Published June 18, 2012 | By J. Messner, N. Haken, K. Hendry, P. Taft, K. Lawrence, T. Anderson, R. Jaeger, N. Manning, F. Umaña, A. Whitehead

The Failed States Index, produced by The Fund for Peace, is a critical tool in highlighting not only the normal pressures that all states experience, but also in identifying when those pressures are pushing a state towards the brink of failure. By highlighting pertinent issues in weak and failing states, The Failed States Index—and the social science framework and software application upon which it is built—makes political risk assessment and early warning of conflict accessible to policy-makers and the public at large.

Published June 20, 2011
Publication CR-11-14-FS
Report available in PDF and Flash formats

The Failed States Index, produced by The Fund for Peace, is a critical tool in highlighting not only the normal pressures that all states experience, but also in identifying when those pressures are pushing a state towards the brink of failure. By highlighting pertinent issues in weak and failing states, The Failed States Index—and the social science framework and software application upon which it is built—makes political risk assessment and early warning of conflict accessible to policy-makers and the public at large.

Publication PD-11-09-FS
Report available in PDF and Flash formats

The Failed States Index, produced by The Fund for Peace, is a critical tool in highlighting not only the normal pressures that all states experience, but also in identifying when those pressures are pushing a state towards the brink of failure. By highlighting pertinent issues in weak and failing states, The Failed States Index—and the social science framework and software application upon which it is built—makes political risk assessment and early warning of conflict accessible to policy-makers and the public at large.

Publication CR-10-99-FS
Report available in PDF and Flash formats

The Failed States Index, produced by The Fund for Peace, is a critical tool in highlighting not only the normal pressures that all states experience, but also in identifying when those pressures are pushing a state towards the brink of failure. By highlighting pertinent issues in weak and failing states, The Failed States Index—and the social science framework and software application upon which it is built—makes political risk assessment and early warning of conflict accessible to policy-makers and the public at large.

Publication CR-10-97-CA
Published June 30, 2010

The strength of the Failed States Index is its ability to distill millions of pieces of information into a form that is relevant as well as easily digestible and informative. Daily, the Fund for Peace collects thousands of reports and information from around the world, detailing the existing social, economic and political pressures faced by each of the 177 countries that we analyze.

The Fund for Peace’s software performs content analysis on this collected information. Through sophisticated search parameters and algorithms, the CAST software separates the relevant data from the irrelevant. Guided by 12 primary social, economic and political indicators (each split into an average of 14 sub-indicators), the CAST software analyzes the collected information using specialized search terms that flag relevant items. This analysis is then converted using an algorithm into a score representing the significance of each of the various pressures for a given country.