The Myth of the Failed State and the War on Terror: A Challenge to the Conventional Wisdom

Abstract

Abstract A central hypothesis in the articulated rationale inspiring the war on terror suggests that failed states play a key role in the international terrorist nexus and require external intervention and guided democratization. This logic is based on two related premises; first that there is a direct link between failed states and international terrorism, second that democratic governance reduces the recourse to terrorism. This article suggests that there is no causal link between failed states and international terrorism and that the asserted ability of democratic governance to catalyze a reduction in terrorism is exaggerated if not wholly inaccurate.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 114 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.