What Is State Failure?

The article is devoted to an overview of state failure conceptualization. One of the most popular concepts was failed state after transformed in fragile state. These two concepts are based on weberian understanding of the state that is irrelevant from historical perspective. Also critics have denoted to political labeling, incorrectness and the lack of formalization of these concepts. Since these indices were built for practical purposes, a full­fledged theoretical foundation for the idea of state weakness was elaborated in great details in a concept of state capacity. This concept tries to surpass the narrow weberian understanding of the state and offers three dimensions of state capacity: fiscal­economic, administrative­bureaucratic and the control over violence. The drawback of this concept is an absence of the threshold to understand whether the state has experienced state failure or not. The most formalized approach to measure state failure is created within a concept of state collapse. This concept has common with the previous concept because bases on the same features (fiscal, administrative and military). Using this concept faces some difficulties because of different cases are the same according to this concept. Sociology offered a concept of state breakdown which has three points: fiscal crisis, elite conflict and mass mobilization. After analyzing both sociological and anthropological literature the author offers to add to these three criteria two additional: deligitimation (or change of self­description in the system) and territorial disintegration.

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