[p2p-research] Postcards from Hell: What Failed States Look Like...

[Kevin Carson]

On 6/22/10, Michael Gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:

> This article is sophmoric silliness... A failed state is a state that has
> failed... not one where we nice people in middle suburbs don't happen to
> like their politics or how they treat their garbage... It is a state that
> doesn't do the minimum that a state must do which is to provide an orderly
> framework for the conduct of internal affairs and for its relations with its
> external environment.
>
> I've been in to several of the places indicated in this list in the last
> couple of years (Ethiopia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh) and while they have
> problems, often severe and even seemingly insurmountable economic, social
> and political problems they are not "failed states".
>
> Certainly places like Somalia and the Ivory Coast and a number of the others
> would likely qualify but under no circumstances would the five that I've
> visited directly nor many of the others that I know secondarily fall under
> that definition.

That was sort of my reaction as well.  I clicked through about ten of
them.  Aside from a couple of pictures in which armed militias
patrolled the streets or small children in uniform practiced military
drills, I couldn't see anything that constituted prima facie evidence
of being a "failed state" in the pictures themselves.  Most of the
other pictures simply depicted people wearing non-Western dress,
sitting on the ground, or living in housing that Americans would
regard as overly rustic or in need of a coat of paint.  Oh,
yeah--there was one picture of Somalia in which some sort of smoky
haze was visible in addition to the non-Western dress and old houses.
But the source of the smoke itself was not visible, and might have
just as easily been an outdoor cooking fire as (say) a house struck by
a mortar fire.  I hate to say it, but at times it almost seems as if
the article is treating sights like Somali men wearing those kilt
thingies as some sort of symbol of extreme backwardness, so that the
reader's reaction will be "Egad!  People who don't dress like the
folks at Wal-Mart!  What a godawful shithole!"

I'm not saying any of these places *don't* qualify as failed states.
But most of the pictures don't show it taken by themselves.  The
author presumably intends each image to be a poignant and self-evident
symbol of failure and squalor, but I just don't see failed statedom
leaping out of most of them.

Also, I suspect there's some problem of arbitrariness in
classification.  There's a difference between "failed states" and
"hollow states," and there are degrees of hollowness as well.  I
imagine there'll be a lot more room for nuance in assigning states to
positions on the hollowness spectrum in years to come.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
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