Postcards From Hell

Foreign Policy Magazine has posted a photo series titled Postcards From Hell, which catalogs the world's "most failed states." The list was compiled by the Fund For Peace.

This year's index draws on 90,000 publicly available sources to analyze 177 countries and rate them on 12 metrics of state decay -- from refugee flows to economic implosion, human rights violations to security threats. Taken together, a country's performance on this battery of indicators tells us how stable -- or unstable -- it is. And unfortunately for many of the 60 most troubled, the news from 2009 is grave.