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STOHL: What is a failed state? When a state fails, what does that mean?

DR. GURR: It's one of those umbrella terms that sometimes means whatever people want it to mean. In Washington in the early nineties, people were using the failed state as an umbrella concept. Those of us on the State Failure Task Force had the job of giving it more precise meaning. So we met four different kinds of conflicts; revolutionary wars, ethnic wars, abrupt changes in governance, in political regimes. And the occurrence of genocide and politicides, for rather different kinds of failures.

STOHL: What are some examples, in a general sense, of failed, failing or destabilized states? I mean we have a spectrum of states that we're talking about, if you could just give me a general example.

DR. GURR: Some of them involve the total collapse of states. That happened in Liberia. You know, in the early 1990's. It happened in Somalia. Angola. At the other end of the spectrum you have countries like India, which have ongoing secessionist wars, both in the Northeast and the Northwest. That's a low-level state failure. So it refers to a variety of bad things, serious conflicts. The capacity of states to carry out their normal business.

STOHL: What kinds of, when you say that a state has failed, what does that mean? Does the government cease to exist, or can it be as simple as healthcare programs aren't available to the general public?

DR. GURR: At a minimum, state failure means that governments are not able to carry out some of their routine functions. Sometimes the problems are relatively localized. It usually refers to armed conflict, or open conflict. Sometimes it refers to violence targeted by the state, you know, against political and ethnic groups within the state. And it usually goes along with that that governments can't carry out all of their, what we think of as their more normal functions; education, healthcare, maintaining a country's infrastructure, and so forth.

STOHL: Why should Americans at large, why should the general public care about whether a state fails or not?

DR. GURR: Well, for one thing, Americans should care because we live in an increasingly interdependent world. I think people recognize that economically. You know, so that our own economic well-being depends on some minimal level of security and predictability, just about everywhere in the world. There's also the very serious risk in an interdependent world, that these kinds of crises spill over. That is, they lead to intervention by neighboring states, they lead to floods of refugees across borders. And then it becomes an international problem. And again, it's very hard to point to any part of the world, except maybe Antarctica, which is not of some substantial concern to some part of the American public.

And if that's not enough for you, there is what we call the CNN effect. That is the fact that human disasters in any part of the world show up on our evening news, indeed on our news all day long, if we tune in to those programs. So we can't escape knowledge about them, and knowledge about them, combined with the fact that we've got some kind of influence over what happens in the rest of the world, you know, almost always translates into a demand, political demand, by some people. You should do something.

STOHL: What kind of concerns do state failures pose to the U.S. government, in the short term and in the long term?

DR. GURR: What problems do they pose for the U.S. government? I think one of them in effect I just referred to. State failures generate pressures, political pressures, on the United States government to do something, either solely or in cooperation with international and regional organizations.

And of course, some of them directly affect places where we have international investments, international loan programs. You know, we are very heavily invested in promoting development in various corners of the world. And some of these state failures directly impact in a negative way. They can undermine, they can destroy all of the gains that have been accomplished through development programs. And at least occasionally, they have some indirect military or security implications for the United States as well. That is, some of them happen in places where we have troops stationed, where we have bases, where we are interested in supporting a friendly democratic regime.

STOHL: Tell me about the State Failure Task Force. Who sponsored it, when was it initiated, and what kinds of things are you working on?

DR. GURR: The State Failure Task Force was initiated at the request of Vice President Gore, late in 1994. His original idea was that if we knew more in a systematic way about the causes of state failure, then it would be possible for the United States in collaboration with the other Atlantic democracies, to devise joint programs of action. That meant joint development programs, and maybe collaborative programs of preventive action, that could head off future state failures. So what he asked the task force to do was to use the best empirical and statistical techniques possible, to identify cases of state failure over the past 40 years, he said, beginning in 1955. And identify the social, the economic, the political, and environmental conditions that preceded them.

STOHL: What has the project found? What are the factors that "cause" a state to fail? What are the danger signs?

