The Fragile States Index (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 FSI - 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.
The strength of the FSI 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 178 countries.
The FSI is based on The Fund for Peace's proprietary Conflict Assessment Software Tool (CAST) analytical platform. Based on comprehensive social science methodology, data from three primary sources is triangulated and subjected to critical review to obtain final scores for the FSI. Millions of documents are analyzed every year. By applying highly specialized search parameters, scores are apportioned for every country based on twelve key political, social and economic indicators (which in turn include over 100 sub-indicators) that are the result of years of painstaking expert social science research. The Fund for Peace's software performs content analysis on this collected information.
The scores produced by The Fund for Peace's software are also compared with a comprehensive set of vital statistics - as well as human analysis - to ensure that the software has not misinterpreted the raw data. Though the basic data underpinning the Failed States Index is already freely and widely available electronically, the strength of the analysis is in the methodological rigor and the systematic integration of a wide range of data sources.
Note: The principle of data timing was changed. Data from reports correspond to the situation from the previous year. The 2020 Fragile States Index, comprises data collected between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2019. Therefore data from Report 2020 is recorded for 2019 and the same logic works for all other years.