One other thing to add re: Mexico. The term "failed state" is somewhat of a misnomer for the kind of analysis that has gone into Mexico's drug war. Mexico, like many other Latin American states, has lived with degrees of hollowness for a long amount of time. What is going on right now is just an exceptionally violent phase of this process. The "worst case" outcome that I developed in my Huffington Post op-ed is not a collapse like, say, Somalia, but a steady erosion of government authority and the growth of alternate power structures.
This ultimately neofeudal landscape (complete with a criminalized public sector) is not really a failed state as much as a hollow one. The current "truce" that may be ongoing in Sinaloa is an example of this process---the decline in violence happening not as much from state intervention but mutual agreement between cartels that bullets may be bad for business.
None of this is set is stone--it is possible for Mexico to eventually cut the violence (as in Iraq) to a livable level and/or to reach some kind of political agreement among the factions. But the conditions that spawned the criminal insurgency are structural and they will likely stay with Mexico even in the best case scenario. Mexico is not a failed state, and it's unfortunate that there aren't really more precise terms with the same catch-all meaning. But Mexico is progressively hollowing, and unless there is a change in strategy things will continue to degenerate.
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