ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the new Peace and Conflict Instability Ledger-a ranking of 160 countries in terms of their risk of future state instability. Investment of preventive resources in high-risk states is preferable to managing the consequences of state failure. Those consequences are often enormous and catastrophic. In the wake of state failure, humanitarian crises and increased military violence can leave a gruesome human death toll. Index construction-the former approach-is a different methodological approach. Gurr and Marshall obtained their index by combining composite scores on individual items through summing and averaging. The chapter focuses on a small set of factors representing four broad categories of state features and functions: the political domain, the economic domain, the security domain, and the social domain. Instability can emerge from factors in each of these domains, or-most likely-from combinations of them.