DR. GURR: Now, the project has been pretty good at identifying general background factors. And some of those, I think, people would regard as pretty obvious. Democratic states are much less likely to fail than other kinds of states. States that have high levels of infant mortality are more likely to fail. That's a poverty factor, but it's not just poverty. It has to do with the social well-being of a population. Those countries that have not done a very good job of maintaining, increasing the social well-being of their population are at risk.

Another factor, and this was somewhat more surprising, economic interdependence. Those countries that have a wide network of trade ties, imports and exports with other countries are less likely to fail than the isolated countries. And we've done a lot more refined studies. You know, for example, finding that of all of the regimes that are most likely to fail, it's the partial democracies, those that have tried to mix or blend the characteristics of autocracy, or authoritarian leadership with democratic institutions. They're headed for trouble.

STOHL: What has the effect of light weapons and small arms been on some of these states that have these other conditions that you've seen cause a state to be at risk? What does the effect of weapons have on those societies?

DR. GURR: Okay, now the question of what effect weapons have on these kinds of conflicts, I think that's best answered by doing a case by case assessment. But one thing that's clear: once countries become involved in internal conflict, in trying to suppress or contain internal conflict, that means that they are an excellent arms market. They buy arms; light arms, heavy weapons, other people's cast-off weapons. And what that means is that if the rebels, whether they're revolutionaries or ethnic warriors or nationalists, want to arm themselves, they have a ready source of arms. They raid the armories and the police stations, and the headquarters of the national guard, to get the weapons that they need. I think the general principle is that the greater the stock of light arms in a society, the greater the potential for escalating conflict, if the other conditions are present.

STOHL: Let's look at each of these cases that we're going to discuss in detail. Northern Ireland. We could talk a little bit about how weapons in Northern Ireland, you have a situation where you've been at war for 30 years, internally, and some kind of peace, they're trying to establish political infrastructure, etcetera, etcetera. But the factor that everyone talks about all the time is we've got to get the weapons out of the hands of the paramilitaries.

DR. GURR: Now, if we're talking Northern Ireland, I think it's an example of a very common situation throughout the world.

One of the things that's happened since the end of the Cold War is that the number of negotiated settlements of internal conflicts has increased substantially. I think most people are so preoccupied with the new conflicts, like Kosovo, which isn't really new, or East Timor, that they don't see the larger trends.

Well, whenever you have a negotiated settlement, a key, a fundamental problem, even if the political leadership on both sides agrees, you've got to demobilize the fighters. And you've got people here who in some cases have been fighting, have known nothing else for a generation, or two generations. You know, father to son to grandchild, in some countries. You've got to de-mobilize and you've got to find alternative occupations, for at least some of them. That's the essential intermediate step to disarmament. Because they're not going to give up their arms. Most of them are not going to be willing to give up their weapons until they've got something else to do with their lives.

So I see it as one critical step, but not the first step. The whole process of making a negotiated settlement work, making it stick, over the longer run.

STOHL: In Albania, where you have a population that looted over a million weapons out of the state arsenals, and completely turned that state upside down. What can you say about the failure, or the lack of the state to fill the needs of the population there?

DR. GURR: Well, when we talk about the Albanian situation, we're really talking about a state that failed in a potentially good way. When the communist regime fell, and that never succeeded in establishing an effective alternative. And they tried; they went through some of the democratic show of establishing democratic institutions, and holding elections. But that didn't translate into much positive for the people of Albania. I think that's why so many Albanians were seduced by the pyramid schemes. It looked like the only game in town that offered a chance for individual wealth. So of course that was one more step in Albania's dissent into chaos.

And I've got to say, the international community responded pretty well to what was happening in Albania. The Italians and other European governments provided a lot of support. There was a lot of international engagement that in effect ended that particular conflict. And if Albania had been left alone, I think it's rather likely that it would have descended into a state of complete anarchy. The international community stepped in and helped the Albanians recreate a state.

But of course, that didn't stop the problem of dispersion of arms. A lot of arms, including, and lots of automobiles, and lots of other portable means of wealth, got exported from Albania. And some of it ended up in Kosovo.

