State weakness: seen from another perspective

David Sogge

September 2008

Talk of “failing states” represents a dominant view that states exist chiefly to promote globalisation’s winners and to police its losers. States should instead seek to ensure better life-chances for all citizens.

Under a variety of terms - weak states, fragile states, states in crisis, countries at risk of instability and low-income countries under pressure - the idea of state failure has become the subject of much attention. An ever-increasing flow of research and proposals for action have come from organisations in the West including the foreign aid system, philanthropic foundations, academic research units and military and security think-tanks.

At the heart of discussions about state failure lies the definition of what states should be, in whose interest they should function, and thus for whom they fail or succeed. Driving today’s approach is the idea that states exist chiefly to promote globalisation’s winners and to police its losers. For Western geo-strategists, non-Western states have the role and duty before all else to protect the West and its interests; only if such tasks are being fulfilled may those states deal with their own situation.

In this paper, David Sogge takes issue with that position. If everyone’s security and well-being is to be safeguarded and improved, states should seek to ensure better life-chances for all citizens – a task which many proved capable of doing after the Second World War. However, in a globalized world, even strong states will not be sufficient.

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David Sogge

Independent Consultant

Transnational Institute Board member, David works as an independent advisor for grant-making agencies, specialising in civil society. Research and other professional activities in Africa provided a basis for books and articles on Angola and Mozambique and many unpublished reports on South Africa. More recently, evaluative research assignments have taken him to Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union. Trained at Harvard, David earned his graduate degrees from Princeton and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague.