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Pauline Baker, the President of the Fund for Peace, discusses the recent publication of the Failed States Index, in partnership with Foreign Policy Magazine. She explains the meaning of “failed state,” highlights key indicators of these states, and explains the significance behind worldwide trends of failing states. Ms. Baker also points out that although the United States is considered stable, it has pockets of failure.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: Our guest today is Pauline Baker. She is President of the Fund for Peace, a Washington, D.C. based research and educational organization that works to prevent war and alleviate the conditions that cause war. Pauline is a political scientist by training with more than forty years experience in academia and the policy world. The Fund for Peace has just published, in partnership with Foreign Policy Magazine, its second annual Failed States Index. Pauline, welcome to the program.
PAULINE BAKER: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
JERRY FOWLER: This term “failed states” or “failing states” is one that has become very commonly used over the last few years. What do we mean when we talk about a failed or failing state?
PAULINE BAKER: There is no universal definition of a failing or failed state, but there are a lot of attributes that scholars agree upon such as losing control over the territory that you have jurisdiction over, not having full physical control over it, or not having a monopoly on the use of force because there are rival militias or rebel groups that have operated in the country, or lacking legitimacy for a large proportion of the population. These are common attributes of a failed or failing state, and they also include other things like not being able to provide public services, or a reasonable level of public services, not being able to interact in the international scene like other sovereign states, high levels of corruptions, etcetera, but basically, we came up with twelve major indicators of failing states, or states that have a high risk of internal conflict.
JERRY FOWLER: What are some of the key indicators?
PAULINE BAKER: We divided it into three categories: social, economic, and political military indicators. They go from demographic pressures to refugees and internally displaced persons, whether there is a legacy of group grievance—basically people do not want to live together, human flight or brain drain, if the productive elements of the population start leaving in droves you know something is wrong. The economic indicators are uneven development along group lines and sharp or severe economic decline. The political or military indicators are delegitimazation of the state. This can come about through fraudulent or rigged elections or high-level corruption—
JERRY FOWLER: Delegitimazation in the eyes of the population?
PAULINE BAKER: Correct, yes, where they do not see the state as a legitimate representative of them any longer. The failure to provide public services, human rights violations, the security apparatus operates as state within a state—by that we mean that there is either rival militias or if you have a dictatorship and the dictator creates private militias that are loyal to him only, bypassing the armed forces, basically you do not have a unified armed forces system, and factionalized leads and external intervention.
JERRY FOWLER: Of those indicators are there some that are weighted more heavily than others or do you view them all as being equal?
PAULINE BAKER: We do not assign weights to them yet; the reason being that we feel you have to do empirical analysis in order to justify the weights that you give them. In some specific cases where we do individual country assessments, if experts come and say, “Yes, in this country we know that this indicator actually is weighted more,” we then can do that, but for the failed state index we have not done it. We are conducting research now which will enable us to give weights to these indicators in the future.
JERRY FOWLER: If you look at this years list, some of the countries that are near the top, or the bottom—I do not know which way you say it—but the most at risk for failing are not surprising—Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast—were there any results that were particularly surprising?
PAULINE BAKER: I think some people were surprised in terms of the top twenty in the list; that a country like Pakistan was in that list. It came out ninth in the rank—that is ninth from the top—and I think that people did not understand that these are objective indicators based on research, and Pakistan is actually far weaker and has a lot of risk, more than what we think of. We think of Pakistan as a nuclear state, now a close ally of the United States, but basically they suffered hugely from the earthquake last year, and there are two zones over which they have little or no control, or autonomous zones, Al Qaeda and the Taliban are still operating fairly heavily in Pakistan, and there is a great deal of corruption in the system as well, so it is a country where on the surface things look like they are doing well—the economy has actually improved and we give credit to the Pakistani government on that—but economics do not solve all problems, and Pakistan came out higher than most people expected.
JERRY FOWLER: What are the implications of that? I guess this would apply to the index in general, but is there some predictive quality to that?
PAULINE BAKER: Yes, we are going to do this year after year so we can establish trend lines, and our hope is that if you think of a weak or failing state as a kind of political pathology, then what we are hoping is that this is seen as a diagnostic tool where you can say not only that a state is shaky, but you can actually identify the drivers of conflict and then hopefully take remedial action and the best hope is that the country itself and the leadership itself takes remedial action. If they do, then the same measures can be used to assess the effectiveness of those policies. It is also a measure of internal, as well as external policies, to try and promote recovery.
JERRY FOWLER: That causes me to wonder how receptive are governments to being put on the list? Obviously you would want some constructive aspect to come out of it, but I would imagine that governments would resent being identified as failing. Are you getting feedback from governments?
PAULINE BAKER: We are getting a mixed reaction. Obviously the governments that are high on the list are not comfortable with the ratings, but we have found that in many cases while they protest they then start asking themselves, “How can we improve our ratings?” In fact, some governments have come to us and asked us that very question. In addition, journalists pick this up and it is a very healthy development when they do that because journalists tend to look at how they got that rating, and there have been a number of articles in the press worldwide where journalists have picked it up, analyzed what is going on in the country, and say, “Well we got high marks for this, but low marks for that, let’s start improving ourselves,” so it stimulates debate and introspection even if there is not a receptivity to it in the initial reaction.
JERRY FOWLER: One thing that jumped out at me about the list is that if you look at the top ten or fifteen countries that are at risk of failing, a large number of them already have external forces on the ground, whether a United Nations mission or some regional mission such as Sudan, Congo, Haiti. Is the presence of foreign forces a stabilizing factor or does that tend to be a destabilizing factor?
