ABSTRACT
State failure shapes human rights conditions in powerful ways. Civil service failure leads to violations of property rights, corruption, rent-seeking and inept economic policy, all leading to poor conditions for economic and subsistence rights. Bureaucratic corruption hampers the delivery of key services, such as health care and education. Unfortunately, the dominant trend has tended in the opposite direction, seeking more aggressive enforcement against a handful of exemplary villains through mechanisms predicated on international law, and therefore on the presumption of sovereignty. The apogee of this trend is the International Criminal Court (ICC). Usable tools should focus on improving human rights conditions by addressing contexts that encourage petty despots. Many core problems of weak states and poor economies have traditionally been addressed through development aid. During the Cold War the most common model of aid delivery was to provide direct government-to-government aid. This enabled recipient governments to build strong patronage networks but seldom resulted in strong states.
