58th most wretched
The planet’s most wretched places are not always the most dangerous, says The Economist. State collapse is hard to measure.
If definitions are elusive, what about degrees of state failure? Perhaps the most detailed study is the index of state weakness in developing countries drawn up by the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, DC. This synthesises 20 different indicators and identifies three “failed†states—Somalia, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo—along with 24 other “critically weak†ones. One striking feature of such tables is that states fail in different ways.
The papers this weekend carried reports on the attempts to get a photo op with US President Obama. Anyone have a spare copy of He’s Just Not That Into You?
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