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This chapter addresses the question of whether international society is or should be responsible for the domestic civil conditions of sovereign states. It considers the problem of failed states, and the role of international trusteeships or protectorates. It argues that having a cause, such as democracy and human rights, is not justification for violating state sovereignty. Western leaders have no right to place themselves above international society, so long as respect for state sovereignty remains the universal standard of international conduct.

This chapter explores a final category of states: weak, failing, and failed states. It focuses on the states in the sub-Saharan African region, based on a belief that the African continent contains more weak states than any other region and, therefore, offers sufficient diversity in terms of cases. On the whole, the weak, failing, and failed states category presents mixed evidence for the globalization school. These states clearly have changed the type of wars they fight, and have reached out to nonstate actors and institutions to help them achieve their security objectives. In addition, there does indeed seem to be an increase in non-traditional security threats in sub-Saharan Africa, although traditional interstate threats persist. The majority of the states in the region, though, have not reduced their armed forces or defense expenditures, nor have they abandoned traditional security concerns to address new threats. Furthermore, they continue to pursue strategies at odds with the prevailing view of globalization, including hard-balancing against regional opponents and military offense.

The core security concern for the United States, and its allies, consists of the troika of terrorism, failed states, and WMD. This chapter traces the emergence of this contemporary view of the security problem, and argues that this view is perplexing, given the dominant view of power politics and security. None of our models of international politics, including those that emphasize the role of power, can explain why the most powerful country in the international system would be preoccupied with a threat allegedly posed by states so weak that they cannot even project power within their own borders. Nor for that matter can those models explain why the totally powerless would attack the most powerful. By way of an explanation, the chapter delineates the implications of an age of vastly asymmetric power on the strategies of both the weakest and the most powerful.

On 1 Nov 1994, the UN Trusteeship Council voted to suspend operations after Palau, the last remaining trust territory, attained independence. The sovereign state has emerged out of decolonization as the supreme form of political organization in post‐colonial international society—an international society in which dominions, colonies, principalities, free cities, and, of course, mandates and trust territories have all but vanished. However, the ostensible failure of this post‐colonial project—the fact that the promise of peace and prosperity held out by independent statehood is too often betrayed by appalling violence and absolute poverty—has reinvigorated interest in trusteeship as a way of responding to problems of international disorder and injustice. The purpose of this chapter is threefold: first, it examines the principal dilemma of decolonization that has resulted in a renewed interest in trusteeship; second, it considers this renewed interest in trusteeship in the context of international involvement in administering Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and, until recently, East Timor; third, it reflects upon the normative implications that a resurrected practice of trusteeship carries for a society of states that is premised on the juridical equality of all its members. The five sections of the chapter are: The False Promise of post‐Colonial Independence; Innovation and Convention—the case for trusteeship in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and East Timor; The New International Legitimacy—the resurrection of trusteeship; A Universal Society of States?; and Answering the Call of Humanity.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the emerging consensus that weak and failing states pose the biggest threats to the US and international security. It then sets out the purpose of the book, which is to analyze the relationship between state weakness and five of the world's most pressing transnational threats: transnational terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, transnational crime, energy insecurity, and infectious disease. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter examines democratization, “failed states,” and empire building after the East–West conflict. The debate over “democratic peace” focused on democratization and was being underpinned by the vision of peace developed by Immanuel Kant in 1795. Since the end of the nineteenth century, there had been no serious discussion of Kant's ideas on how to achieve peace. Power–political realism, liberalism, and modernization theory, which were based on assumptions quite different from those of Kant, were far more prominent. It was only in the early 1980s that this changed, with global political developments and new political circumstances playing a crucial role in the resumption of the debate on Kant's ideas. The immediate trigger for this debate, at least the academic variant, was the two-part essay by Michael Doyle from 1983 entitled “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs.” The chapter also considers the relationship between international relations and sociology.

This chapter draws on the purposive analysis from the previous chapter to consider how ITA can be understood in terms of a device for implementing certain areas of international public policy and international law, and how in this way it fits within the broader structures of international law and public policy implementation. The role of ITA in this regard covers three areas: (1) the prevention and settlement of international disputes; (2) the implementation of settlements to disputes and certain areas of public policy generally, covering territorial status outcomes, ‘state-building’ (including ‘saving failed states’) and liberal governance (including the ‘earned sovereignty’ paradigm), and the exploitation of natural resources; and (3) the promotion of international policy in the area of peace and security, including peacemaking, peacebuilding, and peacekeeping. The chapter also compares ITA with other international implementation modalities (e.g., international human rights tribunals) and argues that ITA amounts to one of the most intrusive forms of international implementation.