Let's talk about that link to Kosovo. I think there's a UN pilot project right now in Albania that is collecting weapons that were looted from the arsenal lootings in 1997. One of the challenges has been that they estimate at least a third of those weapons are no longer in the country, if not a half. And many of them have made their way to Kosovo. And one of the unique factors of the air war was that -- in Kosovo -- earlier this year was that the Kosovars were actually fighting with a lot of these Albanian weapons, and they were waging their war primarily with small arms and light weapons. They did have a few tanks here and there, but primarily they were using looted weapons, or weapons that had come in through Macedonia and that kind of thing.

STOHL: The Kosovars, like most other national liberation movements, do fight with looted weapons, whether they came from abroad or from within their own territory. And about all I can say about that is that once again, I think the problem of confiscating those weapons -- let me back up -- You can't confiscate weapons. You need to buy them back, you need to induce the people who got them to give them up. If you're going to do that, it's got to be part of a larger political package. And beyond that, there's not much I can say about-- I could talk about whether or not there's a viable political settlement being worked out in Kosovo.

STOHL: Well let's touch on that, because one of the things we had talked about was that in Kosovo, in the former Yugoslavia you don't have a lot of trust on either side. And so you have a very well-armed KLA, supposedly demobilized KLA, still, you know, armed to the teeth, with a lot of the weapons they were allowed to keep. How is that going to affect the political process there?

DR. GURR: When you're talking about Kosovo, when I talk about Kosovo, I can't help thinking about might-have-beens. One of the purposes of the State Failure Project was to identify high-risk cases, and in my own research on minorities at risk of conflict, that's a separate project. Both the State Failure Project and my own project have pointed to the Kosovar Albanians as one of the highest risk groups in Europe, if not the highest-risk group, throughout the nineties. And plenty of other people in the policy community have made the same kind of prediction, the same kind of forecast. High risk situation.

So what did the international community do? What did the United States government do? Not a whole lot. But I'll tell you what the Kosovars did. They established a shadow government. They established their own civil government, and that government in effect ran the day to day business of Kosovars for eight or nine years, before the KLA was ever conceived. If the international community had responded to and had supported that shadow government, which was committed to non-violent political action, there wouldn't have been a KLA, there wouldn't have been a KLA problem, either for the Serbs, or for the international community. But of course, now we've got it. The problem is there, you can't go back. All you can do is learn from that example, about the necessity for early response in other situations. Right now it's a matter of getting the, of encouraging the moderates within the KLA leadership, encouraging them, and at the same time, marginalizing the militants, the ones who don't want to lay down their arms. And eventually, recognizing that they are the basis for a new independent state, we'll call it a statehood. They're not going to give up their arms. They're going to keep at least some of them.

STOHL: West Africa has just example after example of states in transition, in some degree of failure, and Sierra Leone, I think, is one of those that just when you think things have gotten as bad as they can be, they get worse, or you see more of a breakdown of the state system. Can we talk a little bit about Sierra Leone, the factors there, where we're at in terms of the peace process, and what role the weapons have played in Sierra Leone.

DR. GURR: Because I might say, Sierra Leone is one of the dozen or so cases of complete state failure, by the criteria that the task force uses. And it has all of the, the dog-eared marks of high risk countries. Relatively low level of economic interdependence, not a whole lot of trade in or out, except diamonds, and that's illicit, right? A government that was neither democratic nor autocratic. A government that was designed by contending elite factions who wanted to make a show of democracy, but who were never able to design an effective set of political institutions. And of course, a very high level of, a great many social problems. The quality of life in Sierra Leone is and has been poor for a long time. Okay, so that's pre-conditions; it's not surprising. And you have, underlying, an ethnic or communal rivalry between the groups that historically have controlled the government in the post-Colonial period. And the groups that have been outside that coalition, and who are responsible for the RUF. The RUF was essentially regionally and communally based. Have I got the right initials, the RUF?

STOHL: Uh-huh. Revolutionary United Front.

