a Leone: The State That Came Back From The Dead

Robert I. Rotberg

The New Nature of Nation- secern Failure

ation-states fail because they can no long-term deliver positive political goods to their people. Their governments lose legitimacy and, in the eyes and hearts of a growing plurality of its citizens, the nation-state itself becomes illegitimate. single a handful of the beingnesss 191 nation-states can straight off be categorized as fai direct, or collapsed, which is the end story of failure. Several dozen more, however, be weak and serious candidates for failure. Because failed states ar hospitable to and harbor nonstate actorswarlords and terroristsunderstanding the dynamics of nation-state failure is telephone exchange to the war against terrorism. Strengthening weak nation-states in the developing world has consequently assumed new urgency.

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Defining State Failure
Failed states are tense, deeply conflicted, dangerous, and bitterly contested by warring factions. In most failed states, government troops battle armed revolts led by one or more rivals. Official political science in a failed state sometimes face two or more insurgencies, varieties of civil unrest, differing degrees of communal discontent, and a plethora of dissent directed at the state and at groups at heart the state. The absolute intensity of violence does not define a failed state.



Rather, it is the enduring roughage of that violence (as in Angola, Burundi, and Sudan), the direction of such(prenominal) violence against the existing government or regime, and the vigorous character of the political or geographical deRobert I. Rotberg is director of the Kennedy Schools Program on Intrastate Conflict and president of the area Peace Foundation. He edited State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror (forthcoming). right of first publication © 2002 by The Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Massachusetts bring in of Technology The Washington Quarterly 25:3 pp. 8596. T HE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY
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SUMMER 2002

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l Robert I. Rotberg
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