PAULINE BAKER: It can work both ways. Keep in mind that this is a snapshot of a country at one point in time. Our data is based basically on six months of activities and events of 2005. External intervention like foreign aid can have a positive affect in that it stops the fighting or it starts good projects or helps public service delivery. It is also a negative factor though in the sense that it undermines the independence and self-sufficiency of that state. This would balance out. If for example, there is a large foreign aid program and it is working, that will show in a public score on public services, but if it is an extraordinary foreign aid program that really undermines the dependency or independence of a country then that would also show up negatively in the external intervention, and it would balance out. I think the real meaning of this would come through the trend lines when you do it year after year. Hopefully that role—that external role—will diminish and the scores will improve.
JERRY FOWLER: If we step back—and I realize you have only been doing this index for two years, but you have been developing the methodology for many more years than that—what is the worldwide trend in terms of failing states? Are there more than there were five or ten years ago? Are there fewer?
PAULINE BAKER: If you look at the mega-studies that have been done—one in Canada and one at the University of Maryland—the general trend is improving, but those mega-trends look at conflict which includes inter-state as well internal conflict, and basically what is happening is inter-state conflict has gone down dramatically, but for the last twenty years or so, internal conflict has gone up. In the last five to ten years, I think that from a numerical basis, internal conflict seems to have been going down based on just counting the conflicts. It does not, however, go into the duration of the conflict, the extent of people killed like in Sudan, lingering conflicts that go on for decades like in Columbia or Sri Lanka. You do not get a qualitative measure; you get a quantitative measure. Some of these conflicts have reached a kind of equilibrium; they just keep going on and on and on, and a country can continue to improve in other areas but there is this sort of blister in the state that does not heal, and hopefully we can address that. It is very hard to get a measure of if you want to take all those qualitative factors into account as well as quantitative—whether things are improving or not improving. I do not think we have enough of a time line yet to really make an authoritative conclusion on that.
JERRY FOWLER: In terms of between last year and this year, what were the states that exhibited the most noticeable improvement?
PAULINE BAKER: The most noticeable improvement was Venezuela which improved by twelve percent, so it is improving a lot. The Dominican Republic improved, Guatemala, Bosnia and Herzegovina also improved. The countries that declined the most were Zimbabwe with the fastest rate of decline of any state between last year and this year, followed by Pakistan largely driven by the demographic pressures from the earthquake which was devastating and which Pakistan has not fully recovered from yet. Then Nigeria and China; and China was another surprise because we have this image of China being an unstoppable engine of growth. All of its power industries are increasing, etcetera, but what we found is that that engine of growth has winners and losers within China and there is a large poor population—the peasants—that have not caught up. There were 87,000 peasant protests in China last year which even for a country the size of China is a huge number. The good news is that the Chinese leaders are aware of it, and they are going to try and deal with it. The more worrisome news is that the answer probably does not lie solely in more agricultural extension programs to increase just the income of the peasants, but probably includes more decentralization which I am not sure they are willing to do because it is very much linked up with corruption of local officials who are seizing land from the peasants. This soft underbelly of economic growth in China unfortunately gave China a less higher score than they may have wanted to have gotten.
JERRY FOWLER: There you would have a case of a country that identifies some risk and is attempting to deal with it, whether they are going to do so effectively or not remains to be seen. Are there examples of success stories where states seem to be on the verge of failing and there was either action by internal actor or action from outside that turned the situation around?
PAULINE BAKER: Taking the long view, I always like to cite two countries that pulled back from the brink, but this was over a period of decades. One is India which in the seventies, people were saying was headed for a demographic disaster because of population growth, mass famine, people were predicting all of the worse, a kind of Malthusian disaster. Of course, India now is the world’s largest democracy and is fairly stable even though as a large country and a very diverse country it still has quite a high incidence of violence and a lot of internal problems, but they have developed—and this is really the core issue here—the state institutions and the system to deal with their problems. The other example, of course, is South Africa which in the eighties was headed for a race war and huge internal conflict, and of course again, they pulled back from the brink and their state did not collapse. We are doing a lot of work now, also on the second stage of this methodology that we are using which is going to be rating also the capacity of state institutions to deal with these issues. Hopefully in the next index we will have some ratings of that as well.
JERRY FOWLER: One thing that is referred to in the report that might surprise a lot of people is this idea of “pockets of failure” in countries such as the United States which otherwise are quite stable.
PAULINE BAKER: The United States did not come out in the category of most stable. W e had five categories there, and Canada and the Scandinavian countries came out actually better than the United States. In the case of the United States, the drawbacks were—as you indicated—the response to Katrina which showed real disfunctionality or pockets of failure, and also the whole debate and activities regarding human rights with Guantanamo, the debate over torture, rendition; the United States slipped back from where it use to be on being really an ideal country promoting human rights and that is due to the war on terror. While in no means is this to suggest that the United States is a failing state, it does have pockets of either disfunctionality or backsliding on some of these indicators that I think we have to pay attention to.
JERRY FOWLER: If people want to look at this index more closely, is there somewhere online that they can go?
PAULINE BAKER: Yes, they can go see the full article on www.foreignpolicy.com which is the magazine’s web site, and you can even go to our web site and get more details on the methodology and the data, and that would be www.fundforpeace.org.
JERRY FOWLER: Pauline Baker is President of the Fund for Peace. Pauline thanks for being with us.
PAULINE BAKER: Thank you.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
