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This chapter examines the patterns of state consolidation in Africa over the last several hundred years. A review of the trajectories of states is valuable because many of the fundamental features of African politics have become more understandable. Furthermore, a deep understanding of how states have progressed in Africa offers the opportunity to develop alternatives that might address some of the pathologies from which parts of Africa suffer. The chapter traces the evolution of state power in Africa and the problem of state failure. It also puts African state-building and consolidation in perspective, reflects on the future of state power in the continent, and evaluates alternatives to African states within the current international state system, such as decertifying old states and recognizing new nation-states. The chapter concludes with a discussion of alternatives to the sovereign state.

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.

Complex humanitarian emergencies are always assumed to be the end results of impersonal forces – such as economic stagnation, political decay, and natural disasters – which bring the nation to the edge of disasters and catastrophes. This may be true, but it may be inferred that the emergencies are worsened by deliberate political and military actions. Human security is being threatened by such, but it is also affected by the human beings' search for political and economic gains. This chapter presents the idea that humanitarian crisis happens in societies wherein the state is weak and the elites are greedy to pursue their own interests. This means that there is a need to explore not only the economic sources, but also the politics of the economic sources of humanitarian emergencies. The chapter also presents different forms of state failure, rent seeking, and predation in an effort to understand the theoretical and practical roles in bringing about a humanitarian emergency.

One of the major challenges of global development is to identify when states are fragile, understand in which dimensions they are fragile and why, and determine the costs of such state fragility as well as how the international community should respond to fragile states. This book studies these causes, costs, and responses from two main perspectives. The first is the perspective of conflict. We cannot properly study state fragility without giving substantial weight to the relationship between conflict and state fragility—how does conflict contribute to fragility and how can fragile states avoid falling into conflict? How can fragile states in conflict make the transition to peace? A second perspective is on the role of the international community. This community, in particular donors, have an important challenge to contribute towards a reduction in conflict and an improvement in the effectiveness of aid. Indeed, despite the prominence of conflicts in many fragile states there is still a lack of research on the economic dimensions of conflict, aid and development in fragile states. How can aid flows to fragile states be made more effective? This chapter provides the background to the rest of the book and discusses the contributions of the individual chapters.

The record of aid to fragile and poorly-performing states is the real test of aid effectiveness. Rich countries can justify aid to fragile states both through altruism and self-interest. But, with some exceptions, donors have appeared at the wrong times and with the wrong attitudes, even sometimes undermining development progress. State failure has dimensions of both will and capacity. Failure demands constructive engagement by donors, in some cases to save people in weak states from their leaders, and in all cases to save the states from circumstances which they cannot control. This chapter examines the aid relationship with respect to three weak countries. Burma presents a case of comprehensive failure of political will and capacity, but isolating the regime, as some donors have chosen to do, will only perpetuate the plight of the population. Rwanda provides an alarming example of donor complicity in state collapse. The country has now rebounded from the terrible genocide of 1994, but some donors still cannot set aside their political and cultural biases. Zambia has lived through many years of bilaterally-assisted economic mismanagement, and also proved to be a highly unsuitable case for Bretton Woods treatment. It is doing better now that the country is more willing and able to take control of its development agenda. The paper concludes with eight principles for donors to observe in engaging more productively with fragile states.

This concluding chapter argues that guilds did redistribute resources to their members at the expense of everyone else; they did not generate countervailing benefits by solving failures in markets for quality, training, or innovation; and they did inflict unintended harm on the wider economy. In practice, markets are never perfect and states are never impartial, and this was undoubtedly true of the markets and states of pre-modern Europe. However, guilds made little contribution to correcting market or state failures. By seeking rents for their own members, guilds intensified market failures, sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently. They also contributed to making governments even more corrupt than they already were by offering an effective institutional mechanism whereby two powerful groups, guild members and political elites, could collaborate in capturing a larger share of resources at the expense of the rest of the economy.

This chapter examines one major market failure that guilds might have helped solve: the potential for information asymmetries between producers and consumers about the quality of goods and services. Many guilds erected market regulations. To address such concerns, guilds required producers and products to be guild-certified, inspected workshops or wares, and penalized quality violations. Guilds also engaged in many unrelated activities which affected quality unintentionally. The chapter then assesses the evidence on information asymmetries about quality, the institutional mechanisms available to solve them, and the outcomes in different sectors of the European economy. It argues that guilds shed light on the balance between market failures, state failures, and the failure of particularized institutions in intermediating between producers and consumers.

This chapter studies the literature on failed states in order to create a definition of a failed state. States can fail along any of the five aspects of statehood, resulting in five types of state failure: anarchic, illegitimate, incapable, unproductive, and barbaric states—failures of security, justice, capacity, economy, and humanity, respectively. Failures in each dimension can occur to greater or lesser degrees, and they can happen independently or, more often, in combination. These concepts help describe the dynamics of state failure during a state-building operation, but they do not exhaust the range of possible problems. The chapter suggests applying the balance-of-power theory to the dynamic among local actors and between local and international actors to generate insights about what influences locals to cooperate with, free-ride on, or fight against state-building efforts.

