The Ideology of Failed States

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.

Author: Susan L. Woodward
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 04/03/2017
Pages: 324
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 9.14h x 6.16w x 0.85d
ISBN: 9781316629581

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2018

About the Author
Woodward, Susan L.: - Susan L. Woodward is a professor of political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has more than twelve years' policy experience, including nine from 1990 at the Brookings Institution, Washington DC, where she wrote Balkan Tragedy (1994). Woodward has been interviewed frequently on television and radio, and has given congressional and House of Lords testimony. She created an analysis unit for the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) during the Bosnian war in 1994, and in 1999, the initial research program on conflict, security, and development for the Department for International Development, including advice on its aid to Kosovo and Moldova, at King's College London.