The state machine approach is a general method for implementing fault-tolerant services in distributed systems. This paper reviews the approach and describes protocols for two different failure models--Byzantine and fail-stop. System reconfiguration techniques for removing faulty components

We offer the first independent scholarly evaluation of the claims, forecasts, and causal inferences of the State Failure Task Force and their efforts to forecast when states will fail. This task force, set up at the behest of Vice President Gore in 1994, has been led by a group of distinguished

the failure states of the system.

sites worldwide, is implemented on top of an infrastructure of tens of thousands of servers and network components located in many datacenters around the world. At this scale, small and large components fail continuously and the way persistent state is managed in the face of these failures drives

An adaptationist programme has dominated evolutionary thought in England and the United States during the past 40 years. It is based on faith in the power of natural selection as an optimizing agent. It proceeds by breaking an organism into unitary 'traits' and proposing an adaptive

on specific properties of services, (ii) responsive, to track changes due to mobility and performance, (iii) robust, to handle failures, and (iv) easily configurable. INS uses a simple language based on attributes and values for its names. Applications use the language to describe what they are looking for (i

of high-level functions that it can perform during a mission, to individually select appropriate actions throughout the mission based on the requirements of the mission, the activities of other robots, the current environmental conditions, and the robot's own internal states. ALLIANCE is a fully

Attempts to forecast or remedy state failure would benefit from a clearer view of the multiple pathways that can lead states to fail. This paper delineates five pathways: esca-lating ethnic conflicts, state predation, regional guerrilla rebellion, democratic collapse, and succession/reform crises

Abstract: Noting data that suggests that Africa oversupplies state failure, the paper probes the sources of political insecurity in the continent. It explores the logic that underlies an equilibrium in which governments employ force to protect rather than to predate and in which citizens engage

Paper prepared for a special issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy in collaboration with iiG This document is an output from research funding by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) as part of the iiG, a research programme to study how to improve institutions for pro-poor affiliation growth in Africa and South-Asia. The views expressed are not necessarily those of DFID.