Conflict and Development

Since the late 1990s, a new awareness of the relationship between conflicts and development
has grown. Developmental factors can act as a trigger for violence, as well as for ending
violence and for triggering post-conflict reconstruction. This book explores the complexity of
the links between violent conflict (usually civil wars) and development, underdevelopment
and uneven development. It emphasises the connections between stable developed economies
and civil wars in other parts of the world, and examines how structural factors (such as the
organisation of the global economy) virtually condemn some regions to conflict and
underdevelopment.
This valuable introductory text explains, reviews and critically evaluates this complex
relationship. It focuses on intrastate conflicts and complex political emergencies that
combine transnational and internal characteristics. Attention is also given to interstate
conflicts. Chapters emphasise how the relationship between conflict and development
traverses many scales (macro, meso and micro) and dimensions (economic, political and
cultural). Furthermore it explains how different developmental challenges and opportunities
emerge along the full life cycle of conflict. Specifically, the role of poverty, state, market,
civil society, globalisation, humanitarian aid, refugees, gender and health within conflict
dynamics are examined. The book also investigates specific developmental issues emerging
during conflict management and post-conflict reconstruction. Both authors have a background
in conducting research in deeply divided societies, and argue that many of the processes
connected with war and peacemaking deliberately write people out of the equation. This book
attempts to ‘write people in’.
By drawing on contemporary theoretical debates and examining current policies and events,
the text unpacks the difficult and complex aspects of the relationships between armed conflict
and development and makes them accessible, interesting and policy relevant. It considers how
peacemaking, peacebuilding and post-war reconstruction are usually more sustainable and
successful if politicians, policymakers, entrepreneurs and those working for international
NGOs take on board local opinion and capacity. Written in an accessible style, the book
considers the main contemporary theories and arguments on conflict, development and the
interactions between the two. The text is illuminated throughout with case studies drawn from
Africa, the Balkans, Asia and the Middle East.
Roger Mac Ginty is a Reader at the School of International Relations, University of
St Andrews. He specialises in the study of peace, conflict and conflict management. His
publications include No War, No Peace: The rejuvenation of stalled peace processes and
peace accords (2006).
Andrew Williams is Professor of International Relations, University of St Andrews. He
specialises in the study of conflict and international history. His main research interests
include international conflict resolution, international history and international organisation.
He has had a great deal of experience of the practice of conflict resolution and has worked as
a consultant for United Nations organisations such as UNDP and UNITAR. He has published
widely in key journals. His book Liberalism and War was published by Routledge in 2005.
Routledge Perspectives on Development
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Nicola Ansell Southeast Asian Development
Children, Youth and Development
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Roger Mac Ginty and Andrew Williams
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Environmental Management and Development

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 Conflict and
Development
Roger Mac Ginty and Andrew Williams
 First published 2009
by Routledge
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© 2009 Roger Mac Ginty and Andrew Williams

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Mac Ginty, Roger, 1970–
Conflict and development/Roger Mac Ginty and Andrew Williams.
p. cm. — (Routledge perspectives on development)
1. Civil war—Economic aspects. 2. Economic development—Political aspects.
I. Williams, Andrew, 1951– II. Title.
HB195.M195 2009
338.9—dc22
2008041929

ISBN 0-203-88000-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 13: 978–0–415–39936–4 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978–0–415–39937–1 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–203–88000–5 (ebk)

ISBN 10: 0–415–39936–X (hbk)

ISBN 10: 0–415–39937–8 (pbk)
ISBN 10: 0–203–88000–5 (ebk)
This book is dedicated to Charlie Williams, Private, RAMC,
1896–1916, a working man who lost his life in a war over
power and resources, like so many others before and since.
 Contents

List of plates ix
List of boxes xi
List of abbreviations xiii

Introduction 1
1 Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict 24
2 Institutions: hardware and software 46
3 People: participation, civil society and gender 72
4 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and
development 92
5 Post-conflict reconstruction and development 122
6 Development, aid and violent conflict 153
Conclusion 175

References 182
Index 206
 Plates

1 A child’s shoe in rubble in Beirut: one of the aims of this

book is to write people back into accounts of conflict and
development 7
2 A refugee camp in Jordan: in recent years there has been a
greater understanding of the interconnections between
conflict and underdevelopment 19
3 A Muslim cemetery in Bosnia: just because a society is
ethnically fissured does not mean that conflict will follow 29
4 A Porsche showroom in Beirut: people in war zones want
the same consumer goods as those in the peaceful countries 35
5 The UN in Jordan: the UN can be considered as an agent
of the liberal peace 49
6 A UN 4⫻4 vehicle: the UN is the planet’s premier collective
security organisation 62
7 An Israeli tank on display at a Hezbollah museum in
Lebanon: only a few states can engage in high-tech war 74
8 An anti-war protest in Boston: civil society often acts as
a bulwark against the state 81
9 A Tamil Tiger cemetery in Sri Lanka: third parties have
struggled to gain the trust of both sides in mediation efforts 101
10 French First World War cemetery: issues of commemoration
can have long-lasting sensitivity 111
11 Rebuilding a war-damaged bridge in southern Lebanon:
post-war reconstruction includes not only infrastructure
but also rebuilding fractured relationships in society 126
12 No weapons sign at the entrance to a UN facility:
disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration are often
among the thorniest of post-war problems 141
13 A UNICEF water tank in southern Lebanon: public health
issues often pose a greater danger than direct violence 146
x • Plates

14 Repairing war-damaged housing in Bosnia: who should pay

for this, and what role should private enterprise play? 159
15 Armoured UN vehicles: Aid workers have come under
increasing threat as humanitarianism has become securitised 168
16 Ruined tower blocks in Beirut: Hezbollah are organising
local reconstruction efforts 177
17 Stop sign in Jordan: care must be taken in the transfer of
western ideas and practices to non-western contexts 178
 Boxes

1.1 Colombia: a confusing conflict stratum 27–8

1.2 Cattle-raiding in Kenya and Tanzania: development
escalating conflict 33
1.3 A clash of cultures: Taliban-run Afghanistan and the British
insurance industry 37
1.4 Oil extraction in Nigeria’s Niger Delta 41
2.1 A clash of cultures? 51
2.2 The viceroy of Bosnia-Herzegovina 53
2.3 Pakistan: strong or weak state? 57
2.4 Privatising security, humanitarianism and development 65
3.1 The Oslo Peace Process: a closed system 77
3.2 Press freedom 82
3.3 Women’s empowerment through micro-finance initiatives 87–8
4.1 History, Israel and Palestine 112
4.2 The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 114
4.3 Rwanda 115
5.1 German and Japanese reconstruction, 1945–55 125
5.2 The problems of reconstruction and DDR in Iraq, 2003–8 140
5.3 Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration and security
sector reform in the Democratic Republic of Congo 144–5
6.1 Blood diamonds and Sierra Leone 164
6.2 External assistance and aid to the Palestinian Authority 166
6.3 Delivering aid in Darfur 170
 Abbreviations

