Massacres in the African Great Lakes Region, disorder in the Caucasus, endless crises in Bolivia, violence in Afghanistan…the state’s inability to guarantee security and stability has become one of the crucial stakes riding on international politics, for disorder in fragile states sends shock waves – transnational crime, terrorism, migration, and smuggling – into the very hearts of the Western powers. The international community has made of this issue of failed states one of its strategic priorities, whereas in the South civil society is trying increasingly to pull through.

Two billion people currently live in “fragile states”, i.e., countries whose governments cannot even ensure minimal security and survival for large portions of their populations. Dozens of millions of people even live in “collapsed states”, under the arbitrary and brutal reigns of militia, criminal groups, and warlords. While the notion may be vague and contested, the experts quibble over the terms, and some governments may be scandalised at being so classified¹, the reality of an archipelago of vulnerable or failed states cannot be denied. Depending on the source and definitions, 20 to 60 countries are operating in this twilight of humanity.

In devoting forty-one pages to fragile states, Enjeux internationaux wanted to highlight a phenomenon that is generally just touched upon in the news, although the events that occur there are unspeakably brutal and spill over into neighbouring regions, even to the rest of the world.

At first glance, these countries, whether caught in “stealth conflicts”² or prostrate in “forgotten crises”, rarely represent capital strategic or economic stakes slated for headlines on the 6 o’clock news. At first glance, we must repeat, for although they are located on the world’s “fringes”, at an apparently safe distance from the “posh neighbourhoods”, these collapsed or convulsed countries shake up and weaken the international order. In the era of globalisation, nothing is “foreign”, nothing is “far” from us.

Violence, pandemics, and terrorism
The General Staffs, intelligence services, and specialised study centres increasingly consider the failed states to be one of the most serious challenges to international security. “Along with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism,” Gareth Evans, the president of the International Crisis Group, asserts, “…[the matter of state failure] is one of the big three security problems that will preoccupy the first decades of the 21st century”.³

Failed states are indeed often associated with a set of “untraditional” threats, namely, international terrorism, health pandemics⁴, transnational criminal groups, humanitarian crises, dirty wars, and environmental catastrophes. The most serious human rights violations (massacres of civilian populations, massive raping, and ethnic cleansing) are often found in these states, and even if they alone are not responsible for global instability, the fragile states are incubators of the threats that will sooner or later play leapfrog with borders.⁵ So, under the presidency of Charles Taylor, the “state breaker”, Liberia contaminated all of West Africa⁶, a region snatched up by the infernal machine of war, corruption, delinquency, and looting. The shock waves, which were carried by chaotic migratory movements, trafficking in human beings, and the smuggling of natural resources, even reached the shores of Europe and North America.

A state does not have to break down completely for this to occur. It suffices if only a few regions escape central government’s control, such as the drug producing areas of Colombia and the Golden Triangle at the intersection of Laos, Burma, and Thailand. Also, the risk of terrorism is real: Liberia served as a base of financial operations for the al-Qaeda network, but the terrorist networks found shelter above all in the “quasi-States” of Pakistan, Yemen, Kenya, the Philippines, Guinea Bissau, and Indonesia. “Like the mafia, they seem to flourish more easily in poorly governed states than in states that are not governed at all”.⁷ This pitfall lies in wait even for the apparently heavenly micro-States of the ends of the earth, the “confetti” of the South Pacific, such as the islands of Nauru and Tonga, where organised crime and terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda operate.⁸

Ulterior motives
The origins of the states’ “failures” are controversial because they imply admissions of responsibility. Failed nation building after long and traumatic periods of colonial rule; the end of the Cold War and its Client State system; the impact of uncontrolled globalisation⁹; aid or structural adjustment policies tied to the state’s dismantling and the promotion of nongovernmental players; surges of ethnic feeling and religious fundamentalism; the destabilising manoeuvres of secret services, multinationals, or business networks; the corruption of the local elite; and so on: the reasons are tangled and the accusations interlaced.

Is this a malfunction of the system or of one of its structural features? State institutions are sometimes deliberately weak: that is the case of some Latin American countries, which have over-developed their repressive institutions and under-developed their other functions, notably those for the redistribution of wealth, so that private oligarchies can develop as freely as possible. It is the case of some African countries where the leaders, following the example of ex-President Mobutu¹⁰, have organised the plundering and bankruptcy of their own states. In other words, some states are set up to ensure the security of the regime in place at the expense of their inhabitants’ human security.¹¹

“For whom must the State function,” Michael Ignatieff asks, in the same vein, “For the local elite? For international civil servants? Or for the great Western capitals’ political leaders?”¹² And what criteria are used to define a functioning state?

Who ultimately decides the status of a failing state? Such a label is not painless. Once proclaimed “failed” or in crisis, a state may find itself in the major powers’ sights, especially since in the post-9/11 world, the issue of managing failed states has left the humanitarian sphere for the security policy stage.

