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Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World

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This is an utterly brilliant book that has held my attention all morning. Although the authors do not integrate the thinking in the ten books below, I am totally, deeply, impressed by their intelligence, knowledge, and good intention.

They set out to develop understanding in five areas:

1. What State needs to do
2. How international community can help
3. How timelines and interdependencies should define sequencing
4. Why one size does NOT fit all
5. Why we must accept our shared responsibility and recognize the need for both proactive intervention, and coproduction (and sharing) of wealth.

I started with the endnotes and index, which is where I begin the most intelligent books in my reading program. I immediately detected the gaps that I address with the ten annotated links, but I was also immediately won over in seeing their appreciation for the report of the High Level Threat Panel of the UN, for Singapore under Lee Kwan Yew, for the balanced score card approach (some call for a triple bottom line), for Paul Collier's focus on the bottom billion, for Paul Hawkin's et al on natural capitalism.

Within the notes, I was shocked to learn that it has been reported that the United Nations deprived Afghanistan of the first two and a half years of all donor contribution, "by agreement" with US Government and World Bank. Since one of the author's has served as Finance Minister in Afghanistan, not only do I believe this--it must never happen again.

I find in this book one of the most original, refreshing, relevant, and therefore essential reviews on the matter of the State. Although the author's do not cite McIver, the original master on the origins and functions of the state, I consider them to be the new thought leaders and essential to any discussion of how to improve the inter-relationships among the eight tribes of governance: states, militaries, law enforcement authorities, academics, businesses, media, non-governmental organizations, and civil society including labor unions and religions. They are wrong-headed in thinking that "only sovereign states...will allow human progress to continue," and that "illegitimate networks will not be conquered except through hierarchical organizations," but in no way does this diminish the extreme importance of their deep thinking on the role of the state and the need to change both our concepts of sovereignty and our rules of the road for international organizations.

A useful early idea is that of the "double compact" between the country leadership and the international community on the one hand, and with the citizens on the other. It becomes obvious very quickly that corruption in government service is the single cancer that must be removed before states can achieve legitimacy and efficacy.

The authors have many gifted turns of phrase to include "harnessing our collective energies and readjusting to emerging patterns."

The authors recognize early on that legitimacy comes from below, from citizens, and must be earned.

I am not going to summarize each chapter, but I want to point readers toward the Army War College Strategy Conference, just concluded, on "Rebalancing the Instruments of National Power." I have posted both 29 pages of notes and an 8-page draft article for the Joint Forces Quarterly. Singapore got it early and is the world's first "smart nation." They understood early on that education powers economics, economics powers security, and so on.

Today, the authors document ably, stewardship of the environment, respect for social entrepreneurship, fair trade, and innovation in applying information technology to create wealth are all coming to the fore with honest leaders.

They identify five aspects of the networked world that are of note:

1. Framework for balancing activities of diverse stakeholders
2. Rule of law at a strategic level, with freedom of action at a tactical level (not quite true in the USA where the corrupt federal Congress establishes federal CEILINGS for regulatory action).
3. Massive investment--one reads repeatedly of the glut of money available for emerging markets (and I would add, the absence of both commercial intelligence and co-investment planning with charitable foundations)
4. World is evolving according to open systems (super point, see my keytone briefing to Gnomedex 2008, "Open Everything."
5. World is finally starting to evolve past rote memorization and toward recognizing patterns (the adaptive complex system and panarchy literature covers this well).

In the middle of the book they have six themes, each developed in a manner that makes this book quite valuable for any library, personal or organizational.

1. Conflict causes polarization of identities *and* ungovernability of aid subject to black market rules.
2. Peacemaking has been geared to compromise rather than strategic planning for a long-term outcome
3. This means that state dysfunctionality is highest immediately after the peace accord.
4. Even if civil war does not break out, cost of failed politics and poor policies is immense.
5. Lack of money is not the driver for poverty, but rather corrupt politics that enrich the few at the expense of the many.
6. Dysfunctional states spawn the rise and spread of networks of criminality and wealth confiscation instead of networks of social wealth creation and sharing.

The book concludes with "A New Agenda for State Building"

1. International compacts
2. Sovereignty strategy
3. Shared rules of the game
4. Mobilization of resources (this would be better titled harmonization of resources--we need Global Range of Gifts Tables for every country down to the village hut level, online, updated by national call centers
4. New leadership styles--this is a superb overview of what it takes to migrate from industrial era pyramidal leadership to Epoch B swarm leadership (see the image I am loading above).
5. Reflexive monitoring at every step of the implementation process
6. Double compact in practice

The final two chapters focus on national programs, and in conclusion, on "Collective Power."