ADB African Development Bank

ADB Asian Development Bank
ANC African National Congress
AU African Union
CNN Cable Network News
CPA Coalition Provisional Authority
DDR disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration
DFID Department for International Development
DRC Democratic Republic of Congo
EAR European Agency for Reconstruction
EBRD European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
ECHO European Commission Humanitarian Aid Office
ECOWAS Economic Community of West African States
EU European Union
GDP gross domestic product
GNP gross national product
GOS Government of Sudan
ICC International Criminal Court
ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross
IFI international financial institution
IGO intergovernmental organisation
IMF International Monetary Fund
INGO international non-governmental organisation
INSTRAW (UN) International Research and Training Institute for the
Advancement of Women
JEM Justice and Equality Movement
LDCs least developed countries
MDGs Millennium Development Goals
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
NGO non-governmental organisation
xiv • Abbreviations

NICs newly industrialised countries

OCHA Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
ODA Official Development Assistance
OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
OSCE Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe
PA Palestinian Authority
PIOOM Interdisciplinary Research Programme on Root Causes of
Human Rights Violations
PLO Palestine Liberation Organisation
PRT provincial reconstruction team
R2P responsibility to protect
RUF Revolutionary United Front (Sierra Leone)
SAP structural adjustment programme
SPLA Sudan People’s Liberation Army
SSR security sector reform
TRC truth and reconciliation commission
UN United Nations
UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UNIDIR United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research
UNMIK United Nations Mission in Kosovo
UNRRA United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency
UNTAC United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia
UNTAET United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor
USAID United States Agency for International Development
WCT war crimes tribunal
 Introduction

One of the oddities of social science research has been that theories of
development and theories of conflict have largely evolved in isolation
from one another. This was especially odd since development economics
as an academic subdiscipline and area of policy expertise emerged in a
post-Second World War context defined by violent conflict. Moreover,
the lens of development studies was firmly focused on the developing
states, many of which were prone to conflicts relating to decolonisation,
post-independence power struggles and proxy competition among Cold
Warriors. The few development economists who considered the matter
saw war as an interruption of development and surmised that
development could not begin until war had ceased in a particular location
(Thomas 2006: 186). As a result, most development specialists excluded
countries experiencing violent conflict from their studies. In effect,
conflict was written out of development.
We must be careful not to be too harsh on the development theorists:
many were economists more at ease with the study of a state’s fiscal
levers than its political machinations. Moreover, the vast majority of
development research was country-specific and thus poorly placed to
observe regional or international patterns, including those that contributed
to violent conflict. Just as development theorists largely ignored conflict,
the emerging subdiscipline of conflict studies had little to say – until
relatively recently – about development issues. There were a few
honourable exceptions among the conflict theorists (Gurr 1970; Azar
1990), but by and large their lenses of inquiry overlooked the potential of
2 • Introduction

development (and de-development, underdevelopment and uneven

development) to contribute to both war and peace. The sole interest of
many theorists was interstate war and the interplay between military and
political leaders in different states. Economic conditions within states
were important only in terms of how they could sustain a state’s ability
to pursue war. Alongside the macro-level lens that examined the war
potential of states and the international system, other conflict theorists
adopted a micro-level of analysis by using social psychology to explain
the conflict potential of individuals (Deutsch 1973; Cairns 1996). The
mezzo-level lenses, and particularly ones which would examine the
condition of identity groups, were largely overlooked.
The not so splendid isolation of development and conflict studies from
one another was no longer sustainable when the end of the Cold War
witnessed an initial upsurge in civil wars. Not only were these civil wars
more visible than their Cold War predecessors, but also the international
system was in flux and there was a scramble to find national, regional and
international mechanisms to deal with civil war. In this context, there was
a rush to explain the phenomenon of civil war, and the corpus of
academic, policy-related and journalistic work exploring the linkages
between conflict and development began to grow. Crucial in this process
was a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of conflict and the
long-term and often unsatisfactory nature of pacification strategies
(Kaldor 2006). The orthodoxy that development was an integral part of
peacebuilding spread very quickly and was notably promoted by UN
Secretary General Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 Agenda for Peace text. There was
also a growing realisation of the links between the outbreak of violent
conflict and underdevelopment and uneven development (Collier 2000b;
International Development Committee 2006: 8). As a result, many
academics, policymakers and political leaders came to see development
as a key to conflict prevention. The concept of human security, which
gained prominence from the mid-1990s onwards, was highly influential
in broadening conceptualisations of security to encompass issues
traditionally regarded as germane to development or social improvement
(United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 1994; Shaw et al.
2006: 3–18).
This book is published at an exciting time in the evolution of our
understanding of the relationship between conflict and development. The
situation is not unlike that faced by seventeenth- or eighteenth-century
cartographers upon ‘discovering new territories’ in the Pacific: they were
able to map the coastline and principal features visible from the coast, but
 Introduction • 3

a more detailed map of the interior required exploration of the unknown.

In a similar way, we have a good understanding of the outlines of the
relationship between conflict and development, but there is less clarity
on the precise nature of this relationship, particularly in terms of how
it changes according to circumstances and context. Moreover, the
adoption of critical and historical lenses make it clear that conflict
and development policy interventions are attended by a raft of ethical and
practical problems.
There is a further similarity with the situation facing early cartographers:
they were seeking to understand and represent a territory in a particular
way, compressing a society, its peoples and environment onto the western
format of the printed page that conformed to increasingly regularised
cartographic norms. We need to be aware that many of our discussions
of conflict and development use peculiarly western tools of analysis and
occur at a level of abstraction far removed from the lived experience of
those facing the challenges of conflict and development. The fact remains
that most development and peacebuilding policy (and the research that
underpins it) is designed in the global North but is directed at the global
South (Scholey 2006: 179–80). Moreover, western analyses of developing
world and conflict contexts can be prone to stereotyping that overwrite
a more complex reality. Thus we are all familiar with African women
portrayed as ‘[a]lways poor, powerless and invariably pregnant’ or African
men as aggressive (Win 2007: 79).
Just as early cartographers were anxious to curry favour with their patrons
and anxious not to offend powerful interests, contemporary analyses of
peace, conflict and development operate in environments conditioned by
politics and funding. Funding bodies tend to prioritise research with
practical relevance. Often this is for understandably good intentions, but it
risks shoehorning research into limited directions so that it is in service to
technocratic ‘solutions’ and avoids critical or innovative thinking. Thus,
for example, the UK government is more likely to fund an evaluation of a
development project it is carrying out, rather than a study of the structural
factors that are likely to limit the success of the wider development
programme. Sometimes powerful interests mean that the study of peace,
conflict and development is severely constrained. Arms manufacturers,
governments, international organisations, international financial
institutions and NGOs find external scrutiny a burden and may take steps
to manage or thwart it.
Perhaps the most prominent example of hypersensitivity to research and
critical scrutiny concerns Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt’s (2007: vii–xii)
4 • Introduction

