The 2009 Failed States Index has just been released, a fifth annual collaboration between Foreign Policy Magazine and the Fund for Peace, ranking 177 countries according to a range of economic, political and social indicators. Considering the ease with which some people tend to throw this term around, I am compelled to open the discussion here with some attempt at agreeing on just what it means for a state to be “failed”. Robert I. Rotberg, director of the Kennedy School of Government’s program on intrastate conflict and conflict resolution and president of the World Peace Foundation, offers this summary of what qualifies:

“Failed states have two defining criteria: They deliver very low quantities and qualities of political goods to their citizens, and they have lost their monopoly on violence.”

I’ve spent a couple of days looking through the guts of this study, in part for the Latin America side of this blog and have also reordered the rankings to zero in on C.I.S. countries. Pop out the box at the right to see the sample of countries in question or go to FP’s website for the entire survey. More discussion of Georgia and Russia after the jump.