Dealing With Failed States: Crossing Analytic Boundaries

With the ever-increasing interdependence across individuals, groups, international organizations, and nation-states an increasingly significant policy concern in the contemporary turbulent world of globalization is the question of state failure. There has been a growing academic interest in the determinants of state failure and an acute awareness across the international community of the need for dealing with issues of instability in states.

The contributors to this volume represent the most recent cutting edge approaches to state failure—looking at both conditions of conflict and economic development, dealing with the conceptualization, causes, and consequences of state failure, as well as policy-oriented analyses as to how state failure can be contained, reversed, or prevented. In order to deal fully with the phenomenon of state failure, investigators must be involved in a number of boundary-crossing activities. The contributors to this volume have addressed failed states through:

• multiple levels of analysis, assessing domestic and cross-border phenomena, internal and external conflict, domestic and international political economy;
• multiple disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches representing political science, sociology, and economics;
• various methodological approaches, including large-N empirical analyses, case studies, and simulations; and
• through both basic and applied research, drawing on the work of academics, IGOs, NGOs, and national governments.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Conflict Management and Peace Science.

Harvey Starr is the Dag Hammarskjold Professor in International Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of South Carolina.