study of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States was dropped by its
publisher and met with astonishing hostility when eventually published.
Former US President Jimmy Carter and Nobel peace laureate Archbishop
Desmond Tutu also came in for criticism (much of it personalised) for
likening Israeli treatment of Palestinians to ‘apartheid’. The effect of this
hypersensitivity to criticism is a self-censorship among many academics.
For example, few will use the term ‘Israeli state terrorism’ when Israeli
actions meet the criteria for such a label. These intellectual danger zones
are by no means restricted to scholarship and policy analysis on Israel.
Early cartographers would annotate their maps with the legend ‘here be
dragons’ on areas deemed too dangerous to map. In a similar way, there
are issues and areas that modern researchers of peace, conflict and
development find controversial or inconvenient to study.
Controversies abound in the study of conflict and development: Are
internal or external factors primarily responsible for a state’s
underdevelopment? Should aid agencies cooperate with warlords to
distribute humanitarian goods? How can the post-9/11 security demands
made by western states be reconciled with human rights, social inclusion
and political liberalisation in developing world states? What are the
implications for humanitarianism of growing civil–military cooperation?
Can increasingly intrusive western means of development programming
and good governance be reconciled with indigenous and traditional
norms? How can increasingly technocratic development and
peace-support interventions address the affective or emotional
dimensions of development and peacebuilding? These questions, and
many more, form the basis for this book.
The essential purpose of the book is to chart our understanding of the
complex relationship between conflict and development. The book is
written from a largely critical perspective: critical in the sense that it
questions orthodoxy, but not so critical as to forget that academic sophistry
is of little help to those facing the very real hardships that attend the
problems of conflict and development. At heart, development and conflict
revolve around people, yet social scientists (along with government
planners, non-governmental organisation (NGO) log-frames and financial
models) have been particularly successful in writing people, and especially
the affective dimension integral to human life, out of its analyses. This
book recognises that humanity red and raw plays an essential part in
stories of conflict and development. Hate, rage, revenge, hopelessness,
bitterness, ignorance, love, joy and mercy are as relevant to analyses of
processes of conflict and development as academic conceptualisations.
 Introduction • 5

The book is based on five assumptions about development that help with
our understanding of the connections between conflict and development:
● That development is not necessarily a good thing; it can have negative
and unintended consequences.
● That development can trigger and sustain violent conflict.
● That development, by its very nature, is an uneven process.
● That development is not just about economic growth.
● That development can be targeted in ways that aid post-war
reconstruction and reconciliation.
The first assumption (that development is not necessarily a good thing)
may initially seem Luddite or somehow antithetical to human
advancement, especially since development is regarded by many as the
means through which public goods (education and health care) and
personal liberty (freedom of expression and action) can be attained.
‘In everyday usage “development” is virtually synonymous with
“progress”’ (Thomas 2006: 187). Moreover, in the western political mind,
the continuation of economic development is a fundamental assumption
of political and economic life. The shelf-life of the western political
leader who advocated limits on growth would be very short indeed.
Jimmy Carter’s emphasis on American fuel dependency is believed to
have been a major factor in his 1980 electoral defeat to Ronald Reagan.
Indeed Reagan’s ‘It’s morning in America again’ television commercial
for his 1984 re-election campaign is regarded as a modern masterpiece in
light and fluffy electioneering that shied away from pressing issues such
as accelerating economic disparities. Despite the tremendous political,
economic and moral power behind the orthodox position that
development is always a ‘good thing’, critical observers must be prepared
to judge development according to its actual impact and ambition. Such
normative judgements will depend on the moral-ethical-political
framework held by the individual, community or institution that makes
the judgement, and the vantage point from which they make their
judgement. Put simply, where one sits will determine how one judges
development. If development is demonstrated to inflame conflict, degrade
environmental conditions and have profoundly negative social and
cultural consequences, then it is entirely reasonable that observers reflect
this in their judgements. It is unreasonable to brand those who are against
‘bad’ or unjust development as being against all development.
This leads to the second assumption, that development can trigger and
sustain violent conflict. This is by no means always the case. Indeed, as
6 • Introduction

will be demonstrated in later chapters, development can help prevent

conflict or aid post-conflict reconciliation. Yet is it important to recognise
the conflict-promoting potential of developmental processes whereby
intergroup resource competition, population displacement, environmental
degradation and the erosion of social structures that may have once
restrained conflict may all contribute to violent conflict. These issues will
be explored in detail in Chapter 1.
The third assumption, that development, by its very nature, is an uneven
process, contributes much to explanations of the initiation, maintenance
and ending of violent conflicts. A complex array of structural and
proximate economic, political and geographical factors accounts for the
uneven nature of development. Many of these factors will be discussed in
later chapters. The unevenness of development (and resources and
approaches to development) suggests that conflict will be ‘inevitable’, but
as we will see it is often the management of resources and development
that matters. As important as unevenness is the perception of unevenness.
This is particularly salient in societies with identity-based divisions in
which groups may interpret their share of resources through an ethnic,
religious or racial lens.
The fourth assumption, that development is not just about economic
growth, stems from the tendency of many observers (not just development
economists) to overlook the social, political and cultural dimensions of
development. Crucial in this regard is the type of development strategy
pursued and the relative importance attached to redistribution and market
freedom, as well as political and cultural development. A narrow
economic lens could examine China’s astounding economic growth rates
(averaging at just over 10 per cent between 2001 and 2007) and declare it
a development success (Asian Development Bank (ADB) 2006: 137). But
a more holistic approach might take account of the state’s poor human
rights record. Amnesty International’s (2008) State of the World’s Human
Rights report observed that
[g]rowing numbers of human rights activists were imprisoned, put
under house arrest or surveillance, or arrested. Repression of minority
groups, including Tibetans, Uighurs, and Mongolians, continued . . .
the death penalty continued to be shrouded in secrecy and was used
extensively.
(Amnesty International 2008)