This introductory chapter advances a theory of state failure that explains the cohesion and fragmentation of security institutions as a consequence of resource rents, which critically influence how local elites leverage local offices of state security. It offers an insight into the interplay of rents and resources, especially at the subnational level, in nations with low capital mobility—where resources cannot be extracted, concealed, or transported to market without state patronage and involvement. The chapter also presents the method and evidence used in the book's study. The central argument is explored through a comparative analysis of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. These countries have many social, economic, and political similarities, yet they manifest starkly different paths of state development. The study employs comparative historical analysis of national-level developments that has nested within it a microcomparative study of subnational outcomes.

This chapter looks at the history of the Iraqi state. Much of independent Iraq's history of state making (1958–80) followed the rentier-state paradigm until the onset of the Iran–Iraq War in 1980; this started a new era in the state's history that ultimately led to state failure and collapse: initial war making (the Iran–Iraq War) led to overstretching of state capacity; the ensuing fiscal crisis led to a further weakening of the state and pushed the regime into bellicosity (the annexation of oil-rich Kuwait in order to shore up Iraq's rentier resources). The concerted military action by the international community and the subsequent regime of United Nations sanctions left the Iraqi state crippled. The weakened Iraqi state—a fragile state par excellence—had to re-create new forms of legitimacy by resorting to Iraqi nationalism based on tribal affinities and the Islamic religion in order to counter the persistent surveillance by and encroachment of powerful external adversaries. The bellicose public discourse proved counter-productive, as Iraq's supposed military capacity was one of the reasons for the violent regime change in 2003 and the total collapse of the state in the aftermath of the invasion.

This chapter examines five cases of state building: West Germany (1945–55), Nicaragua (1989–92), Liberia (1993–97), Sierra Leone (1999–2006), and Afghanistan (2001–10). These five cases indicate a diversity of geographic regions, time periods (post-World War II, post-Cold War, and post-9/11), international actors (unilateral, multilateral, and blended), and scale (costly interventions versus less costly ones). The chapter uses the five dimensions of statehood in structuring and analyzing each case through a step-by-step framework. First, it describes the general background to the case. Second, it points out the failure in each dimension of statehood. Third, it discusses the state-building strategy employed in each dimension of statehood, and evaluates whether or not it addressed the dynamics of state failure in that dimension of statehood. Finally, the chapter utilizes a process-tracing methodology to illustrate how a strategic match, partial match, or mismatch caused the outcome observed in the case.

This chapter extends the study to the population of approximately forty weak states whose economies are defined by low capital mobility. It illustrates the impacts of resources, patronage, and local elite rent-seeking on state security using paired comparisons of six countries. Each pair—Syria and Lebanon, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan, Zimbabwe and Somalia—has confronted similar challenges, yet they have witnessed state security fragmentation in one and state security cohesion in the other. Approximately fifteen countries have experienced state security fragmentation (often leading to state failure), while across the same period thirteen countries have avoided fragmentation and witnessed the rise of cohesive state security apparatuses underpinned by rent-seeking. These are long-lasting state formation trajectories, and there is little overlap between the two groups. At the same time, another eleven countries have managed to avoid either of these trajectories, despite their low capital mobility.

This concluding chapter discusses how understanding the distinct patterns of state failure in weak states with immobile capital can inform our study of regime change, ethnic violence, and security sector reform—both comparatively and in the postcommunist region. The analysis of weak states is relevant as it offers a new look at the forces motivating local elites, whose political calculus involves accessing rents and whose actions are defined by the limitations imposed by immobile capital. As the examples of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in this book reveal, these structural and strategic factors combine to erode institutions from within and they can be decisive in perpetuating state power or leading a country into state failure.

This book locates how civil society organizations, partnerships, and associations are being mobilized in response to market failure and state failure. This is related to critical governance studies and explores two political strategies that seek to recontextualize the significance of civil society. One strategy is individual and collective self-responsibilization to lighten the governance burdens of local and central states. The other is collective self-emancipation through social innovation, community mobilization, and creating the commons to limit or escape the constraints of market and state. Thus, governance can be located at the intersection of networks and solidarity as alternatives to market exchange and hierarchical command. The book will juxtapose 'romantic public irony' to fatalism, stoicism, cynicism, or opportunism.

This chapter lays out the theoretical framework for comparing weak states with immobile capital. The framework introduces the variables that structure rent-seeking, and specifies the mechanisms of resource exploitation driving local elites. In weak states of the late twentieth century, whose economies were defined by low capital mobility, the concentrated resources under rural elites and the reach of the state through lines of patronage critically determined how struggles among elites draw security apparatuses into macropolitical processes of state declineand failure. The chapter contends that state failure and civil war can be the direct result of cash crop economies. It is precisely the fact that cash crops have high barriers to entry and low value-to-weight ratios that make these economies vulnerable to state failure. Under certain conditions, these factors do not dampen conflict but generate highly contentious rent-seeking that can divide elites and pull a state apart.

This chapter describes the transformations of state security apparatuses in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It examines how the Soviet Union's collapse set in motion the cooptation and competition of local elites around shifting rent-seeking opportunities, leading to the fragmentation of security institutions in Tajikistan and the cohesion of Uzbekistan's security apparatus. In Tajikistan, fragmentation unfolded over four phases, leading to state failure and civil war. In Uzbekistan the regime's rent-based co-optation of local elites and expansion of its coercive apparatus contributed to its descent into corruption and repression, a term which the chapter refers to as a coercive rent-seeking state. In a period defined by anticorruption reforms, mass arrests and dismissals of political elites, unprecedented political and economic liberalization, and large demonstrations that often turned violent, local elites' long-standing patterns of access to power and wealth in each republic became openly contested.