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STOHL: We're interviewing Hans Hendrickholm for the Failed States Show. Let's start with a definitional question. What is a failed state, or a failing state?

Mr. HOLM: A failing state is a state where basic functions are collapsing. You can't provide security for the people, you can't provide all the function that a state normally does, that it's, that you're protected, that you have health, that you have education, that you have all these other things that are basically the reasons why we have states.

STOHL: What are some recent examples of failed or failing states, or weak or destabilized states?

HOLM: We have unfortunately a whole long row of them. A lot of countries in West Africa, Sierra Leone, Liberia, but also countries like Somalia, Congo. And in Europe, even. Countries like Kosovo, things that happen, Albania. So there's a whole range of very different types of failing states.

STOHL: What factors can cause states to fail?

HOLM: There are a lot of reasons why states fail. Some of the basic ones have to do with the fact that most of these governments aren't really established as states. Many of them are states that have grown up, and have a short history. Many of them are states where the government really isn't established and legitimate in the eyes of the citizens. Many of these states are countries that are based on tribal types of societies, where people don't really have a connection with the state.

STOHL: What effects, then, can weapons have on a state that's already lacking the basic social structure?

HOLM: The problems with the proliferation of weapons in these states is that if you don't really feel that you belong together; the different groups in society don't really feel that they belong together. And you get a grievance against the other tribe, or the other part of society, or the ones who have fair skin, or the ones who have brown skin, or whatever the division may be.

With the proliferation of handguns, of course it becomes very easy for them to use that, to try to further those political goals. And that's what we've seen in a lot of these states; that the Tamils in the northern part of Sri Lanka, because they have traditionally and historically have felt underprivileged. With the proliferation of weapons in that area, all of a sudden could take their grievance and turn it into revolution, or a revolutionary type of situation, with disastrous consequences for the state.

STOHL: The United States is one of the most heavily armed countries, in terms of the civilian population. There's enough weapons for every man, woman, and child in this country, yet you don't see a destabilized state in the United States. Whereas, in other countries, perhaps, a third, or even a quarter of the amount of weapons can cause a state to fail, or severely destabilize the state. What's the difference between the United States and these other states. Why does one fail and one not, even when there's the same amount of proliferation of weapons?

HOLM: Many people have argued that there's, why should we be so concerned about failing states, and the proliferation of weapons in the Third World, where a lot of our countries, and the United States in particular, have a lot of firearms available for the average population? Aren't we really being neo-imperialistic, in trying to say you shouldn't have all these handguns, but whereas we should? That leads up to addressing the issue of what's the difference? Why should we be so concerned there, when we're not so concerned about it in our own societies? And the reason fundamentally is that these states haven't matured yet. They haven't developed what we call a civil society; a society where you feel that in some cases, you still, even though there are differences between people from Texas or people from Virginia, or people from the North, you still all feel that you belong to one state. And you are not going to take up guns, hopefully, and try to make Virginia a separate entity. And it is that fundamental adherence to the common idea of a state, that many of these countries simply don't have.

STOHL: Can you talk a little bit about the lack of basic cohesion in some of these countries that you've mentioned; in Kosovo and Albania, and how that can perpetuate the fragility of a state.

HOLM: Part of the problem in a lot of these states is that democracy is so fragile. And what happens then is that if you're a politician, in Kosovo, in Albania, or in Sierra Leone, and you know, as a politician, that you're not really loved by the people, you're not really in contact with a lot of people, it becomes very tempting to try to say that well, the problem is all the ones that live in that particular region. The problem is all the ones that live in Kosovo, like Slobodan Milosevic was saying for many years. That's where all the problems come from. Those are really the bad guys.

Thereby, as a politician, in order to get support for your own political agenda, you whip up attitudes of nationalistic support. And that is very often very easy to do. It's sort of like politicians turning matters of life and death into like a football match, where adhering to one team becomes your identity.

With an enormous proliferation of handguns, you're in a desperate situation. Just think about what it would be like if you distributed handguns at a big college football game, and had everybody whipped into a frenzy about this. And there was plenty of beer available, and there were guns under each seat. Not exactly a good cocktail. But that's the kind of thing we're seeing in these countries, that the government or parts of the government are distributing weapons, or actively aiding the distribution of arms. And at the same time saying, your neighbor is a really, really bad guy. The ones in Kosovo, the Edu Tribe, whoever it is that they're mocking up as the enemy. Those are the ones that we should be concerned about.