DR. GURR: At the risk of harping on the same theme over and over again, the light arms, the availability of light weaponry has made it possible for both the RUF and the government to fight a war. The combatants, and that includes, there's the Karamoshars (phonetic), and I'm fumbling on their name. Anyway, the armed groups in Sierra Leone are not likely to give up their weapons unless and until they see prospects for a political settlement and their own reincorporation. And sometimes the peacemakers have to swallow a lot. I mean, you have to allow some people who are responsible for what you regard as murder, or gross human rights violations to participate in power, as the price of their accepting a peace agreement.

STOHL: Somalia is another, East African country, that just has been in a state of failure for many, many years. And one of the interesting things about Somalia right now is that with the renewed violence between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the conduit for arms passage has been rejuvenated. And you're seeing more and more weapons flowing throughout the East African region, from perhaps some of these West African conflicts that are reaching their culmination. What can we say about Somalia?

DR. GURR: Okay, well let's make Somalia the next stop on our tour of Africa, and disaster areas. One of the curious things about Somalia, so far as I'm concerned, is that virtually everyone ignores the fact that Northern Somalia, the country, the self-styled country that calls itself Somaliland, has been largely free of serious internal conflict. Because we're not talking here about the flow of arms, we're talking about the prior political conditions. The South is anarchic; no one has been able to establish anything resembling effective power, much less centralized political authority. So it's a free-for-all, and it's an arms bazaar, and will continue to be.

Somaliland established its own independence, declared its own independence I think in 1991 or '92. It established an effective civil administration, has used traditional Somali methods of conflict resolution among competing clans, and thus far has avoided most of the devastating effects of warfare and the influx of arms, destabilizing arms that's characterized the South.

The point is here, why isn't anybody drawing lessons from what the people of Somaliland have done, as a guide to what might be done for the rest of Somaliland? If you've got a working civil administration, with virtually no outside aid, I might say, and no international recognition, but if you've got a working civil administration, and if you've built a political coalition that supports that, then you don't need to worry about the arms flow.

STOHL: Exactly. Are there any other states that you think that might be a good example, that have other factors present, but then arms kind of come in and cause the state to fail, or to become severely destabilized?

DR. GURR: I think the question here is whether one can identify situations, high risk situations in which an influx of arms would be an accelerating condition. I think so, I think so, because of course, the arms are a means, a means to an end. But what I didn't come in with was a mental list--

STOHL: No, that's okay.

DR. GURR: Yeah, it would be useful if I could point to a couple of situations.

STOHL: Well we can come back to it, too, towards the end. Let me--

DR. GURR: No, give me a minute to think about it. Okay, we can come back to it later.

STOHL: Okay. Let's talk a little bit about what the U.S. can do. There's a hesitancy to intervene, the U.S. can't be the world's policeman, we've heard those a thousand times. But what can the U.S. do to stop a state from failing? What kind of preventive measures can we take, or after the fact, you know, once a state has failed?

DR. GURR: The question about what the United States can or should do in response to state failure is a, has got an easy answer, an easy superficial answer. The answer is, you respond early, because if you respond early, as if you can anticipate, if you anticipate a state weakness, if you anticipate serious internal conflict, you do things like designing long range development programs in ways that will minimize the risks. You take a more active role, a more proactive role in promoting the development of institutions of civil society; the underpinnings of real democracy, effective democracy.

There's a pretty wide range of actions, policies that can be supported, both by the United States itself, and in cooperation with various kinds of international and regional organizations. And by and large, money spent on prevention is a good deal more effective than money spent on reaction. I mentioned the Kosovo case as one in which if there was preventive action early, serious preventive action, it would have been a lot less costly, for everybody involved, than the air war and the massive NATO presence there now.

But what you really need, you need a series of-- let me restate that-- You need a set of strategies. You need a set of preventive strategies, and backing those up, you need to be willing to intervene in a more forceful way, if the situation devolves, or you might say escalates into serious conflict with humanitarian consequences.