The final assumption is to recognise the potential of development to

contribute to post-war reconstruction and reconciliation. In an ideal
 Introduction • 7

situation a mutually reinforcing relationship can be established between

development and reconstruction. Formerly divided peoples can come
together for the joint pursuit of economic growth and social progress.
This is not always the case, and poorly managed post-war reconstruction
often has profound consequences for the nature of the post-war society,
some of them negative.
Alongside these assumptions on development, it is worth noting that the
main focus of this book is on civil war, rather than interstate war. This is
primarily because war between states is a rare phenomenon, while civil
war (albeit often internationalised) is more common. In 2006, for
example, although thirty-two armed conflicts were ongoing, none of them
could be classed as interstate (Harbom and Wallensteen 2007: 626).
Importantly our interest in conflict extends beyond the direct violence of
overt war. Indirect or structural violence plays a key role in contexts of
conflict and development. Such violence is often deeply embedded in the
socio-economic and politico-cultural behaviour of a society. It can be
insidious, barely visible and taken for granted. It takes the form of
discrimination in the provision of public goods and opportunities, the
militarisation of society and the prevalence of societal attitudes

Plate 1 A child’s shoe in rubble in Beirut: one of the aims of this book is to
write people back into accounts of conflict and development
8 • Introduction

(sometimes encouraged by the state or other institutions) that certain

groups are inferior to others. So this book proceeds by adopting holistic
views of both conflict and development. Neither concept constitutes a
neatly compartmentalised category. Instead they are messy, ill-defined
and there is little agreement about the best way to pursue development
and conflict transformation. Above all, both concepts relate to the most
contrary and awkward species of all: humans. People don’t always say
what we want them to; they don’t always believe what we say; they don’t
always behave as we expect them to; and they’re not always as grateful to
us as we feel they should be. As a result, people are often written out of
analyses of conflict and development.
An array of factors help write people out of many studies of peace,
conflict and development: the media’s need to compress thousands of
individual experiences into a single narrative; the technocratic bias of
policymaking in which units and spreadsheets are more manageable
than people; and social sciences’ move towards large-scale studies
and its inability to deal with the affective dimension of human
behaviour. Indicative of this ‘writing out’ of people is development
and conflict-sensitive ‘programming’ as practised by many donor
governments and agencies. The term ‘programming’ suggests a
machine-like process whereby carefully regulated inputs are expected
to have particular outputs. Just as war is often criticised for
dehumanising individuals and objectifying them into a lumpen enemy,
there is a real danger that responses to conflict and underdevelopment
have a similar effect. Most studies, apart from biography, cannot hope
to convey individual experiences. In terms of academic studies,
anthropology has perhaps had most success in recognising that people
in conflict zones do not constitute an undifferentiated mass and that
individuals often experience events and processes in very different
ways.
This chapter proceeds with brief overviews of the evolution of theories
of development and conflict so as to provide a context for subsequent
chapters. In relation to development studies, it is particularly important
to understand the contemporary dominance of neo-liberalism and
market-led ‘solutions’ and the consequences of this for internationally
sponsored development and peace-support interventions. The evolution
of conflict studies shows how a more complex understanding of the
causes and maintenance of conflict has emerged, and how this has
shaped contemporary conflict transformation interventions. The chapter
concludes by outlining the basic structure of the book.
 Introduction • 9

The evolution of development theory

Summarising a multidisciplinary endeavour such as development studies

is a difficult task, especially when the ultimate purpose of development,
and the optimum means of achieving it, are hotly contested. Kothari
(2005: 1) is rightfully critical of surveys of the discipline that ‘articulate a
singular theoretical genealogy’. Development studies has been peculiarly
faddish, seizing upon theories and techniques at particular moments, only
to discard them in favour of a new saviour theory or technique. Kothari
(2005: 2) also warns against interpretations of development studies which
regard 1945 as Year Zero, as though no development or thinking about
development occurred before that year. Scrutiny of the means to achieve
economic development has a long intellectual pedigree (Meier and Rauch
2000). J.M. Keynes was particularly prescient of the need for peace
negotiations to take seriously the issue of long-term economic
development. Dispirited after his ringside seat at the Treaty of Versailles
negotiations following the First World War, he observed that ‘Peace has
been declared at Paris. But winter approaches’ (Keynes 1920: 235).
According to Keynes:
The Treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of
Europe, – nothing to make the defeated Central Empires into good
neighbours . . . nothing to reclaim Russia; nor does it promote in any
way a compact of economic solidarity amongst the Allies themselves;
no arrangement was reached at Paris for restoring the disordered
finances of France and Italy, or to adjust the systems of the Old World
and the New.
(Keynes 1920: 235)

As will become clear in later chapters, lessons seem to have been learned,
in that it is well recognised that the ending of wars provides unique
opportunities for international political and economic intervention. Less
clear, however, are the optimal types and extent of any intervention.
Although 1945 was not Year Zero, it was the year in which the contours
of the modern international financial architecture were established. The
World Bank and the Bretton Woods exchange rate mechanism (which
facilitates international trade) date from this era. The Second World War
also saw the United States re-establish itself as the predominant state in
the world economy. The decade and a half after the Second World War
was the highpoint of economic planning during which development
economists were convinced that ‘“good” scientific analysis would
generate the “right answers”’ (Harriss 2005a: 19). This was the period of
10 • Introduction

positivist orthodoxy, in which the primary aim of development was

accelerated economic growth, the primary agent was the state (mediated
by the Bretton Woods institutions) and the primary means of achieving
growth was careful analysis followed by a precise plan. The plan often
involved raising rural productivity and transferring underutilised labour
from the agricultural to industrial sectors (Leys 1996: 8).
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was becoming clear that economic
growth was difficult to achieve in many developing world contexts, and
that the fruits of any growth were rarely shared fairly. There was no
shortage of economic theories, but as J.K. Galbraith (1964: 38) observed,
‘it would be a mistake to identify complexity with completeness and
sophistication with wisdom.’ The failure of the initial post-war
development planning led to a new emphasis on modernisation and
technology transfer. The key here was the adoption of ‘modern’ forms of
administrative and political organisation in imitation of western states and
businesses, the transfer of western knowledge and skills through
education programmes, and a ‘green revolution’ of increased agricultural
productivity through the use of western farming methods (Rostow 1960).
This, in turn, sparked a radical critique in the late 1960s and early 1970s
as it became clear that, in many cases, modernisation strategies had made
few appreciable differences to citizens in the developing world (Harriss
2005a: 19–25). According to left-wing critics, the ‘“modernising elites”
were really . . . lumpen-bourgeoisies, serving their own and foreign
interests, not those of the people; world trade perpetuated structures of
underdevelopment’ (Leys 1996: 12). According to this view (usually
called ‘dependency theory’), modernisation was a recipe for further
immiseration and a structural dependence on western economic powers
(Frank 1967).
Global political trends, and specifically the Cold War, had a profound
impact on development strategies. A number of states, including Cuba,
Ethiopia, Tanzania and Vietnam, adopted socialist development
programmes, usually under the tutelage and protection of the Soviet
Union. To differing degrees, ‘scientific socialism’ was mobilised in the
service of development. This often involved the nationalisation of
industry, restrictions on foreign capital, land reform, and an enhanced role
for the state in directing economic exchanges and initiatives (Clapham
1987). In most cases, the results were not good: the socialist ‘reforms’
tended to be disruptive and often reliant on state coercion, the global
economy offered a poor fit for those not willing to reform, and socialist
experiment states such as Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia were often
 Introduction • 11

