Challenging the concept of “failed states”

There is no real consensus on the definition of a “failed-state”. Some scholars focus on the capacity and effectiveness of the government to determine if a state is failed or not (Patrick, 2007). Other indices such as the Index of State Weakness and the Fund for Peace’s Failed State Index underline the democratic character of state institutions in order to determine its level of failure (Call, 2010). Finally other scholars focus their argument on the legitimacy of the state (Kaplan, 2008), on the nature of the state (Gros, 2012), on the growth of criminal violence in a state (Rotberg, 2004), on the extractive institutions (Levitt, 2012) or on the states’ capacity to control its territory (Taylor, 2013). One of the main contributions on the theorization of the “failed state” is the “gap framework” developed by Call (2010). This framework unpacks the concept of “state failure” focusing on three gaps that the state is not able to provide when it is in the process of failure: capacity, security and legitimacy. Since “failure” is a relative term (Carment, 2003), the “gap framework" seems to be more useful than other definitions. Instead of attempting to quantify the degree of failure of a state, the gap framework provides a three dimensional scope useful to analyse the interplay between the government and the society in states in a more analytical way. This essay argues that the concept of “state failure” is not useful since it has never been applied to the Mexican state. Using the “gap framework” this essay aims to demonstrate that the Mexican state was failed from 2006 to 2012. The argument focuses of the war against drugs period (2006-2012) because the Mexican government found itself in an arena of competition among the drug cartels (Friedman, 2008, 2). After demonstrating that the Mexican State was failing during that period, the essay concludes that the “failed state” concept is a label used for geostrategic purposes and policymaking. Labelling the Mexican state as “failed-state” was not in the interest of the international community mainly because of its geographical position, its interdependence with the United States and because of its economic infrastructure