I put the book down feeling GREAT. This book is a seminal reference.

Now for ten books (and my reviews) that round out this one book:
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

This is an important, easy-to-understand look at why rebuilding failing states should be the at the top of our country's priority list. The authors provide clear cut examples of why previous efforts to curb corruption and terrorism have failed, and offer a viable "framework" for fixing these systems.

I would recommend reading this book to gain a rather general sense of the important issues in addressing failed states. I think the authors make a strong case for the desperate need for a more strategic/management-based approach to statebuilding.

My criticism is that I felt that the authors were often randomly picking and choosing examples that seemed to "nicely" fit their thesis while overlooking more complex cases of state failure (such as the DRC or Somalia) where their approach appears almost too clean to implement. I would have really appreciated a deeper assessment of a difficult case study where the authors attempted to implement their approach while discussing the myriad of complexities and shortcomings of their own strategies.

Though the authors do a decent job critiquing the UN and the failures of Western government interventions, I think they needed to go farther in addressing the issue of resource extraction and how the interests of the developed world in continuing such policies (or ignoring such activities all together) contradict directly with true sustainable development. If the market model is really the answer, as the authors contend, then which agency (or group of states?) can effectively serve as the honest broker in the battle between market profit/development vs. sustainable state building? This is a very important issue to address given the power imbalances between the key actors in the international system. Such imbalances exacerbate failed interventions and perpetuate state failure.

I found this book after watching a talk by Clare Lockart at the Aspen Ideas Festival website.

The talk is amazing--I said to myself "finally, here is somebody with novel, systemic insights into international development--what works and what doesn't work." So I was very excited to get the book.

I found the book to be a somewhat tough read. In the first half the commentary wanders more than it needs to. It's clear that the authors know a lot about the history of related events, but the focus jumps around such that I struggled to pull out the key points, or find a clear line of thought. The bright spots are the stories sprinkled throughout.

The second half of the book (Parts 2 and 3) is a fairly straightforward description of the "Ten Functions of a State" that they define. It's all very sensible, although I wish there was more talk of "how to get there from here," more examples of how to actually put it into place.

I kept wishing for focused chapters on specific countries, or even situations, that would take the ideas from the book and apply them, rather than a few paragraphs here and there.

By sheer coincidence, I started reading this book at the same time as the book "The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works" by Henry Waxman. I found that book to be an amazing read. It is one gripping story after another, with just the right amount of commentary and structure around it to give perspective. I couldn't put it down--read it in a few days, and am still talking about what I learned.

The ideas underneath this book are important and brilliant. The way it's written just didn't work for me, and I suspect for a broad audience. If these ideas were presented differently, for instance as a set of stories (like Waxman did), this would be riveting.

I hope the authors take another crack at this in a different format because the ideas are important--perhaps a different publisher?

If you care about international development, this is worth looking at--the ideas are very good.

Fixing Failed States left me with a mixture of excitement and frustration - excitement because it sets out some good ideas on state-building, frustration because it doesn't quite live up to the title and is sloppily edited, with whole chunks repeated verbatim, wandering narrative etc (shame on you, OUP!).

But let's focus on the interesting stuff. The authors have a go at a `kicking away the ladder'-style trawl of some historical examples of state-building, citing Singapore, the Southern US, European Union and Ireland. Not bad, especially when showing how Singapore went from fragile case and predicted basket case to statist development superstar. As always, there is a nobel prize-winning economist on hand (in this case Gunnar Myrdal) to pronounce that the country is doomed, just as it begins a stellar take-off.

But the real substance is drawn from Afghanistan, where the authors first met and worked together when Ghani was Finance Minister after the fall of the Taliban, and Lockhart was an adviser to the government. I previously blogged on their account of this in Prospect.

The authors identify and explain ten core functions of the modern state (the state's remit - and spending- has expanded remorselessly over the last 200 years):

- Rule of Law
- A monopoly on the legitimate means of violence
- Administrative Control
- Sound management of public finances
- Investments in human capital
- Creation of Citizenship Rights through Social Policy (eg social protection),
- Provision of Infrastructure Services
- Formation of a market
- Management of public assets, both physical and intangible (eg national brand)
- Effective Public Borrowing

They also wrestle with a critical question that has come up repeatedly in presentations of From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World: are effective states generally built by autocrats (think Bismarck or Stalin), rather than democrats? Their answer is that history has moved on, and that today's state builders need to respect rights and consult their populations, both to achieve internal legitimacy, and international acceptance. They argue this more through assertion than evidence, though - it certainly doesn't pass the China test.

