The aim of the Crisis States Research Centre (CSRC) at DESTIN's Development Research Centre is to provide new understanding of the causes of crisis and breakdown in the developing world and the processes of avoiding or overcoming them.

The CSRC research objectives are:

• to assess how constellations of power at local, national and global levels drive processes of institutional change, collapse and reconstruction and in doing so challenge simplistic paradigms about the beneficial effects of economic and political liberalisation
• to examine the effects of international interventions promoting democratic reform, human rights and market competition on the 'conflict management capacity' and production and distributional systems of existing politics
• to analyse how communities have responded to crisis, and the incentives and moral frameworks that have led either toward violent of non-violent outcomes
• to examine what kinds of formal and informal institutional arrangements poor communities have constructed to deal with economic survival and local order

Its website offers access to:

• publications produced by the center, including working papers, briefing papers, discussion papers, and other crisis states papers
• links to crisis states related websites
• the crisis state programme forum, containing some public and private rooms