This concluding chapter considers a convincing conception of enduring peace and the need to move beyond monothematic diagnoses of the contemporary world and of social change. It argues that none of the debates on peace-engendering structures and processes that have taken place since the 1980s in social theory have produced convincing results. The thesis of the “democratic peace” has proved essentially unviable, at least with respect to the so-called Kantians' initial claim of global validity for their statements. The discussion of “failed states” and “new wars” has focused largely on processes of state decline or marketization but has done little to place these processes within a broader theoretical framework. Finally, the arguments put forward by theorists of an American imperium, which entail antithetical positions, have failed to show that this attempt to spread American power throughout the world will in fact succeed and bring about peace.

Failed states may present the most difficult challenge to global stability in the coming century. U.S. and international policy mistakenly compounds the problem of ungoverned territory by opposing the decentralization of large nations into more compact, ethnically homogeneous units. Crisis bargaining theory shows how the great powers can help cure failed states by guaranteeing power-sharing agreements in war-torn countries.

This concluding chapter summarizes conclusions, sketches the scope conditions under which these conclusions hold, explores alternative hypotheses, offers policy recommendations, looks at the most recent state-building operations, and engages briefly with the discussion about the normative merits of armed state building. The chapter also introduces four additional areas for further research. First, scholars should compare cases of state building to “negative cases” of failed states to isolate the interventions’ impact on postconflict societies. Second, scholars should explore other periods of history to identify pre-twentieth century cases of state building. Third, scholars should test the distinction between state building and imperialism, and examine if dynamics of imperial rule mirror those of state-building operations. Finally, scholars should start looking at the foreign policy processes of state building.

This chapter studies the state fragility index of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). This index serves as an example of the uses, creation, and supposed measurement through indicators of the concepts of fragile, failing, or failed states. It describes this term as a ‘trading language’, which is used to refer to complicated social realities that are very heterogenous and have very little empirical and theoretical agreement.

This chapter explores the statebuilding response to often violent and criminal state-formation dynamics, often described as failed states. It discusses the decrease of criminality and violence and assurance of individual rights and freedoms by approaches to statebuilding. It also shows that negative hybrid peace is the result of statebuilding as it comes from the power and interests of state and international elites. In various contemporary statebuilding examples, the degree to which the ‘failed statebuilding’ design has resulted in a positive or negative form of hybrid peace is then addressed using empirical sketches.

This introductory chapter presents a broad survey of the study of weak states both as a scholarly exercise and in relation to the Middle East. The study of weak states is itself a controversial terrain where the very definitions of “weak” and “collapsed” or “failed” states are contested. This chapter outlines some of the more salient controversies involving the weak and failed states discourse, and addresses the question of where weak states come from, examining the causes and characteristics of state weakness and failure. It also discusses the role of the more powerful states and international organizations that have invested considerable sums of money in fragile states because they view them as threats to international security.

A failed state is a country with a government that cannot or will not deliver essential public services (political goods) to its citizens. Failed states are those political entities in international politics that supply deficient qualities and quantities of political goods and, simultaneously, no longer exercise a monopoly of violence within their territories. Failed states are violent. There are no failed states that do not harbour civil wars. When there are one or more insurgencies within the state, and when other critical criteria are met, we have a failed state. This chapter examines the range of failed or failing states that have affected Europe’s security interests since the end of the cold war.

This chapter examines the transformation of world politics in the first two post-Cold War decades, as forces of globalization altered the security, political, economic, and normative contexts in which sovereign states operate. The most profound structural changes over these twenty years included the rise and decline of America’s “unipolar moment”, a dramatic shift of power to the developing world, the declining incidence of war (both intra- and interstate), the growing strategic salience of transnational threats, the emergence of failed states as a major security concern, the growing global influence of regional organizations, and a sharpening debate over norms of sovereignty and non-intervention. To cope with this daunting global agenda, states increasingly turned not only to formal treaty-based international organizations but to more flexible arrangements of collective action.

This chapter examines the difficulties faced by liberal states in responding appropriately to the challenges of weak and failed states and suggests that such difficulties are connected to the tension between the notions of Liberalism of Restraint and Liberalism of Imposition. It first considers liberal states' emphasis on the principle of Restraint within the context of decolonization and explains why this emphasis held no solution to the problem of weak and failed states. It then explores how the policy of Imposition has been much strengthened since the Cold War in that humanitarian and/or security concerns may lead to intervention, including intervention by force, in weak states. It also discusses the empowerment that sovereignty provides to the elites controlling weak states and concludes with an assessment of the liberal dilemma: neither Restraint nor Imposition is effective in addressing the severe problems in weak states.