The 2008 Failed States Index, a joint venture of Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund For Peace, has been released, and as usual, Africa is sadly overrepresented. The continuing presence of African states on this ranking (the continent holds more than half of the slots among the twenty worst — most failing — countries) has caused Peter Pham to ask a question: Does the index forecast failure or, however unintentionally, precipitate it?
Pham's question is worth asking, but it ascribes far too much power to the rankings. One imagines that Somalia would be teetering, Zimbabwe's electoral crisis would have played out as it did, and Khartoum's rapacious thugs would have gone forward with the murderous ways regardless of the issuing of the 2008 Failed States Index. And Pham confuses correlation with causality. Pham is correct in his assessments of the methodological flaws of this sort of ranking, ir any other kind in which the social sciences try to mimic the hard sciences. And he makes a good point with regard to Uganda — that most signs point to that country being able plausibly to claim a great deal of successes, yet the Failed States Index does not seem to indicate as much. But I still find his conclusions less than convincing. If Uganda rises or falls it will be hard to pin those failures or successes to a list, however influential, in a glossy magazine emanating from Washington, DC.
