The Ideology of Failed States
Why Intervention Fails

Contests to reorganize the international system after the Cold War agree on the security threat of failed states: this book asks why.

Susan L. Woodward (Author)

9781316629581, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 3 April 2017

324 pages, 5 tables
23.2 x 15.6 x 2.2 cm, 0.48 kg

'In a very impressive follow-up to her work on the former Yugoslavia (Balkan Tragedy …), Woodward (CUNY Graduate Center) examines a myriad of failed states and finds that the reason intervention fails is not just the internal failures of these states.' S. Majstorovic, Choice

What do we mean when we use the term 'failed states'? This book presents the origins of the term, how it shaped the conceptual framework for international development and security in the post-Cold War era, and why. The book also questions how specific international interventions on both aid and security fronts - greatly varied by actor - based on these outsiders' perceptions of state failure create conditions that fit their characterizations of failed states. Susan L. Woodward offers details of international interventions in peacebuilding, statebuilding, development assistance, and armed conflict by all these specific actors. The book analyzes the failure to re-order the international system after 1991 that the conceptual debate in the early 1990s sought - to the serious detriment of the countries labelled failed or fragile and the concept's packaging of the entire 'third world', despite its growing diversity since the mid-1980s, as one.

1. Introduction
2. What's in a name?
3. History of a concept
4. State-building as solution
5. Building an international apparatus for state-building
6. The real problem of failed states
7. Consequences
8. Neither security nor development.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS]