Beneath the Surface of Paper States Ken Menkhaus, professor of Political Science at Davidson College (U.S.). On paper, the world is governed by sovereign states, each exercising exclusive control within its own territory. In reality, millions of people live in a political vacuum in which the state exercises little or no meaningful authority. This “sans État” condition includes ungoverned urban slums, forgotten rural communities, and, most dramatically, the growing zones of state collapse. Observers rightfully point to this trend with alarm. They cite the spread of “chaos” as a global security threat—a breeding ground for lawlessness, organized crime, warlordism, humanitarian crises, and unchecked disease. Indeed, this crisis of governance is an underlying source of much of the misery of underdevelopment and violent crime that many of the world’s poorest people endure. Fortunately, the communities living in these zones of state retrenchment are not passive. Their towns and neighbourhoods are usually far from anarchic. From rural Somalia to the urban slums of Haiti, these stateless communities are devising innovative ways to organize themselves to provide a variety of basic services. The most ambitious of these spontaneous forms of self-governance even conduct quasi-diplomatic relations with the external world. International development agencies know this well—local polities have become important partners at the grassroots level where the state is unable or unwilling to exercise authority. This trend poses a broader historical question. Is the retrenchment and even collapse of some states a temporary phenomenon related to the end of the Cold War, or is it the beginning of the end of the era of state-centric global politics itself? It has often been argued that sovereign states were an inappropriate, western imposition on the colonized world. What we are now witnessing, these critics add, are local communities shrugging off this failing colonial legacy, remaking polities and indigenous systems of governance which better match local realities and meet local needs. Others add that the forces of globalization are also accelerating the erosion of state authority and sovereignty. Does this imply that the state is actually being replaced by these institutions of self-governance? Here one must proceed with caution. In most cases, they are very limited and fragile institutions, located in slums and war zones. Second, despite its irrelevance as a functional polity in some parts of the world, the state is likely to remain with us for a very long time. It remains the cornerstone of the current international political system; international organizations and law are state-centered, and personal travel documents are state-based. The world at large is simply not equipped formally to interact with and recognize alternative polities. The irony, then, is that for some of the world’s people, the state is simultaneously irrelevant and indispensable. Instead, we are witnessing a trend toward a two-tiered system of political life in parts of the Third World. On one level, there will be “paper states”—thin, formal, and weak juridical structures—which will continue to lay claim to a sovereignty they cannot actually exercise, but which the international community requires and will continue to recognize. Beneath the surface of the paper state, a second tier of political life—a messy, fluid, innovative, often informal mosaic of local polities—will continue to evolve, and will provide at least some of the public goods which communities desire. They will include local non-governmental organizations, religious movements, neighbourhood groups, business associations, clans and mafia, and will often draw extensively on international resources. The challenge to the external world will be learning to work constructively with this increasingly complex political development in some Third World settings.