ABSTRACT
Is it actually possible to label sociopolitical structures as failures or near-failures and pitch them against so-called successful ones? Can failure be quantified and calculated against a set of specific and measurable indicators? And what happens when these classificatory regimes fail in achieving what they set out to do and instead create a normative environment that is counterproductive? Nowhere is the complexity and the significance of these questions more apparent than in the context of state failure. In the last three decades, the concepts of state failure and fragility have gained importance, despite the absence of a consensus on what qualifies as a successful or a failed state. But there are fundamental problems that affect this discourse, beyond definitional ambiguities. This chapter discusses that the state failure and fragility discourse is a normative one which takes supposedly stable states as the norm and then focuses on the outliers to bring them in line with the expectations of the international community. The indicators and rankings are a more concretised manifestation of this, and act as governance instruments to identify failed and fragile states and shape their behaviour. However, the creation of the failure-fragility discourse and the norm is itself based on an anomalous understanding of state failure. The acontextuality that is built into the state failure-fragility discourse means that the prognosis and the predictions that the paradigm offers are unable to recognise the problems that gave rise to this phenomenon in the first place.
