Annual Report Series: Global Report on Conflict, Governance, and State Fragility

• Research for this publication, originally featured in the 2007 Foreign Policy Bulletin, involves the calculation of the unique State Fragility Index, which measures state fragility, or weakness, in terms of effectiveness and legitimacy in areas of security, economy, domestic politics, and human development. Because state fragility is closely linked with governance, development and conflict dynamics, the report also features analysis of progress in and interactions among these areas. The 2009 report, co-authored by Ben Cole and Dr. Monty G. Marshall with support from the One Earth Future Foundation and George Mason University, as well as the 2010 update and most recent (2011) report, are available here. Print copies are available by request. See the Center for Systemic Peace website for more information.

• Comparative political science and sociological research lacks a valid and reliable cross-national time-series measure of civil society vibrance. While groups such as Civicus are working to measure civil society cross-nationally directly, they cannot tell us about civil society over time, and sample size is limited. Moreover, agreement on a definition of civil society remains difficult to reach. This project involves developing a proxy measure for civil society, which can be applied to all countries over time, which, despite not measuring civil society directly, nonetheless correlates well with existing measures of civil society strength, as well as established correlates of civil society strength, such as per capita income and democratic governance qualities. This project is supported by the Center for Systemic Peace and Societal-Systems Research Inc.

• Originally a book chapter, this piece conducts a review of literature on fragile and failed states, including theoretical and empirical analyses, and data sources, and argues that the complex-social-systems research design and agenda fits this increasingly important research area better than traditional methodologies. The author also responds to recent critics of the state fragility/failure research agenda, such as William Easterly.

• Developed by Marshall and Cole, and currently being coded by Marshall, Cole, and a team of researchers from the Center for Systemic Peace, this dataset records election results, legislative seat distributions, and codes for regime type and party systems, for all countries with more than 500,000 people, from 1946 - present.  

• The problem of factionalism has been identified as a leading cause in state failures and political instability events, and is present in most, if not all, societies during the democratic transition process. Unlike the recent meaning of the term reflecting intra-party fragmentation, or the more common condition of "issue factionalism," where society is polarized related to a specific political issue, factionalism in this study features extreme, systemic, and sustained polarization of society, with reinforcing political cleavages, and frequently "unnatural" alliances among parties of divergent interests and anti-system parties. Use of coercion, by either state or non-state actors, as well as widespread demonstrations and election boycotss are common symptoms of the factional condition. Research into this condition is focused on identifying successful means of managing factionalism, investigating the role of the pre-factional regime type in determining factionalism outcomes, and the emergence of factionalism in established democracies.

• Previous discussions of governance and civil society have focused on the relationship of both with democratic governance. This study reexamines civil society, not as a requisite for democracy, but as a means of harnessing the complexity inherent in social systems, and making use of this complexity to improve communication between civil society and the state, and vice versa. In countries where civil society is highly regulated and vertically integrated, there is very little feedback on state policies and programs, although the state may be much more effective at achieving its ends. In contrast, a country with little or no societal regulation, complexity (defined as interactions among people or organizations and between people and organizations, and their environment) goes unharnessed altogether: chaos and anarchy. This type of system would allow so much unstructured communication and feedback that any useful information is overwhelmed by "noise," preventing the state from learning, and civil society from benefiting. This thesis posits that the only way to harness social complexity, improve state-society relations, allow government learning, and generate the most effective policies is maintaining a balance between these extremes of horizontal and vertical structures, between chaos and order. Thus, governance should not be measured on a binary democracy/autocracy basis, or even on a scale from autocracy to democracy, but rather in terms of the ability of the state to harness the complexity of the social system.