Abstract
Despite political conflicts in Quebec, Northern Ireland, and the Basque provinces, contemporary humanitarian emergencies are rarely found among high-income countries, unless you include the roughly 20,000 people killed yearly, mostly by guns, in the United States’ cities. Emergencies generally occur in low- and middle-income (that is, developing) countries, suggesting a threshold above which emergencies do not occur1 (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 1996, pp. 13–30; Holsti 1991, pp. 274–78; Jung, Schlichte, and Siegelberg 1996, pp. 50–4). A disproportional number of these states are weak or failing (Holsti 2000, pp. 243–50), a trait that interacts as cause and effect of their relative poverty.
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