the scenes of violent civil war. The true fragility of these states’ economic
models did not become apparent until the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the withdrawal of subventions. Both dependency theory and the
socialist model of development paled into the background with the
coming tide of neo-liberalism.
The neo-liberal revolution of the 1980s and beyond was in sympathy with
wider political and economic changes. The political right was on the
ascendant in the United Kingdom and the United States, and globalising
market forces meant that national and international controls over capital
had been severely eroded. Traditional responses of state-directed
development policy were no longer effective in an economic climate
characterised by economic shocks, unstable commodity prices,
international capital flight and increasingly powerful and mobile
multinational corporate interests. The end of the Cold War meant not only
the collapse of the Soviet Union as a material supporter of alternative
models of economic development, but also the collapse of the notion of
‘an alternative’. Former Soviet satellites proved to be in no position to
resist aggressive economic reform interventions (often called the ‘shock
doctrine’) by international financial institutions. The rise of neo-
liberalism was also assisted by abundant evidence of state incompetence
and corruption throughout the developing world. Deepak Lal (1998: 65)
noted how the ‘old development economics . . . implicitly assumed that
the state was benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent.’ The ‘Chicago
School’ (who claim intellectual authorship of neo-liberalism) were
pushing at an open door at the headquarters of the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and rightist governments. The
essential neo-liberal argument was that the dead hand of the state and an
invariably bloated public sector acted as a brake on economic
development, while an unfettered market could act as an engine of
development. In this view, the benefits of market-driven growth would
trickle down and benefit all.
According to James Dorn (1998: 13), ‘the real plight of underdeveloped
countries is not market failure but government failure – that is, the
failure of government to protect property rights, enforce contracts,
and leave the market alone.’ Champions of neo-liberalism were
forthright in what needed to be done: the state must be pared back,
the market freed from regulation, state assets should be privatised, and
exchange controls and industrial licences should be lifted. The salvation
for underperforming economies lay in more exposure to the market, not
protection from it. Peter Bauer (1998: 36) had little time for ‘unfounded
12 • Introduction

notions about Western responsibility for Third World backwardness.’

For him it was
abundantly evident throughout the Third World [that] the poorest and
most backward societies and areas are those which have fewest
commercial contacts with the West, and the most advanced are those
with the most extensive and diversified contacts, including contacts
with those bogeymen, the Western multinationals. Throughout the
Third World the level of economic attainment declines as one moves
away from regions with most Western contacts to the aborigines and
pygmies at the other end of the spectrum.
(Bauer 1998: 28)

Neo-liberal prescriptions, which were enthusiastically endorsed by global

capital and the leading international financial institutions, were rolled out
in former Soviet-bloc states, often with catastrophic social consequences
(Klein 2007: 180–4). Western governments, and by extension their
development aid institutions, increasingly adopted market-led ‘solutions’
to all aspects of governance.
Cloaked in a populist mantle of the empowerment of entrepreneurs and
the cutting of public sector waste, neo-liberal truisms became the new
orthodoxy. According to David Harvey,
Neo-liberalism has, in short, become hegemonic as a mode of
discourse. It has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point
where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many
of us interpret, live in, and understand the world.
(Harvey 2005: 3)

The intellectual dominance of neo-liberalism is essential to our

understanding of the responses of leading states, international
organisations and international financial institutions to the problems of
conflict, development and peacebuilding. Market-led ‘solutions’ have
been hardwired into the organisational culture and policy responses
of donor governments and NGOs. Whether this manifests itself in
micro-credit schemes to further women’s empowerment, or in the
privatisation of state resources as part of a post-war reconstruction
programme, it has had a profound impact on the ethos of
humanitarianism, development and conflict amelioration policies.
Under the guise of ‘good governance’, massive programmes of social,
economic and political engineering have taken place in societies emerging
from conflict and economic crisis. In many cases, relationships between
citizens and the state, the state and the market, and the state and other
 Introduction • 13

states have changed radically. For example, neo-liberal wisdom may

demand that a state cuts its bureaucracy at the conclusion of a civil war in
order to keep down inflation and achieve international competitiveness.
Yet, the political loyalty of particular sections of the population may have
been dependent on patronage from the state in terms of employment or
access to public goods. Neo-liberal interventions may thus radically alter
political bonds and have far-reaching consequences for political
participation and stability, and public perceptions of political processes
and institutions.
Unsurprisingly, neo-liberalism has attracted immense criticism,
particularly in relation to its inability to address poverty and social
exclusion. The near deification of the market and corporate power has,
according to its critics, reconfigured the balance of power in many
states, with public interests being demoted. Harvey (2005: 19) regards
neo-liberalism as a ‘system of justification and legitimation’ aimed at
reinforcing ‘the capitalist social order’. In this view, it is a potentially
authoritarian political model: ‘The neoliberal state is necessarily hostile to
all forms of social solidarity that put restraints on capital accumulation’
(Harvey 2005: 75). While Dorn (1998: 14) regarded ‘Chile’s free market
revolution’ of 1973 as ‘an example for the rest of Latin America’, Harvey
(2005: 8–9) was excoriating of Pinochet’s US-backed coup on ‘little
September 11th’ and the widespread suppression that followed in the
name of libertarian ideas. It is true that many champions of neo-liberalism
are agnostic of the social and political costs of an unfettered market.
Deepak Lal (1998: 68, 70) observed that ‘The characteristics of good
government are more important than its particular form’ and ‘it is by
no means self-evident . . . that Western democracy necessarily promotes
a market-friendly culture.’ Critics remain unconvinced of the
redistributive potential of the market and believe that politics do matter,
particularly in relation to political commitments to social inclusion
(Harriss 2005b: 228).
Certainly there is a widespread understanding of the potentially
pernicious effects of market-led programming in development and
peacebuilding contexts (Chua 2004). As Moore (2005: 263) notes wryly,
‘Intellectuals have a generic tendency to explain.’ But analysis and
explanation, no matter how erudite, are not the same as policy
alternatives. The problem for critics of neo-liberalism is that their
opponents have created a self-reinforcing system based on widely
accepted norms of efficiency, cost-effectiveness and enterprise. The
neo-liberal system is promulgated by corporate interests and international
14 • Introduction

