During its 65-year history, the Central African Republic proved to be a country highly susceptible to destabilising processes. Tribalism, corruption, violence and the incompetence of the ruling elite have become immanent elements of the political system, leading to a gradual decomposition of the state and its evolution towards a dysfunctional (‘failed’) state, unable to perform its basic external and internal functions. The civil war that engulfed the country in 2013 was a consequence of political, social and economic conflicts that had been accumulating for many years. In this article, the author sets himself the task of identifying the main factors (internal and external) leading to the destabilisation of the state as well as the sources of contradictions that lay at the root of this process. Accumulation of negative trends along with low levels of socio-economic development at the moment of gaining independence and the inability to initiate modernisation processes, as well as the existence of negative international interrelations (conflicts in the immediate international neighbourhood) led to a crisis of statehood in the CAR.