ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to advance a parsimonious explanation anchored in - and based on - both positivist - not in the more metatheoretically rigid and unimaginative sense - and postmodernist epistemological foundation. Over the years a plethora of measures have been suggested as possible cure for the problem of state failure and domestic anarchy. The ultimate source of communal conflicts, which in many cases lead to domestic anarchy and emerge under a variety of circumstances and take various forms, is perhaps reducible to the crises of citizenship and legitimacy. When these crises reach an acute level, they could lead to the total collapse of the institution of state. World history is replete with examples of communal conflicts that took place before the institution of state came into being in its political form. For analytic and practical purposes, the dialectical process of state failure could be thought to begin when a state comes into being in national or imperial form.
