Failedstates 2012
- By FP Staff
If anything has become clear since we started publishing the Failed States Index in 2005, it’s that state failure is an entrenched problem — one the world is far from figuring out how to fix. Every one of the 20 countries atop this year’s index has been there before: Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Iraq have never made it out of the top 10, and Somalia takes the unwanted No. 1 spot for the fifth straight year. But despite an overall trend of stagnation — the average score on the index, prepared by the Fund for Peace and published annually by Foreign Policy, has remained more or less steady from year to year — the 2011 Arab revolutions prove that dramatic change is still a possibility, if not a guarantee of progress. The biggest shifts in this year’s index were registered by Libya, Syria, and Egypt — all three countries jumped markedly higher on the list, a reminder that although revolutions may weaken or topple dictators, they can also provoke greater instability. But there are gains being made as well: Mogadishu is in the midst of its longest period of relative peace in the past two decades. These gains may seem meager, but at the very least they suggest that, even when it comes to the worst cases of human misery, nothing is forever.
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The 2012 Failed States Index
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Photos: Postcards From Hell 2012
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The Worst of the Worst
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10 Reasons Why States Fail
By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson -
Was the Arab Spring Worth It?
By Hussein Ibish -
The Watch List
By Jay Ulfelder -
What’s Wrong with Pakistan?
By Robert D. Kaplan -
Kaplan’s 8 Geographical Pivot Points
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Are All States Failing States?
By David Rothkopf -
It’s Lonely Being No. 1
By Paul Collier -
How to Help Somalia
By Abdirahman Mohamed Mohamud Farole -
Failed States by the Numbers: How Bad Are They?
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Change Is the Only Constant
J.J. Messner -
Flirting with Disaster
By Patricia Taft
- The Worst of the Worst
From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, see which countries fared worst across 12 indicators. - Why States Fail
The top 10 reasons countries fall apart. - Was the Arab Spring Worth It?
From lost GDP to continuing violence, tallying the costs of a region in turmoil. - The Watch List
Predicting state failure isn’t as hard as you think. - Postcards from Hell
What does living in a failed state look like? A tour through the world’s 60 most fragile countries - 8 Geographical Pivot Points
From Angola to Yemen, eight countries whose futures are tied up in the land they occupy. - It’s Lonely Being No. 1
Is there any hope for Somalia? - How to Help Somalia
The president of Puntland State argues that to defeat the global threats of piracy, terrorism, and anarchy, the world needs to think locally.
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Rebecca FrankelRebecca Frankel is senior editor, special projects at Foreign Policy. She is the author of War Dogs (forthcoming in the fall of 2014 from Palgrave), a book about canines in combat, the subject of her regular Friday column "Rebecca's War Dog of the Week," featured on The Best Defense. Before joining FP in 2008, she was managing editor of Moment Magazine, a publication founded by Elie Wiesel in 1975, where she began working in 2003. In addition to her work on war dogs, Frankel has written on a wide range of topics from the religious escapades of singer Bob Dylan to Hitler's family doctor. Her profile of author Joyce Carol Oates was published in the collection Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations in 2006. She has appeared as a commentator on ABC World News and MSNBC among others. In 2011, she was named one of 12 women in foreign policy to follow on Twitter by the Daily Muse.
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