Global Report on Conflict, Governance and State Fragility 2008

Abstract

The Global Report series and its signature State Fragility Index and Matrix first appeared in the March 2007 edition of the Foreign Policy Bulletin.1 It was designed by Monty G. Marshall and Jack Goldstone at the Center for Global Policy, George Mason University, and patterned after the Peace and Conflict series created by Marshall and Ted Robert Gurr in 2001. These global report series were designed to satisfy the imperative for knowing the contrasting conditions characterizing the many states comprising the emerging global system and gauging general system performance in an era of dynamic globalization. The original report published in 2000 sparked controversy within the global policy community with its prescient observation, and presentation of supporting evidence, that “the extent of warfare among and within states lessened by nearly half in the first decade after the [end of the] Cold War.”2 This claim was initially dismissed as either mistaken or misinformed by most officials and analysts in the United Nations Secretariat when it was brought to their attention. The claim clearly challenged the prevailing perception of increasing global disorder and that the world was becoming a more, not less, dangerous place.3 It took several years before critical reaction turned away from examining the claim itself to offering explanations for the global decrease in warfare. In the current Global Report, we continue the original claim by observing that global warfare has remained in decline through 2007 and has diminished by over sixty percent since its peak in the late 1980s. Consistent with the decline in major armed conflicts has been the continuing increase in the number and consolidation of democratic regimes, rising to ninety-four at the end of 2007 (nearly sixty percent of the 162 countries examined in this report). Some cause for concern must also be reported: the number of ongoing armed conflicts may be showing signs of leveling off, the frequency of onsets of new armed conflicts in the world has not decreased substantially since the end of the Cold War in 1991, and the occurrence of “high casualty terrorist bombings” has continued to increase through 2007. It appears that, while world politics have been successful in gaining peaceful settlements to many of the world’s armed conflicts, several long-running wars continue to resist peaceful settlement and new armed conflicts continue to break out regularly. This report begins with a brief discussion of general, systemic trends in global conflict, governance, and development, with a detailed assessment of changes in State Fragility since 1995. It then presents the State Fragility Index and Matrix 2008 (Table 1) which provides an array of measures of individual state fragilities and, by implication, a systematic assessment of the capacities and prospects for each of the 162 independent countries (with total populations greater than 500,000) that comprise the global system. The State Fragility Index combines scores measuring two essential qualities of state performance: effectiveness and legitimacy; these two quality indices combine scores on distinct measures of the key performance dimensions of security, governance, economics, and social development. The latest version of the Fragility Matrix has established a baseline set of values for its eight component indicators in order to measure State Fragility in previous years and examine changes in each indicator over time.