STOHL: How has the growth in the international arms trade-- I don't know if you can, if you feel like you can speak to this, but how has the growth in the international arms trade caused such a prevalence, and we're seeing all of these fragile states? I mean, obviously the weapons trade is not the cause of these conflicts. I mean, you've said that there are all these other political and democratic reasons, but how has the weapons trade perpetuated or caused or allowed states to fail, or become failing?

HOLM: The international arms trade has played a big role in exacerbating this situation, simply by making it very, very easy for politicians or groups in these very often unstable Third World countries, to get access to the most modern weapons. So that you now, in fact, I mean when you go to Africa, we saw it very much in the Rwanda-Burundi conflict, you've seen in the Congo, all the other countries around them, are supplying them with relatively cheap firearms. So you transform a tribal conflict into a militarized conflict, and the availability of arms in the international arms trade has its own independent cause behind that, really, by making it so easy.

STOHL: It sounds like a very hopeless situation. What kinds of things can the international community do to aid failing or weak states, and to prevent states from all-out failure, like we've seen in Somalia?

HOLM: Well the question of what we can do is, is on the one hand very simple, and the other hand a very complicated one. If we look at it straight up front, it really is a very simple one, because it basically has to do with controlling the traffic of arms. And it's not impossible, there are a lot of other things we control internationally. And in most of these countries, these weapons are not produced, so they come in from the outside. If we really wanted to; if we had the political energy, the political will to really want to control these, we would have the means quite easily, because it has to cross borders, so it wouldn't be that difficult. But it also is very difficult, because that will simply does not exist. There are too many, far too many powerful economic interests, first and foremost, in preventing governments from actually instituting such a control on guns.

And secondly, within these countries, politicians and prospective people who want to be leaders of a group or a clan or whatever it is, go to extreme lengths to get hold of these weapons. So that issue needs to be addressed much more in terms of, on the political level, we in fact need to look at why guns are used, so we need to look at what can we do in order to stabilize a situation politically and economically in these situations? What can we do to help further war break out, in Somalia or Sudan, where the war is associated with poverty, with tremendous fight for the most basic necessities of life? So that is a much, much bigger issue, and much harder to address, of course, but equally important.

STOHL: What kinds of things has the international community done in the past that have not facilitated a resolution to some of these conflicts? I mean, what kinds of mistakes have been made?

HOLM: Some of the mistakes, I think, we've made in the past is that we weren't really ready for all of this, when the Cold War ended. We were caught by the euphoria of the world was no longer divided into an East and a West; they were distributing these weapons to the ones that supported them in the Third World. So we were caught a little bit by surprise, that all of a sudden, we saw this growth of democracy and freedom turn into terrible and nasty conflicts.

So the first mistake I think we've made is that we were so focused on making them into democracies overnight, that we forgot that they simply were not ready for that. That we didn't do the groundwork. And that is now coming home to roost, so to speak. Because we could have done something in terms of East Timor.

The Secretary General of the United Nations has pointed it out very clearly, and others have pointed it out. The difficulties are more in us recognizing it very early and up front, and then instituting preventive action. Then instituting conflict management, at a very early stage.

STOHL: You've just mentioned East Timor, and there's been a lot of discussion about when the U.S. or when the international community should intervene. When does it get so bad, when did Kosovo cross a line that the U.S. should get involved? In many of these cases, you're facing a heavily armed population, often in the U.S.'s case, with weapons that you've in fact provided to that country in the past. When do you decide to say okay, the risk is too great, there's too much instability, this could destabilize not only this country, but the entire region, or hemisphere?

HOLM: The problem about when we intervene is I think a crucial one for us to address politically. Part of the problem is that so far, we've had only really one response mechanism, and that's the military. We haven't really yet developed a response mechanism that's able to go in and do something before the military comes. And that has made it a very hard situation for the military, because they have had to come in and basically try to solve the mess, under the most difficult of circumstances.

