A new president, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, was elected in February but the state is mostly just an empty word outside Bangui, where armed groups and bandits prey on civilians, transporters and their own communities, extorting taxes, kidnapping people and livestock, and launching sporadic killing sprees.
But it has been involved in sporadic killings of members of rival criminal gangs.
While these brutal, but sporadic killings are not without precedent in the Republic, the latest shootings are significant for a number of reasons.
The army was called in to help, but even a month after the rioting erupted, reports of sporadic killings and arson are still trickling in.
IT was, they agreed, in some ways like the burning last year of a Christian village outside Lahore, and in other ways like the sporadic killings of Shiites in the years before that.
But the violence on Friday had a different feeling, as opposed to sporadic killings or dead bodies appearing in the streets, today's incident saw physical clashes between armed men and security forces for the first time since an earlier failed coup attempt in May.
Low-scale, sporadic conflict, including frequent killing by Indian tribes of the settlers' cattle, quickly became a way of life in the hills of Northern California.
Yet we now have a mountain of evidence to show that the abuses of the Sandinista government in the 1980s were minor and sporadic compared with the extensive killings, largely of unarmed peasants, carried out by the armed forces in Guatemala and El Salvador, whose regimes had the staunch support of the Reagan administration.
Several people were killed and dozens were wounded Friday in sporadic violence across Iraq, and a group linked to the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi took responsibility for the killing on Wednesday of the governor of Nineveh Province.
Under this hypothesis, persisters represent phenotypic variants which, due to immunologic stress, enter a slow-sporadic, or non-growing state which makes them tolerant to antimicrobial killing (McCune et al., 1957).
Rising violence across Northern Ireland in recent weeks, with two sectarian killings, hundreds of firebomb attacks on homes and churches, and sporadic gunfire across the so-called Peace Line of walls and fences separating Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, has served as a menacing reminder of what fills political vacuums in the province.
