The State Failure Debate and the Neglected Elite

Abstract

Descriptive terms such as “weak”, “failed”, “dysfunctional” and “collapsed”, are frequently used to connote certain characteristics of statehood. Most scholars agree that states attributed these descriptions are, to some extent, experiencing deficient “capacity” to perform certain functional tasks expected of states. The western state is used as the yardstick to evaluate such deficiency. Due to the western understanding of state performativity, the state failure literature neglects that the state is a political construct erected from historical power struggles. This paper suggests a decentralisation of the state from the state failure scholarship and will demonstrate how the structural characteristics of elites and their agency mutually reinforce ways of obtaining power that are incompatible with the western idea of statehood, and as such, are constitutive of what has been defined as state failure