So I think the real issue for us is to develop the kind of expertise, and the kind of personnel that it's possible for us to send into these countries, before it breaks down. That means that expertise and conflict resolution, that means people who are experts in media, to avoid the building of hate in the local press. That means people who are very good at administration; that means advisors, to advise the politicians. That means all the kinds of things that are soft, that are in fact easier, certainly much cheaper. But right now is only available at a totally uncoordinated and haphazard kind of a way, where individual NGOs will do part of this, but it's not coordinated. It's not coordinated between different states, from the North that do this, and it's certainly not coordinated within the state. So even within the United States, you will have one branch of government trying to do some of it, and USAID will do something different. So we need coherent national strategies, to deal with conflicts before they turn into intervention problems.

STOHL: So if you could just elaborate and talk a little bit about how we can strengthen civil society, what kind of mechanisms can we put into place? Should we strengthen judicial institutions? Should we strengthen political arms or branches of the government? You know, what kinds of things can we do to civil society to prevent states from failing?

HOLM: In a number of these states, the really big problem is that it is both an economic failing, and it's a political failing. We have for years been trying to address the economic failing by providing aid, not always as successfully as we would like to, but we have. But we have not been very good at addressing the political failings. We have not been very good at helping the politicians, in a sense, get closer to their own society. We have not been helping them to get a relaxed relationship with a free media. We have not been helping them to understand the importance of building local NGOs, building women's organizations, and how these organizations in fact can help a politician, instead of being seen always as adversaries. So these are the kinds of things that we have begun to do.

We have, a big label has been called this Good Governance; trying to teach these countries what good governance is all about. A lot of that is awareness raising, some of it has to do with money, but relatively small funds, compared to the economic aid that we give. And first and foremost, it has to do with our political commitment in terms of the political nature of these countries.

So what we can do is that we need to address this politically. We need to establish a political cooperation and strategy with these countries, before it goes wrong. If we look at these conflicts that we have had over the last five, ten years, the great majority of these, I would say, could have been avoided, if we had been there previously.

We could have avoided the Kosovo conflict, if we had involved ourselves with the Yugoslav government in a much more intimate manner than in fact we did. We ended up in an adversarial relationship to the government very early on, which wasn't helpful. We introduced economic sanctions very early on, which wasn't really very helpful. We took a "you either do as we say" approach, "or we won't have anything to do with you," and thereby painting them into a corner.

We did a little bit the same thing with Somalia. We said you can't provide aid for your country, we'll come and provide the aid for you. And we forgot that if we didn't build some sort of feeling that there was a political cooperation between them and us, there was no incentive for them to really listen to us.

And the same thing has been true in all of these countries. They see us pretty much as countries that come with aid, come with dictation and say you're going to have to do it this way; otherwise, it won't work. And that's definitely the wrong approach. It takes a much more committed partnership between them and us, in order to really create that kind of political maneuvering that will make it possible for us to really help them grow into more stable states, where we don't have to intervene, or where small handguns don't become the kind of problem that they are now.

STOHL: Just the last thing I want to talk about is, once you've built the infrastructure, and you've got a civil society that's viable, and you've got democratic institutions, how important, then, does de-militarizing the society, not necessarily, you know, banning weapons altogether, but disarming the population, instilling a sense of this can actually work. It is in my best interest to disarm myself and to have the government sponsor weapons collections programs, you know, with amnesty provided, so that these individuals feel like they're moving in the right direction.

HOLM: Disarming these countries, after the conflict, the immediate conflict has ended, has proved to be an exceedingly difficult task. And I think there's one reason for that. And that is that it has to do with the building of trust. If we're going to get the people in Kosovo, or the people in Albania to turn in their guns that they've stashed away, they need to have a feeling that they can trust society. And we can't really provide that trust. We can put soldiers in there, but as we've seen in Kosovo, we can't guarantee that people feel safe when they go into their fields, whether they're Serbian or they're Kosovars. We can't guarantee them that safety. The only way the guarantee can come is that they themselves have trust in their own institutions. And that's really where we need to build.

So disarming is first and foremost about building trust, and then, later on, when that trust is there, either the guns will rot away in the ground where they've hidden them, or they will simply be turned in. That's a lesson we've learned, I think, from our own conflicts in our own history.