Since the US is all but in its death spiral, let's talk about US state fragility, failure, and what it all means. This will include citations, pictures, and definitions that are important for national security experts and layman to understand. For one, let's define failure. - ThreadSky

rabidpelican.bsky.social • 59 days ago

Since the US is all but in its death spiral, let's talk about US state fragility, failure, and what it all means. This will include citations, pictures, and definitions that are important for national security experts and layman to understand. For one, let's define failure.

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rabidpelican.bsky.social•59 days ago

Defining state failure is almost wholly dependent on how we define a "state." The best way is to define it based upon how a state defines itself, which in most cases is social-contract theory. Thus, a failed state is a state that no longer satisfies its social contract (Zartman 1995).

rabidpelican.bsky.social•59 days ago

This Hobbesian definition has been contested, but more so on its nuances than fundamental concept. The main competition, actor-network theory (ANT), has its own uses describing fragile states (Schouten 2013). However, actor-network theory can be seen more as a quantization of social contracts, here.

rabidpelican.bsky.social•59 days ago

For the sake of this conversation, we are going to presume social contract theory since that is majority of legal assumptions made for constitutional governments. The ratification of constitutions presupposes the existence of social contracts, and this is explicit in American society (A. Allen 1999)

rabidpelican.bsky.social•59 days ago

Thus, we can make general measurements about a state's fragility or failure by measuring specific components of social contracts (i.e. constitutions and law) across states. These include data like GDP, import/exports, cost of living, excess deaths, mortalities, etc. to create scoring systems.

rabidpelican.bsky.social•59 days ago

These scores originate from the CIA's attempt to analyze failed states in 2000. Helman and Ratner (1993) were the first to coin the term, but it is this commissioned task force that most emulate. Ironically, their findings contradicted the idea that failed states posed the greatest threat to the US.

rabidpelican.bsky.social•59 days ago

Since then, the Fund For Peace's "Fragile State Index" has been one of the standard metrics since 2005. Other metrics include the UN's OECD, British DFID, World Bank's CPIA, the US's USAID, Maryland's Political Instability Task Force, and a few others.

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