State Weakness in the Developing World, the rest including, PITF, CSP State Fragility Index and Matrix, CIDCM Peace and Conflict Instability Ledger, and CIFP State Fragility Index, find partial democracies at greater risk of failure than autocracies or full democracies. Transition to full democracy fails, PITF, argues when electoral competition is introduced sans checks on the powers of the executive and a system of civil rights properly in place, as in an institutionalized political competition. CIDCM Peace and Conflict Instability Ledger, found partial democratic societies at a greater risk of failure owing to an inability to provide for group grievances and their tendency to contain dissension through repression. Some conclusions may be drawn here. First, increase in the number of democracies in post Cold War period has made the world more unstable- the odds for such partial democracies failing and destabilizing have increased substantially. Second, conventional state building emphasis on liberal democracy and electoral competition may not herald greater stability or peace in post conflict societies. Evidence in many peace building missions in 1990s substantiates the argument, as armed conflict and violence has immediately followed the withdrawal of foreign forces. Therefore, state building approach must look beyond simple introduction of democratic governance institutions in such conflict settings, where governance practices largely draw legitimacy form indigenous structures and institutions, such as Afghanistan. Third, coercive apparatus growth under prolong autocratic regimes is not reflective of stable statehood, unless, it serves to provide an outlet for accommodation of common grievances and expectations. And fourth, a significant youth bulge, especially in Muslim states may serve to indicate growth in levels of radical or revolutionary movements, resulting in adverse regime displacements, as lessons from Arab Spring suggest.
A few words on the merit of constructing indexes for measuring state fragility and failure. These indices are sponsored by institutions that are based primarily in the First World- mostly universities, private think tanks or in case of the PITF reports, the US government. The arguments in defense may be that since these indices measure state’s performance in relation to its past and present, as well as relative to that of the more successful states, therefore, changes in country performance in crucial sectors may be monitored and risk factors determined beforehand. The timely evaluation of risk assessment may help the international community in adopting preemptive steps for responding to crisis situations. In other words, the global instability forecasting models are valuable tools for making appropriate policies underlining state building intervention. These indices may help when international community finds it harder to interact with reliable local partners for aid prioritization in failed settings. They may also be helpful in determining which sectors need precedence over others, in terms of planning and financing development. In addition to prioritization of funding for needed sectors and fields, these indices may help donors to re-evaluate and reappraise the impact of aid policies and conditionalities on a timely basis.
The above section argued that institutionalist, functionalist and liberal approach of understanding a state has inspired qualitative and quantitative studies that measure state’s effectiveness and capacity across a broad range of service provision. These than either rank the states accordingly, or predict their future risk of instability and failure. This section contends that besides reflecting a Western account of state failure, these indices while noting state weaknesses and ranking them on a broad range of state functionality, fail to account for the relative differences in the strength of state institutions and variations in stability across autocratic and democratic regimes. It also criticizes such Indices for using differential or dissimilar indicators for measuring state strength and predicting failure, and therefore producing differing results in rankings and predictions across it. The merit of such indices stands in helping to guide donor agencies and policy makers in prioritizing funding by basing it on institutional performances across a broad range of state functions.

Conclusions

The humanitarian and security dilemmas connected to state failure and growing international intervention to arrest such failure, has stimulated researchers and scholars interest in defining and understanding the concept of failed states, developing indices for measuring state failure and predicting crisis of political instability for them. The state fragility indices predict state weakness and failure on the basis of defining a state purely on Weberian and Western statehood terms. Such a Weberian influence conceals the growth of non-Western states on a path that was very dissimilar to its Western counter-part. By stressing a total monopoly over force inside a state’s territorial boundary, these indices fail to appreciate that the modern state is challenged by a variety of supra-national global and sub-national local forces, actors and structures.
This paper explored the various state failure indices and indexes and criticized them for using dissimilar indicators to predict instability and, therefore, producing results that are reasonably at variance with each other. It also raises objections on these indices being based on empirical and quantitative data and therefore, ignoring the qualitative socio-political undercurrents in a state, which may lead to sudden and violent regime displacements. The result is that none of the indices could predict authoritarian Arab regimes being challenged by popular discontent and had instead predicted stability for these. The indices gave high scores of stability and authority to autocratic regimes and could not foresee the rise and spread of the Arab spring/revolt.
In constructing the merit for such state failure indexes, it is argued that these contribute to our understanding of the risks of failure on the basis of detailed analysis of socio-economic and political indicators. This may help in guiding international agencies and donor governments in timely and pre-emptive intervention for restoring authority and order in such states. But it is a just a theory bound assumption. The fact of the matter is that powerful states intervene in response to national and security interests and, not according to the merit of a particular case.

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