Foreign Policy has published its annual “Failed States Index,” which aims to quantitatively measure which are “the world's most vulnerable nations,” by drawing on “90,000 publicly available sources to analyze 177 countries and rate them on 12 metrics of state decay -- from refugee flows to economic implosion, human rights violations to security threats."
The top of the list is no surprise: Somalia, Chad, Sudan. Afghanistan is sixth. But what about the Caucasus and Central Asia? Which are the countries in the region most vulnerable to becoming failed states? Before a month ago, probably most people would have said Tajikistan, now Kyrgyzstan would obviously be at the top of the list.
Instead, the top of the FP list, in 36th place overall, is Uzbekistan, and right behind them, Georgia. Now, I just spent two weeks talking to people in Uzbekistan about internal politics and one of the few points of consensus was that the current government is extremely stable and there is basically no chance of unrest. That state has plenty of faults, but it is not going to fail. And Georgia? Obviously it has plenty of problems, but there, too, it's hard to imagine any scenario in which the state would collapse.
Anyway, right after Georgia is Tajikistan, and a few places down after that, Kyrgyzstan in 45th and Azerbaijan in 55th. Obviously the rankings came out before the unrest of the last couple of weeks, but even so. The sad irony: Kyrgyzstan's best score came on the “refugees/IDP” metric. Bet that's not the case any more.
Joshua Kucera, a senior correspondent, is Eurasianet's former Turkey/Caucasus editor and has written for the site since 2007.
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