I think it's especially important that that latter kind of intervention, reactive intervention, I'm calling it, or military intervention, be done in cooperation with other countries, and with regional organizations. So that the United States isn't tarred with the imperialist or neo-imperialist brush. And it's quite aside from the symbolic politics of it. Local and regional organizations usually have a better understanding of what the causes or the dynamics are, and have more access to, can bring more influence to bear on the participants. But that should be the last resort, not the first resort. First resort means anticipation. You need risk assessments, you need to anticipate, you need to design a coordinated strategy that you carry through over the longer run. If you do that, you're minimizing the risks of the really serious kinds of deadly conflict, and humanitarian crises that then lead to the demand for more substantial military type intervention.

STOHL: What has the U.S., what's the strategy been in the past? Have we kind of let states fail? I mean, do you see a shift? You know, you talked about reacting versus preventing, but in the past, has the U.S. just let these states collapse?

DR. GURR: No, I think there's been a real shift in American foreign policy during the 1990's. There's been a shift away from reaction toward prevention. And I give you a concrete example of it. Late last fall, President Clinton announced the establishment of a Genocide Early Warning Center, which is based in the State Department, but which involves the intelligence community and other parts of the government apparatus, foreign policy apparatus. And that was based on a great deal of concern within the administration about being able to anticipate situations in which genocide or potential. To prepare the kind of risk assessments that would make it possible to take preventive action early, rather than wait until you have a Rwanda type situation.

STOHL: What kinds of specific prescriptive measures are occurring now on the ground, or could occur in the future in either a state that's got high risk factors, or in a state that's been near total collapse and is on its way back?

DR. GURR: The question is what's the bundle of activities, policies that might be followed to either forestall state failure, or help rebuild failed states. And it's a very long list indeed. There are government to government kinds of programs designed to strengthen political institutions, to improve the functioning of the judiciary, of legislatures. Increasing the sensitivity of governments to human rights issues. That's one bundle, that's the political bundle.

There's also a set of economic development kinds of projects, which I think we all understand pretty well. My own sense is that there's a great deal more that needs to be done, and is being done, at the grassroots level and at the middle level, involving activities by NGOs, for example. Some of the NGO work that I know about has to do with training, involves training people, local people, in conflict resolution techniques. Training people in the art of dialogue and compromise, and responding to the local, and that may mean village level, or city level, or regional level conflicts, in a proactive way, that keeps them from escalating into something larger. That's just one kind of example. Microlevel development projects, of course. That's something that is not solely the prerogative of USAID, or the IMF; these are things that often are in fact promoted by and financed by other kinds of organizations.

STOHL: Great. Do you want to come back to, did you think of a state, an example, or a case study that perhaps I should touch on that I haven't mentioned?

DR. GURR: Okay, let me mention a couple of high risk states, high risk situations. Nigeria is one of them. There are several groups within Nigeria, especially the people of the Niger Delta, who have episodically engaged in armed resistance to the Nigerian state. And what's happening there is their immediate environment has suffered a lot of damage from oil development, oil spills. Very few of the proceeds of oil wealth are coming back to the region.

Now, if the Nigerian government successfully negotiates a transition to democracy, and if the new democratic government is responsive to the interests of people, the Ogoni (phonetic) and the Ijaw (phonetic), in particular, let me use their names, then there's I think serious prospect that those conflicts will be settled, short of large scale rebellion.

On the other hand, if their needs, if their interests are not addressed, then I would expect that they're going to be actively looking for means to escalate armed conflict. One of the things they need is arms. The Nigerian military is a pretty powerful instrument, they're going to be obviously targets of repression. There is a potential there for a major conflict, and a major humanitarian crisis. And again, I think whether it's going to happen or not is not going to depend so much on the flow of weapons as it is on what happens in the national and the federal political system.

Let me give you a very different kind of example. Two of the groups, regions that are at very high risk, according to my own analyses -- this is not the state failure project, this is my Minorities at Risk project-- are the Tibetans and the Weegurs (phonetic) in China. These are groups which have been episodically in resistance to domination by the Han Chinese, by the Beijing government.

Now, the Chinese government has a very considerable military capacity, and has minimized maybe almost entirely, stopped the flow of light arms into those areas. On the other hand, unless and until the Chinese government is willing to compromise, to accommodate to some degree the autonomous demands of peoples in those regions, the potential is always there for weapons to be smuggled into those regions.