Where it gets interesting is in discussing the implications of state-building for the international system. The authors argue for an overhaul to agree `international compacts' around a `sovereignty strategy' of conscious state building for each country, defined as `the alignment of internal and external stakeholders to the goals of a sovereign state.' `Instead of the many different interventions - humanitarian projects, security, development, trade - agreeing on a long-term, state-building strategy tailored to specific contexts and designed to achieve a fully functioning state should be an organizing principle for the international community.'

All well and good, but what do such sovereignty strategies actually contain? Here it gets a bit vague. In a manner analogous to the `growth diagnostics' work of Rodrik, Hausmann and co. at Harvard University, the authors argue that `the state-building agenda entails easing constraints on state institutions... Rather than adhering to a model that stipulates a priori both the institutions and the mechanisms for their creation, this approach encourages piecemeal, context-specific innovations.' This `institutions diagnostics' approach necessarily entails a lot of trial and error - a job for searchers, not planners, in William Easterly's useful schema.

Although this approach needs a lot more specifics, there are a few tantalising illustrations from Afghanistan, for example when they wanted to replace a chaotic system of multiple currencies, the IMF warned it would take years, and UN advised that Afghanistan would need to employ 8,000 bureaucrats. In fact they did it in four months, by working with the national network of hawala money traders who rapidly organized the collection and then burned and replaced the old money.

Finally, the authors trumpet the virtues of the Afghan National Solidarity Program, set up in 2003 and `designed to empower communities to manage their own reconstruction process. The government provided block grants of between $20,000 and $60,000 to every village in the country as long as they agreed to abide by requirements that the village elect its leadership council by secret ballot, hold participatory meetings to design its own recovery plan and projects, and post its accounts in a public place... four years later, the programme has seen more than 12,000 village development councils elected ad more than 19,000 project plans approved.'

What interested me was the striking echo with the approach of the US marines to the challenge of chaos and complexity - no attempt to determine the exact course of an engagement, just stick to three basic principles: take the high ground, keep moving and stay in communications contact. So is the NSP the way to spend money and build states in a chaotic and complex world?

This review first appeared on Oxfam's From Poverty to Power blog on [...]

Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart are intrepid state entrepreneurs. Their thoughtful analysis of roles that states must play in building societies is characterized by their list of ten essential state functions. Moreover, they have reinforced the framework of markets, citizens, and state by capping with a fourth institutional tier- that of the international community through the idea of a `double compact'. But their focus is squarely on state-building that achieves a high `sovereignty index' which means that the government effectively produces meaningful public value for its citizens. If you are looking to engage the latest and most relevant nation-building strategy, this book provides an invaluable service.

When I picked up this book I hoped to learn about the crucial point in fixing failed states: how to change from the confrontation and conflict mode that resulted in armed conflict and the failing of state functions to reconciliation, reconstruction and development. More precisely, how to assure, that after the failing of a state a unity of purpose emerges between all parties of the previous conflict. There is no word in the book about this crucial issue. How can post World War II Europe with a destroyed infrastructure but a strong unity of purpose to reconstruct and an entrenched understanding of how a society, an economy and a modern country work be suggested as an easy to copy model for countries like Somalia, East Timor and, yes, Afghanistan? The examples from Afghanistan are always interesting but there is no behind-the-scenes-look at the working of the Afghan government, leave alone an explanation, why Mr. Ghani did not continue his obviously successful work as Minister of Finance - only because too many international delegations were keeping him from governing? The inside story and the lessons learned from the interaction within the Afghan society, the Afghan government and the international community in Afghanistan would have been truly relevant to 'Fixing Failed States'. The authors seem to suggest that this task can be managed just by rational arguments and listening to everybody. But personal corruption of those in power and their will to maintain this power as well as the ethnic, religious and political cleavages in a country do not seem to be easily accessible to rational arguments. Otherwise we would have no failed states and Afghanistan would since ten years be following the Singapore model ( by the way - it is surprising that Singapore with its rather authoritarian orientation would be used as a shining example without explaining this seeming contradiction.

So - what do we get? A very interesting and readable chapter 7 on the ten functions of the state (but this chapter applies not only to failed states but to every state, as the examples show that are taken from developing and developed countries alike), a lot of development assistance bashing that can be found more convincingly in other books (William Easterly). The rest is hot air and disappointment.

Democracy means nothing if the government collapses after it's formed. "Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding A Fractured World" discusses countries in danger of collapsing or have collapsed already. Analyzing these states and what political scientists can learn from them and find what they did wrong for current and future countries. "Fixing Failed States" is scholarly and informative, sure to intrigue many readers about the fate of many modern states.