How States Die: Membership and Survival in the International System

When states die, there are massive consequences for neighboring states and sometimes for the entire international system. Somalia’s death in 1991 created a safe haven for criminal non-state actors and has unsettled the Horn of Africa for decades. When the Iraqi state was dismantled in 2003, a similar set of consequences plagued the Middle East and the international system more broadly.

In How States Die, Douglas Lemke provides a rigorous analysis of this phenomenon by reconceptualizing the definitions of the state and state death. A state exists, according to Lemke, whenever a set of state-like political entities exercise control over a populated territory. This includes both sovereign states and ＂territorial contenders,＂ which lack formal diplomatic recognition. Conceiving statehood in this way vastly increases the population of states that have experienced state death, which casts new light on the entire phenomenon. This increased range not only expands the list of ways states can die; it also provides insights into whether diplomatic recognition is associated with longer life and shows that state strength is not related to state death. Similarly, in contrast to the conventional wisdom, victories in conflict do not coincide with longer state survival. State death is one of the central questions within international relations, and Lemke’s reformulation of what a state is will transform our understanding of how and why these deaths happen.

Douglas Lemke is Professor of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University. He studies international relations with particular focus on the interaction of conflict and the development of states. He is a ＂forest＂ rather than ＂tree＂ person, in that his intellectual orientation guides him toward commonalities across levels of development, regional settings, types of states, and types of wars. Professor Lemke earned his doctorate at Vanderbilt University, has held faculty positions at Florida State University, the University of Michigan, and Pennsylvania State University, and has mentored many undergraduate and graduate students. He has published 23 articles, 8 chapters, and 4 books, either as solo-authored works or collaborations with many co-authors.