Understanding Political Stability and Instability
This paper proposes a new understanding of political stability. In doing so, it reviews and critiques previous definitions, outlines five operational concepts, and identifies implications important to the practice of stability operations, current US government policy, and academic research. It finds political stability to be the degree to which formal roles and structures coincide with informal roles and structures within a political object. The wider the ‘gap,’ the greater the instability. Uniquely, this view sees stability and instability as statements of potential, not occurrence.