The word "ungoverned" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe something that is not controlled or regulated. Example: "The region remained ungoverned for years, leading to chaos and lawlessness." Alternatives include "uncontrolled" or "lawless."
Should Iran redirect Hizbullah towards a global terrorist campaign against the West for instance, if the country's nuclear sites were bombed the effect might be more devastating than any of al-Qaeda's works.For the moment, though, the most immediate global threat comes from the ungoverned, undergoverned and ungovernable areas of the Muslim world.
Extremists do, as Cameron said, "thrive when they have ungoverned spaces in which they can exist, build and plan" and the aftermath of the Arab spring has not just opened up new terrain but also exacerbated existing problems of lawlessness and criminality.
Perhaps, some may say, it shows that state failure is an extremely elastic term, embracing both countries in total collapse (Somalia, Chad) and those which merely contain large ungoverned spaces.
In April Mr Yushchenko called a fresh parliamentary election, leaving the country largely ungoverned for almost six months.The hope is that Ukraine's political system will now be rebooted.
A better explanation, given the fraught, radicalised and ungoverned state of north-western Pakistan, and the many dead soldiers there, is that the army could not make a much better fist of controlling the border, even if it did its damnedest.
The Americans discovered its importance only last September, when a patrol ran into a group of insurgents and found that the nearby hilltops provided good observation and electronic listening posts into Pakistan's ungoverned region of North Waziristan.
"No to Islamists and the al-Qaeda gang" reads the roadside graffiti.Meanwhile Libya's ungoverned spaces are growing, and with some 6,000km of border the country's problems are hard to quarantine.
Afghanistan at that time was not an ungoverned space, but a state sponsor of terrorism; indeed, al-Qaeda arguably became a terrorist sponsor of a state.Terrorism aside, what of other global plagues?
But to regard the British Midlands and the banlieues of Paris as ungoverned spaces would be stretching a point.The common denominator for al-Qaeda's activity is not state failure, but the fact that attacks are carried out by extremists claiming to act in the name of the world's Muslims.
Muslims farther south, across the largely ungoverned Sahara desert, might be indoctrinated, trained and sent back to Europe.For America, the worry is that "clean skin" European citizens, with no known record of radicalism, could be used to attack the United States.
The internet has proved to be an "ungoverned space" where al-Qaeda and its followers have thrived.
