ABSTRACT
The Persistent State Weakness in the Global Age addresses the question of why state weakness in the global era persists. Informed by a globalization perspective, this chapter shows how state weakness is frequently self-reproducing and functional. The specific focus on state fragility and weakness in this economic category, however, comes from the donor community and its increasing focus since the late 1990s on aid effectiveness. When looked at comparatively, the region is not characterized by the consequences said to define state weakness. Indeed, the outcome measures are much better than one would expect based on their measures of wealth by GDP or GDP per capita. The Balkan countries also rank extremely low on all the characteristics that would predict a high crime region. The political and policy work has led to an equally remarkable proliferation of quantitative indexes that aimed at classifying countries according to their level of state weakness, fragility, risk of failure, and outright failure.
