CIAO DATE: 02/2012
October 2011
Centre for International Peace and Security Studies
Today, Americans are more threatened by weak and failed states than they are by the strong.1 Or so we believe. A growing developed-world consensus sees failed states as the preeminent global threat.2 But that consensus - and any new security policy derived from it - rests upon an uncertain foundation; insights into the nature and intensity of threats emanating from failed states remain surprisingly tentative and unsystematic. Using new panel data on state weakness, failure and terrorism (1999-2008), this study examines the relationship between internal anarchy and terror. Among the so-called non-traditional threats, terrorism has received by far the most scholarly and policy attention, but the literature is too incoherent to draw any reliable conclusions regarding internal weakness' influence on a country's likelihood to generate terrorism. I find that failure at the country-level does not have a straightforward effect on the probability of terrorism. Specifically, there is no relationship between increased state weakness and a country's incidence or perpetration of terrorism. However, looking only at the 'most failed' states, one finds distinct, significant relationships between different aspects of state failure and terrorism's incidence and production. First, states with the worst human security records are significantly less likely to experience or produce terrorism. Second, the states judged most corrupt, least ruled by law and with the greatest political instability - including total government collapse - are more likely to experience terrorism within their borders. But, of those states, only those experiencing political collapse are more likely to produce terrorism. These results suggest that different types of state collapse yield different propensities toward terrorism; they offer promising avenues for future research; and the models offer methodological and substantive improvements on previous research.
Resource link: Do Failed States Produce More Terrorism: Initial Evidence from the Non-Traditional Threat Data (1999-2008) [PDF] - 507K