A Rebuttal to Foreign Policy's Failed States Index for 2012:
This year, pro forma, almost the entire African continent shows up on the Failed States map in the guiltiest shade of red. The accusation is that with a handful of exceptions, African states are failing in 2012. But what does this tell us? What does it actually mean? Frankly, we have no idea. The index is so flawed in its conception, so incoherent in its structuring criteria, and so misleading in its presentation that from the perspective of those who live or work in those places condemned as failures, it's difficult to receive the ranking as anything more than a predictable annual canard issued from Washington, D.C. against non-Western — and particularly African — nations.
…The golden principle by which this muddle is to be marshaled oh-so-objectively into a grand spectrum of state failure coefficients is apparently the idea of “stability.” But is it really? Well, if you're an Arab Spring country, then yes, it's the “instability” of revolution or popular revolt that has put you in the red this year. Sorry about that. But if you're North Korea (the paradigmatic failed state in the U.S. imagination — hence why Zimbabwe is often branded “Africa's North Korea”), it's because you're far too stable. If stability is the key to all this, and yet there's an imperative for places like North Korea still to be ranked as failures, then we're in trouble. The cart has long ago overtaken the horse. It would be very difficult indeed to conceive of a more stable form of rule than having power descend smoothly down three generations of the same family over six decades and more (perhaps the Bushes will pull off something like this one day).
Read the rest here.