What has kept Tibet, I think, what has kept Tibet from erupting into a new rebellion is the fact that, of the Dali Lama's leadership. He has emphasized throughout the need for a peaceful accommodation of Tibetans' interests. Now he's being challenged by his own more militant, by younger, more militant Tibetans, who want to take a more proactive and violent form of opposition, who want to organize more effective, more violent opposition to the Beijing government.

In Zing Tiang (phonetic) there are, there's already ongoing violence by relatively poorly armed Weegurs and Cossacks, who have got kindred right across the border, right across the Cossack border in particular, who would be more than happy to support an open rebellion against Chinese rule.

Those are cases of conflicts, both Tibet and Zing Tiang, where I think weapons flows, along with the larger issue of political accommodation, are going to be critical in the outcome.

STOHL: Was there anything else that I didn't touch on, that you feel would be important to portray in this show?

DR. GURR: Enough.

STOHL: Enough?

DR. GURR: There's one other important point I would make about the trade in light arms. There are a number of governments in the world that have a record of civil rights -- let me back up -- let me start again. One other point about the arms trade. There are a number of governments that are human rights violators on a fairly large scale. We know that some governments tend to be repeat violators when it comes to genocide and political mass murder. So I think that some of the emphasis on controlling the arms trade ought to be directed at stopping the flow of arms to these kinds of governments; that is, to reducing their chances, their ability to purchase arms that might, that we have good reason to believe will end up being used, directed against their own citizens. That seems to me -- I know, of course, that other people are pursuing that kind of policy, that's not anything new. But I suspect that that is likely to have more impact on reducing internal conflict than attempts to dry up the illicit importation of arms that might be used by rebels.

STOHL: Although there are probably, I think you could argue that there's quite a lot of these governments that have been banned from receiving arms, you know, through UN arms embargoes. Angola, for example-- have had no trouble.

DR. GURR: That's right.

STOHL: --arming themselves.

DR. GURR: That's because of the international restrictions are not very effective, partly because there are both governments and suppliers who don't buy into the efforts at controlling arms flow to those kinds of governments. SECOND INTERVIEWER: Would you care to name names or list, you mentioned countries that are repeat offenders, or have repeat human rights abuses. Is there like a top ten, or three or four that come to mind?

DR. GURR: Okay, one can fairly readily identify the repeat offenders. They include Burma, Iraq, Indonesia, Indonesia under the old regime, and it looks like under the new regime as well. Afghanistan, and in Africa one can point to Rwanda's previous Hutu government, because that was by no means the first genocide perpetrated against-- 1994 was by no means the first genocide perpetrated against Tutsis in Rwanda.

STOHL: How about the Americas? Maybe a country like Colombia, say?

DR. GURR: Colombia's military are too ineffective to be massive human rights violators. There a number of governments that in an effort to control insurgency, engage in episodic rights violations. What I'm talking about here are countries that have systematically attempted to eliminate political or communal challengers, by targeting civilians.

STOHL: One of the criticisms of the international arms trade is that if we only allow governments to get the weapons, then you don't allow oppressed minorities to rebel and fight for their independence, or whatever rights they want. In terms of how that destabilizes a state, I mean, do we arm opposition groups, or oppressed minorities, or is that, again, that could lead to the failure of the entire state system, if we allow weapons to go to one side versus the other.

DR. GURR: No, the issue of whether we should arm the oppressed so that they could oppose their oppressors, that may appeal to the romantics among us, and I've got a romantic streak myself. But I think when you look at the actual flow of arms into the hands of the rebels, those who claim to represent the oppressed, if they don't get them from cross-border friends, they get them by raiding government armories. I think I made that point earlier. So if we arm the governments that are doing the oppressing, or if the world's arm merchants are arming the governments that are doing the oppressing, they're also inadvertently providing an ample stock of arms to be seized to use against those governments. And I really think that the efforts ought to be focused more on political settlements, and disarmament, or standing down the forces, both government and rebel forces, that are using the arms that are already there. The stock of arms in most countries of the global South is very substantial.