State Failure and Fragility: Causes, Cases, Discussions

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DOI :10.26650/B/SSc21.2024.025.03   IUP :10.26650/B/SSc21.2024.025.03    Full Text (PDF)

Let’s Play Equals or Stop Pretending: Recognizing the Ministate in International Society

İpek Z. Ruacan

This article expands on Adam Watson’s discussion of organized inequality and the ‘ministate’ in international society. Watson, a diplomat-scholar associated with the English School of International Relations, maintained that change in international society occurs through resolving the contradictions that emerge between our ideals and realities on the ground, further noting that we have to reconsider the status of chronically aid-dependent states as one such contradiction. While recognized as states, these chronically-dependent states fall far from meeting the material conditions of statehood and a stark gap has thus opened between their legal existence as states and their ability to deliver the functions of a state. The ‘ministate’ is a possible new category of existence for these entities that can resolve the contradictions that have emerged in our contemporary international society around the question of (failed) statehood. The MIRAB economics model, meantime, demonstrates that aid-dependent development is possible. Can we, then, actually proceed with recognizing aid-dependent states as ministates? The article considers two possible pathways to ministatehood, voluntary renunciation and derecognition, and considers the implications of a two-tier international society of donors/recipients following our failure to build an international society of equals. 


Keywords: English School, Adam Watson, inequality, foreign aid, MIRAB

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