Even they cannot achieve much in a completely failed state, but they tend to flourish in places where there is some internal debate between different levels of government and private interests.
ECONOMIST: UNESCO is better at naming enemies than finding friends
The country Musharraf took over from the civilians in 1999 was close to a failed state, especially in terms of its international financial standing.
In many ways, Haiti is a failed state: the latest chapter in its long history of strife saw the ousting of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February.
" Mexico is in no danger of becoming a failed state, " he said.
In 2007, Dutschke failed in his bid as a Republican to defeat Democratic state representative Steve Holland, whose mother, a judge, received one of the ricin-tainted letters.
On 25 November, the BBC World Service is broadcasting a special one-hour debate in front of a Kinshasa audience: Is DR Congo a failed state?
Leaders of ASEAN may finally be waking up to what is happening in the neighborhood: the prospect of a failed state.
New York City, the country's largest school district, is one of only a handful of districts in the state that lost money because it failed to hammer out an agreement with its union by a Jan. 17 deadline.
The overhaul law provided that the federal government would step in and run the new markets if a state failed to do so.
They included Fernando Collor, a former president forced out in 1992 over corruption allegations, who failed to make a comeback as governor of his home state of Alagoas.
But Mr Farage's decision to step down as leader for a tilt at the bigger prize of a seat at Westminster backfired when he failed to unseat Commons Speaker John Bercow in Buckingham, leaving him in a curious state of limbo.
Local media have been reporting that Carlos Pascual, a Cuban-American expert on Europe and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, is Obama's choice, but the fact that he wrote a report for the Brookings Institute on Iraq and the importance of reconstructing a failed state wasn't well received in political and government circles.
Political events in Italy will also be in focus after a divided parliament failed to elect a new head of state on Thursday.
He and Uribe turned the tide in a complicated and costly conflict, at 47 years the longest in the Western Hemisphere, that had very nearly turned Colombia into a failed state.
Yet what failed in Venezuela was not market economics, but a bloated, inefficient state and corrupt political leadership.
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Fatah's popularity has flagged since the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, set up the Palestinian Authority but failed to produce a truly independent state.
Colombia, a country which was starting to look like a failed state during the late 1990s, is generally moving in the right direction under the current government.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Columbia: Moving toward more stability
Plus we would probably destabilise the whole of Sudan which is the size of Western Europe and the last thing we want is a failed state the size of Western Europe on our hands in Africa.
In 1994 the U.S. began pulling out of Somalia, leaving a failed state with no central government.
It is rarer to find a middle-income state in which law and order once existed but later failed.
The schools lost that increase from last year because the United Federation of Teachers union and Mayor Michael Bloomberg failed to agree to a teacher evaluation system by a deadline set in state law.
Police in the West African state of Benin are hunting for the third alleged plotter suspected of mounting a failed coup to unseat the country's president.
In addition, the people who conducted the Harvard study apparently failed to interview a single one of the state regulators who have chosen to incorporate FracFocus into their state disclosure regulations.
The federal district court in Miami ruled that the Republicans had failed to assert a violation of federal constitutional rights and therefore refused to intervene in the decision of state officials.
However, in the case of Damian Green, you have failed to give a full and frank account of your own state of knowledge, and refused to give a view on whether the police raid on 27 November, involving counter-terrorism police, was heavy-handed.
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