Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace have published 2010 Failed States Index listing the world's most vulnerable nations.

Somalia has been the No. 1 failed state for three years running; altogether, the top 10 slots have rotated among just 15 unhappy countries in the index's six years. State failure, it seems, is a chronic condition.

At the top of the list, Somalia saw yet another year plagued by lawlessness and chaos, with pirates plying the coast while radical Islamist militias tightened their grip on the streets of Mogadishu. Across the Gulf of Aden, long-ignored Yemen leapt into the news when a would-be suicide bomber who had trained there tried to blow up a commercial flight bound for Detroit. Afghanistan and Iraq traded places on the index as both states contemplated the exit of U.S. combat troops, while already isolated Sudan saw its dictator, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, defy an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court and the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo once again proved itself a country in little more than name. Among CIS states, Uzbekistan was ranked 36th in the list of most vulnerable nations, followed by Georgia (37th). Tajikistan received the ranking of 38, Kyrgyzstan -45, Azerbaijan -55, Moldova -58. For the second year running, Armenia has been ranked 101st.

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.