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Article Excerpt
Failed-states discourse rests on an illness narrative. As the failing state battles against invasion by the terrorism "virus," the United States serves as physician, diagnosing, treating, and sometimes "curing" the patient. The well state exists in a dominant power relationship vis-a-vis the sick state and the sick state has no voice in decision making regarding its future. Just as sick people have less autonomy than those who are well, sick states have less sovereignty than healthy ones. An uncooperative patient may be deemed incompetent and treated without his consent. Constructivist and feminist analyses of the medical process can shed light on and help in our creation of a revisionist/feminist analysis of the failed-state paradigm. KEYWORDS: medical, narrative, failed states, intervention
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When a virus attacks and infects a vulnerable living cell, it pours its own DNA and/or RNA inside. Once inside, the hereditary material begins a virtual coup d'etat. It attaches itself to the cell's existing DNA and sets up a new command system. ... One cell can be used to create thousands of new, mature viruses. The fastest virus only needs 24 minutes to explode a cell and release new virus particles. Cells are damaged and destroyed with each new birth, and chaos is all that is left in the wake.
--"Virus Basics," 2008 (1)
The world's weakest states aren't just a danger to themselves. They can threaten the progress and stability of countries half a world away.
--The Failed States Index, 2007 (2)
In the field of international relations, it has become commonplace to define states as either failed states or rogue states. "The List of Failed States," published annually since 2004 by Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace, has become a significant tool in the making and carrying out of public policy and is frequently referred to in the making of decisions by the US State Department and USAID as to how aid is allocated. In the academy, failed-state discourse has likewise achieved widespread intellectual currency. The concept is widely noted in a number of undergraduate textbooks, and a search of the EBSCO academic database brings up more than three hundred articles dealing with the notion of a failed state.
However, currently only two monographs exist in which the particular discourse of the failed state is examined from a linguistic and metaphorical viewpoint. No monographs exist in which the concept is examined from a feminist standpoint. Thus far, few analysts have taken on the question of how the language chosen and the language not chosen shapes the debate regarding the fate of nations said to have failed. Rather, as Shahar Hameiri argues, the term is accepted as commonsense or conventional wisdom, with little thought as to its political or ideological underpinnings. (3)
So far, we have not asked in what ways the failed-state model itself structures the discussion about government capacity, the installation of new governments, and the capacities for transformation and change of these nations. Nor have we examined the ways in which the model precludes or closes down discussion, limiting the number of possible policy options available or the seriousness with which alternative policy options are considered. In this article I examine the significance of the label "failed" as imposed on nearly seventy states by an outside authority figure and show how labeling a state as failed infantilizes and even feminizes the state, rendering it no longer an autonomous "body politic" but rather as the subject of outside study and theorizing, dependent on a healthier, nonfailed state for diagnosis, analysis, and cure.
I argue that the labeling of states as failed, failing, or successful rests on implicit assumptions about the state as a "body," as well as implicit assumptions about health, the role that individuals have in determining their own health, the treatments that are the most promising, and the autonomy that the patient enjoys and doesn't enjoy once labeled as ill. The narrative of a failed state as a sick body that falls ill, then either dies or is cured or restored to health, structures discourse in a variety of ways:
1. It creates a power dynamic in which the NGO/failed-state relationship parallels a doctor/patient relationship. This relationship privileges the labeler (who presents himself as an objective "outside" observer) since it is his designation that legitimizes the existence of sickness and the necessity of cure. The "patient" cannot decide if he/she is ill, if the illness merits curing, or what the steps involved in curing should be.
2. It establishes a relationship between the issues of bodily autonomy in medical ethics and sovereignty in world politics. Ethical arguments in medical literature about "when a patient is too incapacitated to make medical decisions for himself and a guardian must be appointed" closely parallel those being made by policymakers in arguing for intervention in a failing state.
3. It reinforces the status quo nature of the current international system since the only choices available to the "failed" state are illness, death, or recovery--which essentially means lifting the body politic from its weakened, powerless, feminine state up into a powerful, virile, male state, at which point it is allowed to rejoin the international community. No alternate ways of healing the state or alternate conceptions of what a healed failed state might look like are presented or entertained.
Why Discourse Theory?
The illness narrative provides a nodal point (4) in understanding failed-states discourse. The narrative rests on an implicit acceptance of a number of commonplace understandings about how illness is diagnosed, defined, cured, and treated. In bringing these assumptions to light, we will also better understand how Western governments, the United States in particular, conceptualize of themselves in the current security environment--as the doctors and healers of the failed-state patient.
How does the United States (or more broadly, the Western world) conceptualize itself as the healthy body, and what are the specific threats that failing states are said to present to the health of that body? The health metaphor suggests that the United States views itself and its own institutions as healthy, but only barely so. If US policymakers and academic theorists view the United States as besieged by large numbers of enemy germs, all of which are plotting to bring down its own health, and if these germs are seen as powerful, capable of multiplying, changing, and adapting to the defenses that are mounted against them, then this suggests that the US perception of the world is one of precariousness and constant danger. That is, as Baumann suggests, our own vision of the international system rests on a "suspicion of brittleness and fragility of the artificial man-made islands of order among the sea of chaos." (5)
Particularly notable is the shift that has taken place in the description of terrorism, the "disease" that attacks, lays siege to, and ultimately lays waste to the bodies politic. Metaphors that evolved to explain the behavior of rogue states since the first use of the term in the mid-1980s compared terrorism to a cancer. Rogue states acted like rogue cancer cells, with an ability to hide within an otherwise healthy body (in this case, the international system), while simultaneously engaging in deviant behavior through altering the cells within the healthy body so that they no longer conformed to norms governing the behavior and actions of healthy, "normal" cells. In contrast, metaphors in the post-9/11 world compare terrorism to a virus, focusing on its "breeding grounds" in failed states, its contagiousness and ease of transmission, its ability to lay dormant for many years undetected by the body (in this case the state) before springing into powerful life, launching a coup d'etat in which the virus takes over the reins of the healthy body, sowing chaos and destruction. Piazza makes the point even more explicit, calling for Western powers to "drain the swamp" and facilitate democratization in the Middle East. (6) Once again, the question that is most significant here is what the alteration of the metaphor says about the United States as a healthy body and how it views its own role vis-a-vis the disease.
In this article, I describe the illness narrative as it applies to the failed state, laying out the stages it undergoes before either being cured or dying. Finally, I discuss the ethical implications of this narrative for issues of state sovereignty in the context of medical discussions about bodily autonomy. I also suggest avenues for future research.
The Body/State as Container
The discourse of the failed state has been the subject of only two previous academic analyses. Both place the discourse of 'failed states' within the context of academic failure--suggesting that a failed state is "one that doesn't make the grade." (7) However, the process by which states are seen as descending into failure clearly...
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