Dysfunctional state or failed state : legal arguments in favor of the uniformity of terminology

As soon as the failed state term became a popular expression, used in politics and media to describe states remaining in poor economical, political or social conditions, it turned into a broad semantic category, which includes several types of phenomena that should be diff erentiated from each other. Moreover, it seems that every scientist and journalist changes the terminology of state dysfunctionality for his own purposes, creating new poorly defi ned terms like: weak state, crisis state, disintegrated state, fragmentated state, fragile state, failing state or collapsed state. This terminological chaos leads to no conclusion in the ongoing debate about state weakness, as no one can be certain of the precise shape of the phenomenon, he discuss. The aim of this article is to convince the reader that the terminology unifi cation process should be started from the point in which the failed state term would be reserved only for the states with no government. The author tries to prove that the lack of government causes serious problems for the application of international law, which are not posed by the dysfunctional states where the government still exists. As a state without government seems to be a diff erent phenomenon from the legal point of view, it should be treated diff erently than dysfunctional states