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Introduction
The literature on 'state failure' has received considerable attention across the social sciences in recent times. This interest has been largely sparked by the urgency of understanding the factors behind political violence and civil war, and the growth of terrorist organisations in many less-developed countries (Menkhaus, 2004; Cramer, 2006). Certainly, these are issues that have attracted significant academic and foreign policy interests. Fearon and Laitin (2004), for instance, have argued that failed states create 'international public bads', and other negative spillovers (such as harbouring criminal organisations) and thus the international community needs to develop forms of 'neo-trusteeship' in order to intervene to build states. Similarly, contemporary US foreign policy has been shaped - particularly since the 11 September bombings - by the potential threat of so-called 'failed states', which are seen as places where terrorist organisations and international criminal networks can flourish. As a 2002 National Security Strategy paper states: 'America is now threatened less by conquering states than [it is] by failing ones'.1
Even if several influential studies have pointed to poor economic performance as a cause of state breakdown and the onset of civil war (Collier and Hoeffler, 1998; Collier et al , 2003), many states that are performing poorly in economic terms, such as Tanzania, Ghana or Zambia, for example, have not experienced anything like the breakdown of some other poor economic performers, such as Afghanistan or Somalia, for instance. The problem in many less-developed countries has not only been poor economic performance but also a breakdown in the legitimacy and political viability of states. Partly as a result, there has been a general shift from seeing state failure as a consequence of state intervention towards the idea of state failure as a justification for state-building intervention.
Although such debates about 'failed states' commenced in the early 1990s, the notion of 'state failure' as a political issue has been germane to international relations for centuries. The problem of state failure was taken seriously by colonial occupiers. Indeed, European colonial powers justified their empires, in part, on the idea that their rule would bring an end to 'savage' and 'barbarous' rule in the colonies. Powerful countries often intervened in poor, weaker states to stem 'social disorder' that potentially threatened their security...