Failed State - Definitional Issues

Definitional Issues

A state could be said to "succeed" if it maintains, according to philosopher Max Weber, a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within its borders. When this is broken (e.g., through the dominant presence of warlords, paramilitary groups, or terrorism), the very existence of the state becomes dubious, and the state becomes a failed state. The difficulty of determining whether a government maintains "a monopoly on the legitimate use of force", which includes the problems of the definition of "legitimate", means it is not clear precisely when a state can be said to have "failed." The problem of legitimacy can be solved by understanding what Weber intended by it. Weber clearly explains that only the state has the means of production necessary for physical violence (politics as vocation). This means that the state does not require legitimacy for achieving monopoly on having the means of violence (de facto), but will need one if it needs to use it (de jure).

Typically, the term means that the state has been rendered ineffective and is not able to enforce its laws uniformly because of (variously) high crime rates, extreme political corruption, an impenetrable and ineffective bureaucracy, judicial ineffectiveness, military interference in politics, and cultural situations in which traditional leaders wield more power than the state over a certain area. Other factors of perception may be involved. A derived concept of "failed cities" has also been launched, based on the notion that while a state may function in general, polities at the substate level may collapse in terms of infrastructure, economy and social policy. Certain areas or cities may even fall outside state control, becoming a de facto ungoverned part of the state.

The spread of the term "failed state" has been criticized by policy researchers for being arbitrary and sensationalist. William Easterly and Laura Freschi have argued that the concept of state failure "has no coherent definition", and only serves the policy goals of Western states to militarily intervene in other states. The British writer Anatol Lieven draws a distinction between the "genuinely failed and failing" states of Sub-Saharan Africa with the states of South Asia, whose rulers he says "have not traditionally exercised direct control over... most of their territory and have always faced continual armed resistance somewhere or other". Although he concedes that Pakistan might be considered "failed" when compared to the industrialized states of Western Europe, he criticizes how commentators use the War in North-West Pakistan to brand Pakistan as "failed", while not doing the same for the proportionally more serious Naxalite insurgency in India or the Sri Lankan Civil War.