The purpose of this essay is to expose a similar bias across the current policy-making and academic debate surrounding assumptions about 'failed states' in the postcolonial world. At present, such debate revolves around taken-for-granted assumptions about the weakness of state capacity in postcolonial states, with 'failed states' commonly regarded as the harbingers of global terrorism and instability. My argument falls into two sections. First, it will be argued that there exists a pathology surrounding Western concerns about 'failed states' that perceives stateness, or the identity of states, in the postcolonial world as instances of deviancy, aberration and breakdown. Drawing from policies emanating from the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's Strategy Unit, the argument will demonstrate how the link between 'failed states' and terrorism is articulated, notably within the new 'Countries at Risk of Instability' (CRI) programme defining policy making towards 'fragile states'. The essay will also highlight here how similar assumptions of aberration, deviancy and breakdown are equally upheld in International Relations (IR) theory, which adheres widely to the view that 'much of the world is under the sway of states that are not states in the strict sense, but are so only by courtesy' as 'quasi-' or 'failed states'. My argument will thereby advance a dual practical and theoretical focus on the 'failed state' of IR by highlighting similar assumptions about the disintegration of state structures in postcolonial states, resulting in state 'failure', degeneration, chaos and anarchy. This enforces a pathological view of deviancy, aberration and breakdown. Second, and by contrast, I will then assert the case for adopting a more nuanced approach to understanding postcolonial state identities that is sensitive to alternative forms of social organisation that arise within different historical processes of state formation and conditions of capital accumulation. In a nutshell, a thorough historicisation of state formation processes in the postcolonial world is required that is cognisant of the political economy within which such states exist. Here, awareness will be drawn to the globally embedded dimensions of postcolonial states within conditions of combined and uneven development. Wider cognisance of this alternative political economy approach might then promote the possibility of moving beyond the increasingly evident shortcomings of policy and scholarly debate on 'failed states' in IR. © 2005 Taylor & Francis.