financial institutions, chimes with populist causes, has reconfigured the

ethos of public sector institutions (from hospitals to universities) in the
developed and developing world, and is in alignment with the strategic
interests of leading states. Critics are perfectly correct in pointing to the
spectre of ‘predatory disaster capitalism’ that profits from the misery of
others (Klein 2007), but the structures of the contemporary international
political economy have been captured by neo-liberal forces and the
system seems able to sustain itself (or at least defer or pass on the costs)
for the foreseeable future. Even the 2008–2010 global credit crisis did not
fundamentally alter government faith in the market.
The predominance of neo-liberalism does not mean that development
assistance aimed at emancipating populations, increasing opportunities
and promoting redistribution in the developing world has come to an
end. Certainly, neo-liberal structures and principles guide much
development activity, but the development sector is flourishing. In 2007,
worldwide overseas development assistance was $103 billion (though in
true free-market style, much of that was creamed off by western
consultants) (Mathiason 2005; Blanchflower 2008). The United States
alone spent almost $22 billion on development aid in 2007, and oil-rich
Gulf and Arab states are fast becoming major development donors
(Harmer and Cotterrell 2005). Increasing emphasis is placed on
integrated development interventions, so that the economic,
environmental, political and social dimensions of development are
interlinked and mutually supporting (Baker 2006). Sustainability, local
participation and ownership, and pro-poor initiatives are a common vein
through contemporary development thinking and practice. The UN
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), as agreed by 189 governments
in 2000, have crystallised development priorities:
● eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
● achieve universal primary education
● promote gender equality and empower women
● reduce infant mortality
● improve maternal health
● combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
● ensure environmental sustainability
● develop a global partnership for development.
Reflecting the target-driven nature of development programming, a
number of international organisations and leading donors (for example,
the Asian Development Bank) now explicitly organise their programmes
around the Millennium Development Goals.
 Introduction • 15

Although development activities have been subject to immense faddism

since the late 1940s, and although there have been broad shifts in
emphasis (from planning to the market-led initiatives), a number of
constants are worth noting. The first is that development is still largely
a North to South enterprise: intellectually, practically and financially.
The second constant is that macro-economic structures are still biased
towards the global North and there are few indications that this situation
will change. The third constant factor is that many of the states that were
in the most need of development in the 1940s and 1950s (during the peak
of development planning optimism) are still grossly undeveloped.
There is no great mystery about the causes and cures of under-
development. As Jeffrey Sachs (2008) observed,
Reaching the MDGs won’t take miracles – we know how to keep
children alive in malarial regions, we know how to increase food
production . . . In simple terms, the limiting factor holding back our
progress towards the Goals is the richest countries coming up with the
money they have promised.
(Sachs 2008: 6)

The evolution of conflict theory

Like development studies, attempts to understand conflict and peace have

attracted theorists and practitioners from a diverse range of disciplinary
and ideological perspectives. Both Adam Curle (1971: 1–3) and John
Groom (1988: 105–8) have identified a tripartite division between
strategic studies (concerned with state attempts to gain or maintain
dominance over other states), conflict studies (which regards conflict as
an unintended outcome of conflicts of interests and is concerned with
regulating harmful competition to minimise the outbreak of conflict), and
peace studies (a critical endeavour convinced that the structures of the
international system require radical overhaul in order to achieve pacific
relations). These strands of research have shown considerable overlap,
particularly in terms of their concentration on the causes of conflict. As
Chapter 1 contains a detailed explanation of the dominant theories of
conflict causation, this section will give a more general account of the
evolution of thinking on conflict.
It is worth noting that for many writers, violent conflict was regarded as a
given (a mere by-product of great power interplay or the consequence of
natural or primordial inclinations), and its causes were not subject to
16 • Introduction

serious scrutiny. Military history, which depicted war as ‘a deplorable

necessity’ (Creasy 1876: xi), thrived, but did little to advance our
understanding of the precipitants of conflict, or its wider social or cultural
impacts. More considered deliberations on the nature and causes of
warfare occupied scholars from Sun Tzu (544–496BC) and Thucydides
(460–395BC) to Saint Augustine (354–430) and Hugo Grotius
(AD1583–1645), but their work did not constitute a united or recognisable
field of conflict studies (Jacoby 2008: 8–12). Real world ‘traumas’ such
as the First World War (over 35 million casualties, the industrialisation of
warfare and the militarisation of societies), or the unleashing of nuclear
weapons gave renewed impetus to those attempting to systematise
knowledge of conflict (Wallensteen 2007: 6). For example, Lewis Fry
Richardson (1950), a Quaker conscientious objector who served with the
Friends’ Ambulance Unit during the First World War, sought to apply
mathematical analysis to warfare, particularly the propensity of armament
programmes to lead to conflict. Yet Richardson, and other pioneers of the
study of conflict as a generic phenomenon such as Quincy Wright (1942)
and Georg Simmel (1955), were a distinct minority. Indeed, many of those
who pursued ‘peace studies’ were derided as cranks, cowards, unpatriotic
or ‘religious nuts’ (Rooney 2000: 16).
The tendency of researchers to compartmentalise their research agendas
and thus separate domestic conflict from international conflict, or
dichotomise violent conflict and structural forms of violence, meant that
attempts to find a general theory of conflict were few and far between
(Azar 1990: 5). The subdiscipline of international relations, for example,
has been mainly concerned (until relatively recently) with wars between
states and showed little inclination to investigate sub-state conflicts. It was
not until the 1950s and 1960s that a recognisably modern strain of conflict
research emerged. Miall (2007: 27) notes how much of this research
attempted ‘to capture the generic characteristics of conflict’, stripping
conflicts of their context in order to better examine the relationships
between actors and the dynamics of conflict processes. Much of this
research was influenced by game theory, behaviouralism and the
application of social psychology to conflict (Axelrod 1990; Boulding
1990: 37–8). Indeed, rational choice and bargaining theory approaches
to the study of conflict are particularly popular (particularly among
North American and Scandinavian academics) and are prominent in
leading journals of peace and conflict. These approaches have helped
scholars to concentrate on key issues such as the credibility of antagonists
in their commitments to peaceful outcomes, asymmetries in the
 Introduction • 17

