Failed States Index 2011 Launch Event: National Press Club on June 29

oin The Fund for Peace (FfP) and BENS for the launch of this year’s Failed States Index (FSI).  The FSI is a leading index that annually highlights current trends in social, economic and political pressures that affect all states, but can strain some beyond their capacity to cope.  Apart from the impact on their people, fragile and failed states present the international community with a variety of challenges. In today's world, with its globalized economy, information systems and security challenges, pressures on one fragile state can have serious repercussions not only for that state and its people, but also for its neighbors and other states halfway across the globe.

The Launch event will include:

• Chairman Mullen's keynote speech on the challenges that fragile and failed states pose for the international community;
• The highlights of the 2011 edition of the Failed States Index;
• A debate on the motion "That Failed States are a Product of Modern Globalization."  The debate will be moderated by Foreign Policy magazine Editor-in-Chief Susan Glasserand include the author David Kilcullen, Emira Woods of the Institute for Policy Studies, Paul Wood, President of Pax Mondial and Georgetown University Professor Ted Moran as the debaters.  The debate will be followed by a Q & A period.  

  The FfP’s FSI has benefited from seven years of collaboration with Foreign Policy magazine.  Linking robust social science with modern technology, the FSI is unique in its integration of quantitative data with data produced using content-analysis software to process information from millions of publicly available documents.  The result is an empirically based, comprehensive ranking of the pressures experienced by 177 nations. The FSI is used by policy makers, civil society, academics, journalists and businesses around the world.