Interference?
Many countries in the North have developed failed state containment policies. The National Security Strategy¹³ that President Bush presented in 2002 made this one of its priorities as part of a policy that officially made development the third pillar of US foreign policy alongside defence and diplomacy. Moreover, the State Department created to this end the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization. Still, the Bush administration is clearly putting the emphasis on the terrorist threat.

The European Union, for its part, has proposed an approach based on the concept of human security¹⁴ that is aimed at fragile states in particular, and its thinking, notably at the EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) in Paris, has forged ahead. Several Member States have included this phenomenon in their development policies.

Given the risks that they represent, the issue of intervening in fragile states’ “internal affairs” is at the heart of the various polemics¹⁵. The UN’s General Assembly approved the notion of “the responsibility to protect” endangered populations in December 2005, but this duty applies only to the extreme cases of genocide and massive crimes against humanity. What should be done with merely chaotic or criminal States?

The temptation is great to revive the question of placing them under trusteeships. That is the proposal made by a renowned African studies expert, Stephen Ellis, of the African Studies Institute of Leiden University (NL). “In (certain) African countries, sovereignty has become a mere legal fiction, one that provides cover for all sorts of internal abuses,” he writes. “Effective intervention is going to occasionally require overriding traditional national sovereignty(...) This idea, anathema since the end of colonialism, deserves rehabilitation”.¹⁶

Real commitments
There is true awareness of the failed states’ international impact: conflict prevention is on most governments’ and Western donors’ agendas, while the terms “nation building” and “the state’s reconstruction” are in vogue. However, almost everyone currently admits that there is no miracle cure for the problem of fragile states, given the complexity of the causes, multitude of players involved, and huge scale of the actions to take. And despite the fear-mongering rhetoric about the states in crisis, the international community’s true commitments remain well short of what is needed. The Millennium Development Goals, which were supposed to address one root of the states’ declines, namely, under-development and extreme poverty, will not be reached. And most states are reluctant to commit their troops to peacekeeping operations in which they run the risk of getting bogged down at any moment.

The international community has had time to think about its limits and the powerlessness of power in countries ranging from Somalia to Iraq, but retreating behind the illusory walls of order and prosperity is not an option in dealing with the sound and fury of the world. Today’s disorder requires a resolute, well-thought-out, responsible commitment in favour of “another world”, one that will set its sights on human security, i.e., the protection of human rights and the war on poverty.

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¹ "The Failed States Index" , Foreign Policy, July/August 2005.
² Virgil HAWKINS, " Stealth Conflicts: Africa" s World War in the DRC and International Consciousness" , The Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, January 2004, www.jha.ac/articles/a126.htm
³ Gareth EVANS, " Building peace, and a belief in the future" , www.globalagendamagazine.com, 2004.
⁴ Laurie GARRETT, HIV and National Security: Where Are The Links?, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, 2005, 67 pages.
⁵ Read USAID, Fragile State Strategy, January 2005, 18 pages.
⁶ DUFKA Corinne/HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, Youth, Poverty and Blood. The Lethal Legacy of West Africa" s Regional Warriors, New York, March 2005, 74 pages.
⁷ Ken MENKHAUS, " The Security Paradox of Failed States" , National Strategy Forum, Spring 2003. www.nationalstrategy.com
⁸ REILLY Benjamin/WAINWRIGHT Elsina, " The South Pacific" , in CHESTERMAN Simon, IGNATIEFF Michael, THAKUR Ramesh (dir.), Making States Work, United Nations University, New York, 2005, 400 pages.
⁹ For more on this subject, see Jean-François BAYART, "L'Etat est-il une victime de la globalisation?" , Esprit, Paris, February 2004. And especially his book Le gouvernement du monde. Une critique politique de la globalisation, Fayard, Paris, 2004. Taking the opposite tack to many of his peers, J.-F. Bayart feels that the Fragile State is "an imaginary figure spawned by globalisation" and the true issue on the agenda is not the state" s decline, but its privatisation. "(Some assert that) the rise in the number of civil wars is a sign of the end of the state. We should wonder if the wars are not bloody state-building processes. In the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, wars are a way to control the state, even to restore it" . Talk given in Bern (CH) on 3 March 2005. Traverse, discussion platform of the SDC.
¹⁰ BRAECKMAN Colette, Le dinosaure. Le Zaïre de Mobutu, Editions Fayard, Paris, 1992.
¹¹ For more on this subject read Mark TAYLOR (dir.), The Problem of the State, Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies, Oslo, May 2005. www.newsecurity.info
¹² Michael IGNATIEFF, " Human Rights, Power and the State" , p. 72, in Simon CHESTERMAN, op.cit.
¹³ The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (The White House, Washington, D.C., 2002)
¹⁴ A Human Security Doctrine for Europe: The Barcelona Report of the Study Group on Europe" s Security Capabilities, 15 September 2004, http://www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/global/Publications/HumanSecurityDoctrine.pdf
¹⁵ OTTAWAY Marina Ottaway/CAROTHERS Thomas, States at Risk -Stabilization and State-Building by External Intervention, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace www.carnegieendowment.org
¹⁶ ELLIS Stephen, " How to Rebuild Africa" , Foreign Affairs, September/October 2005, pp. 135-148.