information available to conflicting parties, and ‘issue indivisibility’ or

the extent to which parties are amenable to compromise or a division of
resources (Fearon 1995).
Over time, more holistic understandings of conflict have emerged. This
has been complemented by the ‘mainstreaming’ of peace and conflict
research, with the establishment of research institutes, specialist journals
and a greater acceptance of the systematic study of conflict in
policymaking circles. There has been something of an intellectual
emancipation of peace and conflict. No longer is it the preserve of a few
pacifists and the closed shop of military and foreign policy officials.
Indeed, after decades of being on the margins, the study of peace and
conflict has even become popular. Christopher Mitchell (1994: 128)
recalls how, as a reaction to the rash of civil wars in the 1990s, ‘a range of
scholars . . . discovered that they have “really” been doing conflict
resolution “all along”’. ‘Ex-strategic theorists, military security experts,
Sovietologists and area specialists’ suddenly turned their attentions to the
problems of civil war. As will be outlined in Chapter 1, the rush to
‘explain civil war’ has variously focused on the importance of identity,
regional factors and econometric indicators. The modern evolution of
conflict studies has reflected real world conditions. The post-Cold War
upsurge in conflicts, greater interventionism by international
organisations and international NGOs (INGOs), and the impact of
globalisation on public awareness of conflicts on the other side of the
planet, demanded a better understanding of conflict. The failure (or
limited success) of some immediate post-Cold War international
interventions demanded a further refinement of our understanding of
conflict.
Specialist subfields in the study of conflict developed in the 1990s and
beyond, with the comparative study of negotiated peacemaking processes
(Darby and Mac Ginty 2000), reconciliation (Hayner 2002) and
disarmament (Wulf 2000) gaining particular attention. A number of
conflict resolution ‘gurus’, or respected practitioners such as John Paul
Lederach, Roger Fisher, William Ury or Ben Hoffman, also gained
greater prominence (Fisher and Ury 1991; Lederach 1995). There was a
growing consensus on the multidimensional nature of conflict, its
increasingly transnational nature in a globalised context, the need to see
beyond conflict manifestations to examine conflict causes, and – crucially
– the importance of development issues in explaining conflict (Azar 1990:
2). Research on conflict has also recognised the protracted nature of many
conflicts, the tendency of violent conflicts to reignite following periods of
18 • Introduction

calm, and the difficult, long-term and costly nature of post-peace accord
peacebuilding. Indeed, ‘no war, no peace’ situations have become
common in which parties agree to a ceasefire but fail to push for a
comprehensive peace process (for example, in Sri Lanka, Israel/Palestine
and Colombia at various times in the 1990s and 2000s), or reach a peace
agreement but fail to move towards a widespread reconciliation (for
example, Northern Ireland or Lebanon) (Mac Ginty 2006).
The increased research on peace and conflict did not occur in a vacuum.
Instead, a real world laboratory of civil war and post-civil war contexts was
available. Indeed, much research has been sponsored by governments,
international organisations, and development agencies as they struggle to
understand the complexities of contemporary conflict. A (mainly
European) critical strain emerged in the growing corpus of conflict-related
literature. The critics, such as Chandler (2000), Pugh and Cooper (2004),
Richmond (2005a) or Mac Ginty (2006), dismissed much of the orthodox
literature as being merely ‘problem-solving’; that is focused on specific
functional tasks related to peace negotiations or the implementation of
peace accords without asking wider questions about power relations and
international structures that help perpetuate conflict. According to the
critics, peace-support operations sponsored by leading states and
international financial institutions amounted to a ‘liberal peace’ or ‘peace
as governance’ (Richmond 2005a: 63) whereby western norms and
institutions were extended. In effect, according to this view, internationally
supported peace interventions were an exercise whereby states emerging
from civil war were compelled to conform to western strictures,
particularly in relation to their adoption of neo-liberal economic models
and western forms of governance. The notion of the ‘liberal peace’ will
receive more attention in Chapter 2. For the time being it can be defined as
the dominant system of peace favoured by leading states, leading
international organisations and international financial institutions.
Importantly, there has been an elision of international strategies to deal
with conflict and underdevelopment. According to many intervening
parties, development is the answer to conflict and underdevelopment.
Thus many of the same strategies that are deployed in societies emerging
from civil war can also be found in societies free from civil war but
suffering from underdevelopment. Development strategies in societies
emerging from civil war might be modified so as to be ‘conflict sensitive’,
but they essentially amount to the same thing: the promotion of the
orthodoxy of neo-liberalism, ‘good’ governance reforms, and the use of
aid conditionality or selectivity to encourage conformity.
 Introduction • 19

Plate 2 A refugee camp in Jordan: in recent years there has been a

greater understanding of the interconnections between conflict and
underdevelopment

Alongside the critical strain to the literature on peace, conflict and

development, other scholars and policymakers have been vexed at how to
‘win’ the War on Terror and subjugate opponents in Afghanistan, Iraq and
elsewhere. The United States and UK increasingly see development and
post-war reconstruction as a key means of winning ‘hearts and minds’ in
the support of their conquest of Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus we have seen
the securitisation of development or the incorporation of development
into security strategies. This has been most visible in the provincial
reconstruction teams at work in Afghanistan and Iraq whereby soldiers
become ‘armed humanitarians’, with obvious consequences for ideas of
neutrality and impartiality which some associated with humanitarianism.
Critics say that western states are more interested in order and security
than development and reconstruction. For example, in early 2007, the
United States committed an additional 28,829 troops to its war effort in
Iraq. Over 21,000 of these were combat troops and just 129 were tasked
with provincial reconstruction (Guardian 2007; see also Tisdall). Such
militarised development results in highly contradictory international
interventions: in less than a year British troops fired over 4 million bullets
20 • Introduction

in Afghanistan and spent over £100 million in development assistance

(Harding 2008).
A conflict-specific nomenclature has developed, with a battery of prefixes
and suffixes fine-tuning our understanding of the concepts of peace and
conflict. Thus ‘peacekeeping’ denotes traditional United Nations (UN)
‘blue helmet’ troop deployments, usually to police an agreed separation
between antagonists. ‘Peacemaking’ suggests a more active form of
intervention or activity, possibly including force to compel parties to
negotiate or make concessions. ‘Peacebuilding’ was originally regarded as
an activity that occurred after a peace accord was reached in order to
support that accord. It covered a range of political, social, economic and
cultural activities and so was cognisant of the links between conflict,
peace and development. The strict delineation of peacebuilding as an
activity that occurs after a violent conflict ceased no longer holds. ‘Peace
implementation’ usually refers to both the fulfilment of the provisions of a
peace accord and attempts to provide an environment (for example,
security, minority return, a tax base to fund social spending) to enable the
implementation of the terms of the accord. ‘Peace fixing’, if we may be
permitted to coin a new term, is the common activity of internal and
external parties to a peace accord returning to the negotiating table to
modify the accord to react to problems. In the post-9/11 period, there has
been a slight draw back from the use of the word ‘peace’ by a number of
leading states as they promote security agendas (often under the term
‘stabilisation’).
There has also been a transition in the suffixes used in relation to conflict.
‘Conflict resolution’ was overtaken by ‘conflict management’ when some
critics suggested that conflicts could not be definitively resolved. Instead
of finding solutions, societies had to recognise the integral nature of
conflict to human societies and thus find non-violent ways of managing
the conflict. But the term ‘conflict management’ was criticised for
assuming that some actors would be managers (often powerful or
well-resourced external actors), while other actors would be managed
(often indigenous, less powerful actors). The term ‘conflict
transformation’ is now current (doubtless to be supplanted by another
term in the coming years). Conflict transformation again recognises that
conflict is part and parcel of human existence, but aims at transforming
relationships between individuals, groups and institutions from
destructive to constructive bonds.
 Introduction • 21

