Thursday, 29 January 2009, Washington, DC
with speakers:
Barbara Harff, Professor of Political Science Emerita at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis and Distinguished Visiting Professor (2003, 2005) at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University
Jack A. Goldstone, the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel Jr. Professor at the George Mason School of Public Policy
With approximately two billion people living on the verge of institutional collapse in fragile states, state failures are a daily tragedy that affect their inhabitants and put in question the stability of the state system. Strengthening weak states and preventing state failure are urgent tasks for the 21st century.
To advance the debate on this topic, the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America organized the Talk Series entitled 'The (Un)Making of Failing States: Profits, Risks and Measures of Failure'. The third talk in the series, addressed the models and instruments for measuring and forecasting failure. The speakers explored the notion of state failure as a category to be measured and addressed challenges in identifying cases, testing explanations, identifying risk assessments and early warnings for genocide prevention. Likewise, the speakers explored assumptions, strengths and limitations of models used in developing an index to measure state failure and consider the possibilities and challenges of working with a multilateral index for state failure based on the groundbreaking project the State Failure Task Force, now known as the Political Instability Task Force (PITF).
-Click here to download Barbara Harff's text
-Click here to download Jack Goldstone's text
-Click here for the first roundtable discussion 'The Unrelenting Logic of Business as Usual: Piracy and Commerce in Failed States' with William Zartman and Ahmed I. Samatar
-Click here for the second roundtable discussion 'The Risks of Acting and Waiting: Democracy Promotion and State Failure' with Robert I. Rotberg and Thomas Carothers