Via the Strategist’s recent guest post comes the Failed State index. What I found to be the most interesting was not the index itself, which contains the nations typically associated with the label, but the states that had most improved or worsened.

Good news:

• Liberia wins the honor of the year’s most improved, where the November 2005 election, after more than a decade of civil war, can be credited with bringing stability and economic growth
• The first direct elections were held in December in Indonesia’s Aceh Province, host to a thirty-year separatist war that ended in a truce in 2005. Former rebel leader Irwandi Yusuf, who escaped from jail after his prison was destroyed by the December 2004 tsunami, was elected governor, sidelining former elites who had long monopolized power.
• In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the first multiparty elections in more than 40 years helped improve the state’s legitimacy in the eyes of its impoverished populace, though the country remains vulnerable to militia violence.

Bad News:

• Lebanon dropped nearly 12 points in the index, giving it a total score just a hair shy of Liberia. The war in Lebanon last year reversed much of the progress made since the end of its own civil war in 1990, Israeli air strikes drove more than 700,000 Lebanese from their homes, and did an estimated $2.8 billion in damage to the country’s infrastructure.
• Iraq and Somalia may suffer from poor governance, but long-serving strongmen are bad news too. Three of the five worst performing states—Chad, Sudan, and Zimbabwe—have leaders who have been in power for more than 15 years.

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