The annual publication of the Failed Sates Index (FSI) by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine generates a legion of criticism from governments, policy circles, media outlets and blogs from all over the world.

The index measures 12 social, political and economic indicators from demographic pressures, human rights and external intervention to highly abstract and subjective measures such as group grievance and state legitimacy.

These 12 principle indicators are disaggregated to more than 100 sub-indicators and weighted.

While it is important for policy makers to have a rough empirical estimate of the different levels of state fragility at a global level, the FSI falls short insofar as it is applied for this purpose.

From the name of the Index, it is clear that its manifold methodological flaws begin at the conceptual level.

A Guardian posting last year by Claire Leigh argues that the term ‘failed state’ “implies no degree of success or failure, no sense of decline or progress.

Failed means there is no way back.” She adds; “it is a word reserved for marriages and exams. It does not belong in a pragmatic debate.”

A similar criticism has been levelled by Lionel Beehner and Joseph Young in a World Policy Blog posting.

They are calling for a re-examination of the binary concept of labelling states as failed or not failed. A quick glance at scholarly journals reveals the lack of agreement among scholars on the definition of state failure.

Nonetheless, the Fund for Peace defines state failure as occurring when there is: loss of physical control over territory or the monopoly on coercive forces; erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions; an inability to provide reasonable public services; and an inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community.

Electoral fraud

Yet, the Fund for Peace’s state failure criteria obscures more than it clarifies. The concept still remains hazy and incoherent. A conceptual flaw that runs through this criteria is the failure to distinguish between ‘the state’ and ‘government’.

For example, the failure to provide basic public services is much less a failure of the state as it is of the government in power.

The criteria ‘erosion of legitimate authority’ faces the same conceptual flaw. For example, President Robert Mugabe’s administration in Zimbabwe is completely delegitimised by the electoral fraud it perpetrated in 2008 and its continued use of coercive capacity to crackdown on opposition.

This is not to say that Zimbabwe does not face enormous social, political and economic stress. However, this is not evidence of state failure. The state is much more than politics and economics.

The core of the state lies in its coercive capacity and there is no evidence to suggest that that Zimbabwe’s coercive capacity is diminishing to an extent that presents a threat to its viability as a state.

The last criteria, ‘an inability to interact with the international community’ is problematic. Somalia may be the closest we can get to a classical Hobbesian state, but the administration in Mogadishu, despite controlling only a few blocks and streets in the Capital, remains an active member of the international community.

In 2010, it extended diplomatic recognition to Kosovo.

The precision and reliability of the FSI is too low to justify confidence that a country with a lower ranking is actually less vulnerable to state failure.

Take the case of Syria ranked 21. It is hard to imagine how the country is not among the top 10 most vulnerable states, given the scale of the current civil war.

Ranking Syria lower than Kenya (#17) which recently had a successful democratic leadership turnover, or ranking Iran (#37) higher than Libya (#54), which is smarting from a devastating civil war, is not only nonsense, but defies what really is logically expected.

A glance at the FSI map (which is full of geographical errors) suggests that Africa is a ‘failed continent’ illustrated in glaring red.

Politically biased

The Index does not distinguish the different variations in fragility among African countries and to suggest that there is no difference is absurd. There are obvious differences in the degrees of fragility among these countries.

The index lumps together countries as dissimilar as Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, the DRC and Chad together as failed states.

By relying heavily on secondary accounts, including newspaper reports and human judgement, one must question the level of objectivity in the FSI.

Indeed, the index has been criticised for being politically biased towards American foreign policy agenda and it’s so called ‘War on Terror’.

Senior US security chiefs usually grace the annual release of the Index.

It is not lost to observers that ‘rogue states’ such as Iran and North Korea, are always classified as failing or failed states.

The index is of no empirical or practical value to scholars or policy makers.

It cannot predict future events like the possibility of a coup in Mali or the current mass street protests in Turkey and Egypt. Of what use is an index that tells us there is violence in the DRC or Somalia?

The whole index is marred in tautology.

It claims to predict violence by measuring violence.

However, the FSI is a useful foreign policy tool for Western governments, particularly the US.

It provides them with the justification for military intervention in the so-called failed states. Crisis in non-Western states is viewed as anarchy and not legitimate political process among legitimate domestic actors.

{Author is a Political Science graduate at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary }

email: [email protected]