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Quote: The 2007 Failed States Index (FSI) ranks 177 countries based on their social, economic, and political pressures. The Ploughshares Fund supports the work of the Fund for Peace to produce this comprehensive index. The FSI was first introduced in the July/August 2005 issue of Foreign Policy magazine. The second FSI was published in the May/June issue and the 2007 edition returned to the July/August issue. In 2005, we rated 75 countries; in 2006, we expanded the Index to include 146 countries. The index is compiled using the Fund for Peace's internationally recognized methodology, the Conflict Assessment System Tool (CAST). CAST is used to assess violent internal conflicts and measure the impact of mitigating strategies. In addition to the risk of state failure and violent conflict, it assesses the capacities of core state institutions and analyzes trends in state instability. The FSI focuses on the indicators of risk and is based on hundreds of thousands of articles and reports that are processed by our CAST Software from 12,000+ sources. Given the vast amount of data processed, it is impractical to make the articles and reports available directly to the public.

Quote: For the second year in a row, Sudan tops the rankings as the state most at risk of failure. The primary cause of its instability, violence in the country’s western region of Darfur, is as well known as it is tragic. At least 200,000 people—and perhaps as many as 400,000—have been killed in the past four years by janjaweed militias armed by the government, and 2 to 3 million people have fled their torched villages for squalid camps as the violence has spilled into the Central African Republic and Chad. These countries were hardly pictures of stability prior to the influx of refugees and rebels across their borders; the Central African Republic plays host to a modern-day slave trade, and rebels attacked Chad’s capital in April 2006 in a failed coup attempt. But the spillover effects from Sudan have a great deal to do with the countries’ tumble in the rankings, demonstrating that the dangers of failing states often bleed across borders. That is especially worrying for a few select regions. This year, eight of the world’s 10 most vulnerable states are in sub-Saharan Africa, up from six last year and seven in 2005.