| Sumario: | What do we mean when we use the term "failed states"? It makes no sense theoretically and empirically, and is a political threat to countries so labeled. To explain the term's popularity, this book begins with its origins, how it shaped the conceptual framework for international development and security in the post-Cold War era, and why. It argues that one should focus on the actors who are promoting and implementing this concept and its policy agenda, not the states so labeled. Detailed analysis of international actors' policies in peacebuilding, statebuilding, development assistance, and armed conflict shows that they focus primarily on building their own operational capacity for intervention, not on statebuilding, that their ideology of failed states responds to the absence in these countries of what they need operationally to act, and that they actually create the characteristics they identify with failed/fragile states. The book concludes with a return to the unreformed international organization of development and security, including its linkage, if the trap of this ideology can be escaped. -- from back cover.
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