Why states collapse

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  • Why States Collapse
    • War and violence
      • War and violence can completely destabilise a country.
      • Even in Ireland during WW1 war destabilised society as nationalists saw 'England's difficulty as Ireland's opportunity"
      • Rebellions and civil wars can cause states to collapse as a result of the people turning against the state making it uninhabitable for those in power, thus they concede power. For example the Russian revolution in 1916.
      • Terrorism or politically motivated violence can also have a destabilising effect on society and lead to the collapse of a state, political violence led to the fall of the Weimar Republic.
    • Poverty
      • Poverty can have an extremely destabilising effect on society, like in the 1932 general elections in Germany 50% voted for the extremes (Nazis or communists). "In times of economic hardship extremest parties prosper"
      • In the 1930s, following the Wall Street crash, 25 democratic systems collapsed and were replaced with political systems of the right or left.
      • The Arab spring was also caused by Poverty, as a man set himself alight in Tunis, Tunisia in protest of the high unemployment rates which triggered a series of events that became known as the Arab spring. Multiple states collapsed as a result of this.
    • Ethnic conflict
      • Ethnic conflict can have an extremely destabilising effect on a society as it is essentially a civil war between groups of different ethnicity.
      • Yugoslavia is a good example of this, it was made up of Croats (Catholics), Bosnians (Muslims), Serbs (Orthodox), Slovenes, Macedonians, Albanians and Montenegrins. After the collapse of communism Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia deliberately inflamed ethnic tensions.
        • He used the police politically to try and gain power, this led to complete state collapse following 4 years of brutal civil war. After this Yugoslavia was no more, it was broken up into new countries in an attempt to avoid any other conflict.
      • Dictatorships and use of coercion can often contain ethnic tensions , but when they collapse like they have in Libya and Iraq, tensions can often emerge and violence can break out.
    • Geopolitical  shifts
      • A geopolitical shift is an event that crosses borders, bringing unrest and instability with it.
      • There are many different types of geopolitical shift, from the famous Arab Spring to natural phenomena like the Spanish Flu or the Asian Tsunami. All of these events caused serious unrest in multiple countries, not just the country that the events occurred in.
        • Geopolitical shifts can also occur as a result of something outside of the state's control air the use of social media in the Arab Spring or the spread of christianity which helped to topple the Roman Empire . Communist and Democratic states helped tear down the Monarchies and Aristocracies in Europe.

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