This Center for Preventive Action Working Paper surveys existing approaches to assessing state fragility and failure within the context of development, conflict, and governance. It examines the risk factors that have been identified through systematic inquiry and research with the goal of improving the prospects for successful conflict prevention and management, and argues that the goal of "early warning" relating to state fragility and failure should be more to inform and temper our expectations for policy response than to trigger costly and risky interventions.
Authors: Christopher Dickey, John Barry, and Owen Matthews
Middle East Regional Editor Christopher Dickey, Contributing Editor John Barry, and Moscow Bureau Chief Owen Matthews report that Russia is weaker than it looks. Most NATO leaders insist the world is too interdependent to allow another cold war. Russia is not the Soviet Union. And Western powers don't want to be drawn into a game of bluff that will only inflate Vladimir Putin's prestige.
This module features teaching notes and supplemental resources for Toward an Angola Strategy: Prioritizing U.S.-Angola Relations, a report of an Independent Commission sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations Center for Preventive Action. This report argues that it is in the interest of the United States to help develop a sustainable and lasting peace in Angola.
Speakers: David A. Hamburg, Fen Osler Hampson, Paul Heinbecker, and Gordon S. Smith, and Bruce W. Jentleson Presider: Major General William L. Nash
Watch experts discuss the changes in conflict prevention work since the publication of the Carnegie Commission on the Prevention of Deadly Conflict's final report ten years ago.
Speakers: David A. Hamburg, Fen Osler Hampson, Paul Heinbecker, and Gordon S. Smith, and Bruce W. Jentleson Presider: Major General William L. Nash
Listen to experts discuss the changes in conflict prevention work since the publication of the Carnegie Commission on the Prevention of Deadly Conflict's final report ten years ago.
Listen to Terje Roed-Larsen, president of the International Peace Academy, discuss the challenges facing conflict prevention efforts in the Middle East.
The Bush administration wants to contain Iran by rallying the support of Sunni Arab states and now sees Iran's containment as the heart of its Middle East policy: a way to stabilize Iraq, declaw Hezbollah, and restart the Arab-Israeli peace process. But the strategy is unsound and impractical, and it will probably further destabilize an already volatile region.
The Council on Foreign Relations' David Rockefeller Studies Program—CFR's "think tank"—is home to more than seventy full-time, adjunct, and visiting scholars and practitioners (called "fellows"). Their expertise covers the world's major regions as well as the critical issues shaping today's global agenda. Download the printable CFR Experts Guide.
The author analyzes the potentially serious consequences, both at home and abroad, of a lightly overseen drone program and makes recommendations for improving its governance.
