What is State Failure?
What is State Failure?
Sassen & Ahmed: State Failure
FOREIGN POLICY magazine issues a Failed States Index once a year in conjunction with the Fund for Peace. A number of indicators are used to determine state failure: demographic pressures, the presence of refugees and internally displaced people, group grievances, human flight, uneven development, delegitimization of the state, human rights violations, an unaccountable security apparatus, failing public services, economic decline, elite factionalizing, and external intervention. The most recent Index, released in July, ranked Pakistan tenth among the sixty states categorized as failing to some degree.
Designating Pakistan a failed state renders invisible the multiple and diverse democratizing forces that have evolved there over the last decade. These forces are shaping law, welfare, diplomacy, business, and people’s empowerment. They need to be recognized by the wider world. They should not be written out of history by indexes that pivot solely on the character of the state.
A number of signs point to successes in Pakistan.
Consider the 2008 nationwide elections that were held amid militants’ threats, after eight years of military rule and the terrible assassination of prime minister candidate Benazir Bhutto. These were credible elections, despite militants controlling much of northwest Pakistan.
Admittedly, deadly explosions at Lahore’s Ahmadiyya mosques in May and the Sufi shrine Data Durbar in July are reminders to the world of the militants’ ability to stage “comebacks.” But these comebacks arrived in the wake of politically backed military operations in the Buner and Swat districts in 2009, in which the military decisively defeated Taliban forces. And of an estimated 2.7 million persons displaced from their homes in recent years, resettlement work by the Pakistani state has thus far enabled 1.6 million to return home.
Pakistan is a country with enormous socioeconomic inequality, but income inequality is not a particularly significant indicator of a failed state. Many admired states—the United States, China, Brazil—have had long histories of sharp inequality. Furthermore, Pakistan’s parliament has now implemented its largest ever, state-led welfare program—the Benazir Income Support Program. This law strengthens the claims of the welfare agency on the national budget, quite significant in a country obsessed with unaccounted for defense and national security projects.
Diplomatically, the Pakistani state has reentered into peace talks with India. Though these remain symbolic at this stage, the two states have lowered tensions which boiled high after the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008, permitting modest movements of people and goods between them. Notwithstanding their mutual suspicions and exchange of terrorism charges, this dialogue could be a stepping stone for establishing ties based on common interests in intelligence sharing and counter-terrorism, helping to reclaim territories ceded to militants in northwest Pakistan and northeast India. The leaders of failed states rarely talk to leaders of other states. That’s not the case with Pakistan.
To a great degree, Pakistan’s self-grown civil society operates with little interference from the state. Entities like the Edhi Foundation, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the Aurat Foundation, the Citizen’s Foundation, and hundreds more grassroots organizations mitigate state failure. They actively work against Pakistan becoming a failed state by providing free ambulance services, monitoring human rights, enabling women’s participation in the public domain, subsidizing mainstream education for the poor, and so on.
Kashf, a microfinance endeavor recently praised by President Obama, has 300,000 clients with $100 million in loans; it is a relatively new private business showing the potential of entrepreneurship in untapped segments of the country’s population. Economic reforms have enabled multiple start-ups in niche sectors. The success of these start-ups is reflected in a recent World Bank survey that ranked Pakistan eighty-fifth out of 183 countries in terms of ease of doing business.
State and society in Pakistan responded to the humanitarian crisis following the 2005 earthquake with generosity and a sense of duty to the nation, debunking the recycled charges of factionalism and fragmentation, which are typical problems in failed states. The state may have been remiss in its pre-quake preparedness, but the nation came together as a whole, with the support of international organizations, to compensate for that state failure.
Democracy in the country has brought provincial autonomy for the people of Pakistan’s Northern Areas, now renamed Gilgit-Baltistan. This has created a de facto fifth province, complete with its own legislature. The first governor of the new province is a female social worker. Other forces are at work too, including the call by Ismaili spiritual leader Agha Khan to give political rights to the Northern Areas, home to a large Ismaili population. These developments promote greater democratization in Pakistan.
THE INTENTION here is not to hide or downplay the problems facing Pakistan. It is rather to ask what we gain by rendering the forces of democracy outlined above invisible on the larger stage of world opinion by burying them under the overpowering concept of a failed state. Calling Pakistan a failed state has the effect of writing these forces out of the script.
To further underline the importance of these democratizing forces in Pakistan, we can look to instances of undemocratic forces in a country that has never been on the list of failed states and that considers itself a global champion of democracy: the United States.
In brief, even global champions of democracy with robust protections of freedom of expression have some rather serious flaws that compromise their democracies.
All we seek to do here is to call for cross-border recognition of the diversity of elements that constitute a country beyond certain features of the state, and the importance of including such elements in the overall rankings of those countries.
For a list of the sources used in this article, please email editors at dissentmagazine.org.
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and a member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com), and author most recently of Territory, Authority, Rights (Princeton 2008). Razi Ahmed is a graduate student in Energy Studies at Columbia who has contributed op-eds to Dawn, one of Pakistan’s leading English-language newspapers.
Homepage photo: Gilgit, in the Northern Areas of Pakistan (Waqas Usman/Wikimedia Commons/2002)
