Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World
ISBN:9780195342697 read summary

I was supposed to give this item for as Christmas give to someone but I recieved after Christmas. Even though I had ordered the book 15 days prior.

Democracy means nothing if the government collapses after it's formed. "Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding A Fractured World" discusses countries in danger of collapsing or have collapsed already. Analyzing these states and what political scientists can learn from them and find what they did wrong for current and future countries. "Fixing Failed States" is scholarly and informative, sure to intrigue many readers about the fate of many modern states.

I found this book after watching a talk by Clare Lockart at the Aspen Ideas Festival website.

The talk is amazing--I said to myself "finally, here is somebody with novel, systemic insights into international development--what works and what doesn't work." So I was very excited to get the book.

I found the book to be a somewhat tough read. In the first half the commentary wanders more than it needs to. It's clear that the authors know a lot about the history of related events, but the focus jumps around such that I struggled to pull out the key points, or find a clear line of thought. The bright spots are the stories sprinkled throughout.

The second half of the book (Parts 2 and 3) is a fairly straightforward description of the "Ten Functions of a State" that they define. It's all very sensible, although I wish there was more talk of "how to get there from here," more examples of how to actually put it into place.

I kept wishing for focused chapters on specific countries, or even situations, that would take the ideas from the book and apply them, rather than a few paragraphs here and there.

By sheer coincidence, I started reading this book at the same time as the book "The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works" by Henry Waxman. I found that book to be an amazing read. It is one gripping story after another, with just the right amount of commentary and structure around it to give perspective. I couldn't put it down--read it in a few days, and am still talking about what I learned.

The ideas underneath this book are important and brilliant. The way it's written just didn't work for me, and I suspect for a broad audience. If these ideas were presented differently, for instance as a set of stories (like Waxman did), this would be riveting.

I hope the authors take another crack at this in a different format because the ideas are important--perhaps a different publisher?

If you care about international development, this is worth looking at--the ideas are very good.

Fixing Failed States left me with a mixture of excitement and frustration - excitement because it sets out some good ideas on state-building, frustration because it doesn't quite live up to the title and is sloppily edited, with whole chunks repeated verbatim, wandering narrative etc (shame on you, OUP!).

But let's focus on the interesting stuff. The authors have a go at a `kicking away the ladder'-style trawl of some historical examples of state-building, citing Singapore, the Southern US, European Union and Ireland. Not bad, especially when showing how Singapore went from fragile case and predicted basket case to statist development superstar. As always, there is a nobel prize-winning economist on hand (in this case Gunnar Myrdal) to pronounce that the country is doomed, just as it begins a stellar take-off.

But the real substance is drawn from Afghanistan, where the authors first met and worked together when Ghani was Finance Minister after the fall of the Taliban, and Lockhart was an adviser to the government. I previously blogged on their account of this in Prospect.

The authors identify and explain ten core functions of the modern state (the state's remit - and spending- has expanded remorselessly over the last 200 years):

- Rule of Law
- A monopoly on the legitimate means of violence
- Administrative Control
- Sound management of public finances
- Investments in human capital
- Creation of Citizenship Rights through Social Policy (eg social protection),
- Provision of Infrastructure Services
- Formation of a market
- Management of public assets, both physical and intangible (eg national brand)
- Effective Public Borrowing

They also wrestle with a critical question that has come up repeatedly in presentations of From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World: are effective states generally built by autocrats (think Bismarck or Stalin), rather than democrats? Their answer is that history has moved on, and that today's state builders need to respect rights and consult their populations, both to achieve internal legitimacy, and international acceptance. They argue this more through assertion than evidence, though - it certainly doesn't pass the China test.

Where it gets interesting is in discussing the implications of state-building for the international system. The authors argue for an overhaul to agree `international compacts' around a `sovereignty strategy' of conscious state building for each country, defined as `the alignment of internal and external stakeholders to the goals of a sovereign state.' `Instead of the many different interventions - humanitarian projects, security, development, trade - agreeing on a long-term, state-building strategy tailored to specific contexts and designed to achieve a fully functioning state should be an organizing principle for the international community.'

All well and good, but what do such sovereignty strategies actually contain? Here it gets a bit vague. In a manner analogous to the `growth diagnostics' work of Rodrik, Hausmann and co. at Harvard University, the authors argue that `the state-building agenda entails easing constraints on state institutions... Rather than adhering to a model that stipulates a priori both the institutions and the mechanisms for their creation, this approach encourages piecemeal, context-specific innovations.' This `institutions diagnostics' approach necessarily entails a lot of trial and error - a job for searchers, not planners, in William Easterly's useful schema.

Although this approach needs a lot more specifics, there are a few tantalising illustrations from Afghanistan, for example when they wanted to replace a chaotic system of multiple currencies, the IMF warned it would take years, and UN advised that Afghanistan would need to employ 8,000 bureaucrats. In fact they did it in four months, by working with the national network of hawala money traders who rapidly organized the collection and then burned and replaced the old money.

Finally, the authors trumpet the virtues of the Afghan National Solidarity Program, set up in 2003 and `designed to empower communities to manage their own reconstruction process. The government provided block grants of between $20,000 and $60,000 to every village in the country as long as they agreed to abide by requirements that the village elect its leadership council by secret ballot, hold participatory meetings to design its own recovery plan and projects, and post its accounts in a public place... four years later, the programme has seen more than 12,000 village development councils elected ad more than 19,000 project plans approved.'

What interested me was the striking echo with the approach of the US marines to the challenge of chaos and complexity - no attempt to determine the exact course of an engagement, just stick to three basic principles: take the high ground, keep moving and stay in communications contact. So is the NSP the way to spend money and build states in a chaotic and complex world?

This review first appeared on Oxfam's From Poverty to Power blog on [...]

I would recommend reading this book to gain a rather general sense of the important issues in addressing failed states. I think the authors make a strong case for the desperate need for a more strategic/management-based approach to statebuilding.

My criticism is that I felt that the authors were often randomly picking and choosing examples that seemed to "nicely" fit their thesis while overlooking more complex cases of state failure (such as the DRC or Somalia) where their approach appears almost too clean to implement. I would have really appreciated a deeper assessment of a difficult case study where the authors attempted to implement their approach while discussing the myriad of complexities and shortcomings of their own strategies.

Though the authors do a decent job critiquing the UN and the failures of Western government interventions, I think they needed to go farther in addressing the issue of resource extraction and how the interests of the developed world in continuing such policies (or ignoring such activities all together) contradict directly with true sustainable development. If the market model is really the answer, as the authors contend, then which agency (or group of states?) can effectively serve as the honest broker in the battle between market profit/development vs. sustainable state building? This is a very important issue to address given the power imbalances between the key actors in the international system. Such imbalances exacerbate failed interventions and perpetuate state failure.