The Fund for Peace: Russia is moving towards improvement
Short version
Foreign opinion
The Failed States Index, produced by The Fund for Peace, helps monitor political, economic and social pressures that all states experience, also identifying when those pressures are pushing a state towards the brink of failure. In this special interview for the Russian International Affairs Council J.J. Messner - a Senior Associate at The Fund for Peace who also manages FFP's Country Profiles program – discusses the global risks and trends that the Failed States Index reveals, touches on the methodology of the Index and analyses Russia’s performance over the past 8 years.
Full version
Foreign opinion
The Failed States Index, produced by The Fund for Peace, helps monitor political, economic and social pressures that all states experience, also identifying when those pressures are pushing a state towards the brink of failure.
In this special interview for the Russian International Affairs Council J.J. Messner - a Senior Associate at The Fund for Peace who also manages FFP's Country Profiles program – discusses the global risks and trends that the Failed States Index reveals, touches on the methodology of the Index and analyses Russia’s performance over the past 8 years.
Interviewer: Maria Prosviryakova, RIAC
Why is the Failed States Index (FSI) so important?
The Failed States Index is so important because of the attention that it draws to the pressures that are experienced by a 178 countries around the world now. Because the Failed States Index breaks down its analysis to 12 specific indictors, it is not only a matter of being able to see how countries are doing relative to each other, but it is also being able to give policy makers, business people, academics and so on the ability to look at the individual types of pressures that are being experienced by countries whether they be economic, social or political, or a combination of all of them.
What global risks have you tracked during the 2005 to 2012 period that might pose a threat to the international community in the very near future?
There are a lot of trends that have being seen over the last several years that are fairly obvious to people. One of them is the Arab Spring. I wouldn’t say that the Failed States Index predicted the Arab Spring, but what you could see for a number of countries that were affected by the Arab Spring was a gradual decline on a number of the key indicators in the years leading up to the revolution.
There are other trends that are a little quieter in the background, that people might not observe that clearly. For example, the economic decline of Europe. Now we can see that it is a very serious problem. If you look at the countries like Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain: almost without exception they have declined every year in the Failed States Index ever since we began analyzing them. So, we are able to track those sorts of trends, the hardest hits have been economic of late.
Your methodology combines content analysis of qualitative and quantitative data and then expert analysis. This approach overcomes some of the most common criticisms that other indices face. But the first part of your methodology – namely the collection of publications on major events in the country – relies solely on English-language sources. Does this mean that some important trends documented in non-English sources might be omitted and some of the countries’ indicators might not be accurately estimated?
One of the challenges that we face is the language issue. By analyzing content as we do in English it is naturally going to have somewhat of an English language bias to an extent. However, there are a couple of points to realize on this. First of all, it is a very simple practical issue of being able to analyzing in other languages. There could be the misconception that it is as easy as plugging in different words and a way you go, but it is not so simple.
About five years ago we had an experiment, when we tried to teach the software French. French is probably as close as you can get to English in that level of readability and understanding the content from a software point of view. But it didn’t work. Thus, trying to factor in languages such as Russian with Cyrillic, Amharic or Arabic, or non-Latin character set makes it even more difficult. But if you were to choose multiple languages, you also face a further problem: which languages would you choose? For example, if you were to focus on twelve languages, then the thirteenth language group is obviously going to be biased against.
Finally, the key issue to realize is understanding the way we analyze English-language documents is – whether we like it or not- the fact that English has become somewhat a global language. And it means that if some media content that is in foreign language is to be translated into another language, it is probably going to be English. There is a lot of foreign language content out there that is translated into English; and we are able to pick it up then.
The highest FSI score is a 120. A high score indicates high pressure on the state, and therefore a higher risk of instability. Why haven’t you given the maximum score to any state yet?
Some countries come very close. Somalia for example has scored the maximum score on a number of indicators. But it hasn’t scored a 120 overall yet. We are very cautious about ranking a country at the very top score. Because if you take the Somalia example – Somalia has been at the top of the Index for 5 year now. It hasn’t only stayed at the top of the Index for 5 years, this year it actually scored its worse score ever. And it demonstrates to us that it is possible for countries that we didn’t think to get any worse - to actually get worse. So, if we already give a country the worst possible score, there is no way we can go after that. If a country pushes up against the maximum, so be it, but we are very cautious about giving the maximum score.
Over the past 8 years Russia has improved its failed states index score from 83.5 to 77.1, but that only represents a 6.4 point improvement. How do you assess this modest improvement?
Well, first of all in terms of the right of improving, Russia’s trajectory has been towards improvement, almost unstopped over the last several years. And for a 6 point-change over the period of 6-7 years, it is really good. So, for Russia to score an average of 1 point better every year is actually significant. I think the extractive industry has contributed a lot to the economic performance of the country. Also, it is interesting looking at Russia within the context of the BRICS countries; and looking at how those 5 countries - even though they are still on different parts of the Index -are actually fairly consistently improving over the last several years. This is one of the trends that we are seeing: the BRICS countries are performing quite well. We will see, whether that is sustainable.
What could Russia do to improve its score?
It is not so much recommendation as to how to improve, so much - how not to worsen. I think the trajectory towards economic and political openness will be important to consolidate the gains. Any movement backwards - whether be political, economic or legal - will have effects on Russia’s score moving forward. And any closing of Russia as it were - would have negative effects on country’s performance moving forward.