That “failed state” is a misleading term is a point that we have raised numerous times on this blog. Failed state does typically not mean anarchy, but failed modern sovereign state. To be cheeky, it means “why don’t you govern the way we [i.e., the developed world] want you to govern the boundaries we imposed on you without your consent?” To be cheeky and terse, it means “why don’t you govern the way the west wants you to govern?” Failed modern states often do provide security – hence making them a state in the theoretical sense – just in a different way than people with blue uniforms and badges. Their only failure is to live up to our expectations.

The latest foray into this misleading argument comes from Benjamin Powell at The Freeman. Powell starts with a lurking straw man:

…by most measures Somalia’s poverty is diminishing and Somalia has improved living standards faster than the average sub-Saharan African country since the early 1990s. In that sense Somalia is at least a relative success story. The most interesting part of Somalia’s success is that it has all been achieved while the country has lacked any effective central government.

Powell spends most of the rest of the article describing governance in Somalia (which, to his credit, is a very interesting discussion). But there is a straw man lurking in the paragraph above and its “central” to his argument. (Intentional double entendre.) When we get to the next-to-last paragraph, the straw man becomes vivid:

Somalia does demonstrate that a reasonable level of law and order can be provided by nonstate customary legal systems and that such systems are capable of providing some basis for economic development.

I don’t know if the straw man is intentional or if Powell doesn’t understand that he is contradicting himself. What makes these customary legal systems non-state? Somalia doesn’t look like a state in the modern, western-defined sovereign empirical sense, but this is only one type of state. If Somali clans have the legitimacy to provide security for the people they govern, then by definition these clans form a state. What is unclear here is if Powell doesn’t recognize the difference between a state in a theoretical sense versus the empirical way we define a state today or whether he is trying to mislead us. Confusion about the concept of a state is at the center of the (failed) argument. Once we realize that the empirical modern state is only one type of state that can exist, the argument really comes back to “why don’t you govern they ways outsiders want you to govern.” I hate to be all ethno-centric here, but this is the bare-bones argument, even if Powell doesn’t recognize it.