Reversing Polarities: Anarchical (Failed) States versus International Progress

The article explores how the literature on 'failed states' (re)produces the modern state as a regulatory ideal, obscuring its contingent character and its violent foundation. So, discursive practices, based on an Eurocentric account, construct the 'failed state' as deviant. The resultant hierarchy of states, in turn, creates favorable conditions for interventionist practices, whose agents are depicted as members of a 'progressive' and 'benevolent' 'international community'. As state failure is interpreted as exclusively domestic process, a well-demarcated boundary between the domestic level of...