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Key Text Assessing State Failure: Implications for Theory and Policy

Author: D Carment
Date: 2003
Size: 22 pages (346KB)

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Summary

In anticipating state failure, effective response and accurate analysis are equally important. But does the international community have an analytical basis for generating good response strategies? This paper by Carleton University argues that explanations of state failure are inadequate analytical tools for risk assessment and early warning. The disparate analytical approaches constitute a useful tool-kit but there is a gap in understanding between academics and practitioners. Future funding efforts should emphasise the integration of analytical findings and the methodologies of research programmes.

Debates on state failure have mainly focused on definitional issues, the strengths and weaknesses of contending methodologies and evaluation procedures and the causes, manifestations and processes of state failure. Much less attention has been paid to the question of how to link theoretical insights to policy options. To date, states and international organisations have done little towards the creation of working and useful conflict prevention regimes at the regional and global level. While there is no lack of rhetoric on the necessity of prevention, serious attempts to give organisations the tools to put preventive systems into place are modest at best.

Understanding and responding to state failure requires a multifaceted, multilayered and multi-actor methodology. This approach entails two levels of analysis - relative performance measures and an appreciation of the dynamic processes of conflict. The ramifications of such an approach are:

Policy preferences for solutions to state failure will depend on the explanations we accept for their decay and potential collapse.
By emphasising the root structural causes (economic, social and political composite indicators), the range of solutions expands to long-term, developmentally orientated structural prevention.
By emphasising medium- and micro-level political configurations and interactions, the range of solutions might include partition, power sharing, democratisation or constitutional entrenchment of ethnic or minority rights.
It might also include more specific operational responses such as sanctions, peace enforcement and long-term institution building.

Those who develop methodologies to assess the risk of state failure should be clear about the array of political instruments available to provide an effective response.

Ultimately, anticipating state failure is a process-based approach requiring sound analysis as well as an explicit connection to policy options for preventive measures.
A process-based approach means that the method and format of applied early warning is shaped directly by the operational focus of the process itself, in this case preventative action as opposed to preparedness.
All of these elements point to the relevance of basic policy analysis and planning methods to close the warning–action gap.
Such methods incorporate the structuring of problems, the application of appropriate analytical tools to solve these problems and the communication of analysis and recommendations in a format useful to decision makers.
In short, policy planning is a type of decision-support procedure. Such an approach requires that organisations have a better sense of their own institutional needs and capabilities.
Such activities should have a built-in evaluative process or impact assessment capability that will ensure self-monitoring and provide policy guidance. At the very minimum, activity in an economically and politically fragile society should not further destabilise that society.

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Source: Carment, D., 2003, ‘Assessing State Failure: Implications for Theory and Policy’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 24, no.3, pp 407-427
Author: Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, http://www.carleton.ca/npsia/