This paper presents the Index of State Weakness in the Developing World, which ranks all 141 developing countries according to their relative performance in four critical spheres: economic, political, security, and social welfare.

An exploration of how states address the often conflicting challenges of development, order, and inclusion.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Conventional wisdom among policymakers in both the US and Europe holds that weak and failing states are the source of the world's most pressing security threats today. However, as this book shows, our assumptions about the threats posed by failed and failing states are based on false premises.

The threat of terror, which flares in Africa and Indonesia, has given the problem of failed states an unprecedented immediacy and importance. In the past, failure had a primarily humanitarian dimension, with fewer implications for peace and security. Now nation-states that fail, or may do so, pose dangers to themselves, to their neighbors, and to people around the globe: preventing their failure, and reviving those that do fail, has become a strategic as well as a moral imperative. State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror develops an innovative theory of state failure that classifies and categorizes states along a continuum from weak to failed to collapsed. By understanding the mechanisms and identifying the tell-tale indicators of state failure, it is possible to develop strategies to arrest the fatal slide from weakness to collapse. This state failure paradigm is illustrated through detailed case studies of states that have failed and collapsed (the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, the Sudan, Somalia), states that are dangerously weak (Colombia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan), and states that are weak but safe (Fiji, Haiti, Lebanon).

There is growing international recognition that high economic exposure, remoteness and proneness to natural disasters have a debilitating effect on small economies, despite the fact that some of them exhibit relatively high per capita incomes. This paper presents a Commonwealth vulnerability index that can be used as an additional criterion to augment other factors, such as per capita income, which are taken into account in reaching decisions on the treatment of certain developing countries by international organizations.

Although long a component of U.S. foreign policy, strengthening weak and failing states has increasingly emerged as a high-priority U.S. national security goal since the end of the Cold War. The threats from these states include: providing safe havens for terrorists, organized crime, and other illicit groups; causing conflict, regional instability, and humanitarian emergencies; and undermining efforts to promote democracy, good governance, and economic sustainability. This report: (1) Provides definitions of weak states and describes the links between weak states, U.S. national security, and development challenges; (2) Surveys recent key U.S. programs and initiatives designed to address threats emanating from weak states. Illustrations.