UC Berkeley

Failed states--countries in which governing institutions have corroded or collapsed-- are considered by many scholars to pose a grave threat to global security. Policymakers broadly share this view. The United States' 2002 National Security Strategy flatly declared that "America is now threatened less by conquering states than by failing ones", while the United Nations warns of the global dangers posed by states that cannot meet their responsibilities as sovereign powers.

The conventional wisdom on the risks posed by failed states represents a significant shift in international relations scholarship, which has traditionally emphasized the threat that strong states pose to weaker polities. It also represents a shift in foreign policy, as fears of state failure have flooded resources into shoring up weak states and reconstructing failed ones. But do failed states pose a global security threat? Despite the stakes, there has been little empirical research that isolates and tests the causal mechanisms linking state failure with specific threats. This project empirically assesses the consequences of state failure, through an investigation of several security threats of global significance: transnational terrorism, and pandemic disease outbreaks. The core finding of the research is that failed states largely do not act as "exporters" of international security hazards. To the contrary, that the aspects of institutional incapacitation that analysts frequently highlight--broken security institutions, weak public service provision, corroded infrastructure--often render failed states systematically less likely to propagate security threats than higher-capacity states.

However, though fragile and failed states do not pose a generic and grave international security risk, they remain sites of endemic violence and instability. And so while the security imperative for engagement may be limited, the moral case remains. Accordingly, the second element of the dissertation explores the dynamics of statebuilding and reconstruction, focusing in particular on the linkage between institutional reconstruction and legitimacy. While international efforts to reconstruct failed states have generally focused on legitimation through the establishment of liberal-democratic institutions, the results suggest that delivery of basic services, rather than governance processes alone, play a vital role in structuring popular perceptions of state legitimacy. Building systems to effectively deliver services is necessarily a long-term process, implying that efforts to reconstruct fragile states will need to be sustained if they are to succeed.