Fixing Failed States

Fixing Failed States addresses one of the central issues of our times: the proliferation of failed states across the world and our inability to stabilize them. There are between forty and sixty failed states, and they house one billion people. The world's worst problems-terrorism, drug and human trafficking, absolute poverty, ethnic conflict, disease, genocide-originate in such states, and the international community has devoted billions upon billions of dollars to solving the problem. Yet by and large, the effort has failed. Written by two of the world's foremost experts on the subject, the book does not simply describe the issue-it explains why our solutions have not worked and presents a compelling, doable agenda for addressing this most pressing of global crises. The task at hand is to develop novel strategies informed by the realities of our fully globalized world. Most importantly, international institutions should foster mutually reinforcing bonds between states, civil societies, and markets, which is the key to stability and progress in our era of globalization. The book's uniqueness lies in its essential optimism-an optimism that the authors have earned through their own substantial real-world efforts in failed states and their widely acknowledged expertise.