Beautiful photo essay on the state of the world outside of our own narrow periphery. Below are 6 out of the 61 stories and photos. Visit Foreign Policy to view the entire photo essay.
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“For the last half-decade, the Fund for Peace, working with Foreign Policy, has been putting together the Failed States Index, using a battery of indicatorsto determine how stable — or unstable — a country is. But as the photos here demonstrate, sometimes the best test is the simplest one: You’ll only know a failed state when you see it.”
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Chad’s troubles are often written off as spillover from the conflict taking place in next-door Darfur, Sudan. But this central African country has plenty of problems of its own. An indigenous conflict has displaced approximately 200,000, and life under the paranoid rule of Chadian President Idriss Déby is increasingly miserable. Déby has arrested opposition figures and redirected humanitarian funding to the military in recent years. Matters might soon get worse as the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the country’s east, where the bulk of the refugees reside, begins to depart on July 15. Pictured here, local Chadians in the village of Dankouche struggle to share scarce resources such as firewood with a nearby Sudanese refugee camp.
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Life in Zimbabwe has undoubtedly gotten better since a power-sharing agreement between Robert Mugabe, who has ruled this southern African country since 1980, and Morgan Tsvangirai, his most prominent opponent and the current prime minister, entered into force in February 2009. Inflation is down from 230 million percent, goods are back on the shelves, NGOs are able to work again (though they are often still harassed), and the country is able to tap into foreign credit lines from regional banks and China. The bad news is that Mugabe has kept up his dictatorial rule as if nothing had changed; for example, he celebrated his 30th anniversary in office to the spectacular fanfare seen here, where children display militant loyalty to the ruling party. Mugabe and Tsvangirai operate autonomously, holding occasional talks to resolve disputes over cabinet appointments, land expropriation, opposition arrests, and media freedom — among other things. With little sign of progress for months, both leaders are now looking forward to fresh elections as the “only way out” of the political stalemate, as Tsvangirai has put it.
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The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the epitome of a country cursed by its resources. Blessed with perhaps the world’s single most abundant, diverse, and extractable supply of minerals, Congo has been exploited from the moment its riches were known — first by Belgian colonialists, then by miserable kleptocrats, and today by the Army and various rebel groups and militias. Meanwhile, miners, such as those seen here, work for meager wages. For all the country’s mineral wealth, today it has little to show for it save one of the world’s most desperate humanitarian situations. Although the International Rescue Committee’s estimated death toll of 5.4 million since 1998 has been contested, no one doubts that hundreds of thousands, if not more, have died — not from fighting but from disease.
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Trash overwhelms the eyes and nostrils upon arrival in Freetown, a capital city that expanded rapidly with refugees during and after Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war. Few of those safety-seekers have returned home, remaining instead in shantytowns on the city’s outskirts and in the seaside capital’s many flood plains. Public health is correspondingly poor in urban areas, with the fate of mothers particularly grim. One in eight dies in pregnancy and 43,000 children under the age of 5 perish every year. And what of the country’s blood diamonds, now out of rebel control? They were enough to feed and arm a brutal rebel movement but are far from enough to fund a country, bringing in just $35 million in the first five months of this year.
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And this one hits home a little closer than the others since this is a photo from the Phillippines.
Democratic elections will see power transfer from President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to her successor, Benigno S. Aquino III, at the end of June. Despite booming foreign investment, poverty is the dominant reality for the country’s population. Here, a child walks between shantytown blocks built on tombs.