Do not resuscitate.

• Author: Pham, J. Peter
• Position: Situation: Critical - Critical essay

WE SEEM to be on constant red alert for state failure, but we can stop fearing and start looking. It's already happening in Somalia, Congo and Sudan; it is also likely to spread to Eritrea, Kenya, Nigeria and possibly even Ethiopia--and that's just on the African continent. These places do matter to the United States, but breaking them apart--rather than building them up--may be the answer.

Since the end of the cold war there's been a lot more conflict within states than among states. The ensuing televised death, destruction, famine and disease creates calls for humanitarian intervention. We hold up the crumbling foundations of statehood. Adopting a strategy of altering states to fit "nations" instead of forcing "nations" to fit states will put an end to the draining and futile efforts to prop up weak and tenuous countries. It is time to stop nation building and start nation razing.

Code Red

SOME OF the most devastating examples of the wrong-headedness of promiscuous nation building can be found in Africa. The region houses a plethora of "imported states"--states whose territorial order was artificially imposed during decolonization. Their borders simply reflect the arbitrary and artificial way great powers delineated their spheres of influence during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Their inevitable failure has led to nearly two-dozen wars that have left at least eight million dead and displaced an estimated twenty million more. It was typical imperial hubris to have the surreal expectation that the continent's post-independence leaders could somehow weld together a nation out of heterogeneous peoples and cultures. Even more naive was the belief that contrived and artificial unity could ever work. Many of Africa's fifty-three states simply do not reflect the reality of the "nations" within them. Consequently, these states aren't working. They aren't providing order; they aren't providing prosperity; they aren't providing a pathway to democracy. We need to face up to the reality that in some cases "nation breaking" is precisely what is required to escape the cycle of violence at the root of the crises and lift the heavy burden of humanitarian intervention.

These states have not survived on internal legitimacy but on foolhardy international recognition. The West believes there is no alternative. So, in our poverty of imagination, we have canonized an untenable status quo.

In Sudan, the tragedy in Darfur--characterized by the United Nations as "the world's worst humanitarian crisis"--is just the latest in a seemingly endless series of internal conflicts that have bedeviled the country since its independence. Last fall, representatives of the country's South boycotted Sudan's national-unity government. This underscores the precariousness of the U.S.-brokered 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement--a truce that temporarily suspended a conflict that had left more than two million people, mostly South Sudanese, dead.

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The ironically named Democratic Republic of Congo has never, in its history as an independent country, had a complete set of free and democratic elections for local, provincial and national governments. Notwithstanding the international plaudits that accompanied the 2006 presidential election there as well as the presence of the largest United Nations peacekeeping...