Structure of the book

Chapter 1 advances our understanding of conflict and development by

examining the links between poverty, profit and violent conflict. It
outlines the main theories that explain the escalation and maintenance of
conflict and discusses the political economy of violence whereby conflict
becomes a profitable activity and therefore – in some cases – sustainable.
The chapter also examines the connection between the presence and
exploitation of natural resources and conflict. Chapter 2 provides an
overview of the institutional architecture that shapes contemporary peace
and development: states, the market, international organisations and
international financial institutions. Contemporary conflict and
development takes place in a context of complex multilateralism and
hyper-globalisation in which multiple actors can be involved in the same
conflict and/or development process, often using proxies and sometimes
acting in contradictory ways. Thus, for example, the UK government may
be investing heavily in the economic and military pacification of
Afghanistan through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and
the UN, while UK consumer demand fuels poppy cultivation and the
warlords associated with its trade (Coghlan 2006).
In contrast to Chapter 2 and its focus on top–down institutions, Chapter 3
deals with people, as citizens, the displaced, victims, antagonists,
consumers of public goods, men or women, unified in civil society or
fragmented into particularistic groups. The elixir for those who wish to
promote conflict, peacebuilding or development is popular participation
as a means of legitimising their enterprise. This chapter will explore the
impact of conflict and development on people, and the strategies that
ethnic entrepreneurs, political leaders, aid agencies and others use to
mobilise and connect with groups.
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are essentially intended to show how policymakers
and academic students of conflict alike have tried to conceptualise the
problems that arise after conflicts have arisen and, in some cases, ‘ended’.
We have summed it up as ‘transitions’ from conflict and war to a kind of
‘peace’ (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) 2007: Foreword). Chapter 4 looks at thinking on conflict
resolution (though we prefer the term ‘transformation’) and the
techniques and methods that have emerged since the end of the Cold War
to try to damp down conflicts and deal with their psychological, social
and other ‘deficits’, as Miall et al. (1999) and Ramsbotham et al. (2005)
have put it. This will encompass an examination of different approaches
22 • Introduction

to ending conflict, including newer approaches such as truth and

reconciliation commissions. Chapter 5 looks at the evolving notion of
‘reconstruction’ after wars, and in particular takes issue with the belief
that we can have a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to such efforts. It will in
particular flesh out what we called above the ‘increasingly technocratic
[nature of] development and peace-support interventions’. The alphabet
soup of reconstruction now includes acronyms like DDR (disarmament,
demobilisation and reintegration) and SSR (security sector reform) that
have to be understood by any neophyte (or advanced) student of conflict
and development. We will attempt to sieve the soup in such a way as to
make clear both the underlying rationale for such terms and practices, but
also their implementation. In this chapter we will also look in more detail
at some of the human and structural problems involved in ‘reconstructing’
a society. What are the problems to do with the health of the population
that need to be considered after a war, for example? Finally, Chapter 6
comprises an overview of the difficulties of using ‘aid’ as a panacea
during, but mainly after war. The focus here will be on those delivering
aid, and the reaction of those to whom it is delivered, which is not always
positive. We consider that this dilemma is one of the keys to
understanding what is both wrong, and right, with current development
policies in the developing world. Along the way, text boxes are used to
illustrate points. Chapters will end with summaries, discussion questions
and suggested further reading. Since many of the organisations and issues
mentioned in the chapters have content-rich websites, e-resources are
annotated at the end of each chapter.

Summary

● Theories of conflict and development have largely evolved in isolation from

one another.
● More recently, there has been a greater cross-fertilisation between ideas and
policy approaches to conflict and underdevelopment.
● Particular worldviews have dominated thinking about conflict and
development. At the moment, neo-liberal economic ideas influence
development thinking and, in the aftermath of 9/11, security and order is
playing a prominent role in peace promotion.
● There is a growing realisation that there are no ‘quick fixes’.
 Introduction • 23

Discussion questions

1 How could ‘success’ in development be defined?

2 How can we make sure that development and peace-support
interventions do not become a new form of imperialism?
3 Consider if there are realistic alternatives to neo-liberal development
models.

Further reading

Excellent surveys of the evolution of development theory and practice can

be found in Leys, C. (1996) The Rise and Fall of Development Theory,
Oxford: James Currey, and Kothari, U. (ed.) (2005) A Radical History of
Development Studies: Individuals, institutions and ideologies, London: Zed
Books. A neo-liberal assault on Keynesian or state-led development strategies
can be found in Dorn, J., Hanke, S. and Walters, A. (eds) The Revolution in
Development Economics, Washington, DC: Cato Institute; Ramsbotham, O.,
Woodhouse, T. and Miall, H. (2005) Contemporary Conflict Resolution: The
prevention, management and transformation of deadly conflicts, 2nd edition,
Cambridge: Polity provide an excellent survey of literature and approaches to
conflict.

Useful websites

A goldmine of material on conflict and conflict transformation can be found at

Beyond Intractability: www.beyondintractability.org/, while the Humanitarian
Practice Network provides online reports on development and humanitarian
issues: www.odihpn.org/. On Israel’s sensitivity to criticism, the Mearsheimer
and Walt article is available from the London Review of Books at www.lrb.
co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html and Mearsheimer can be seen making his case on
YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSAqNuf55k0. Criticisms of the
Meirsheimer and Walt thesis are abundant. See, for example, a letter from Alan
Dershowitz at www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n08/letters.html#letter1 or an article by the
Anti-Defamation League at www.adl.org/Israel/mearsheimer_walt.asp.
Dershowtiz was also critical of Jimmy Carter’s use of the term ‘apartheid’ in
relation to Israel, see www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-dershowitz/the-world-
according-to-ji_b_34702.html.
 1 Poverty, profit and the
political economy of
violent conflict

Introduction

In the first years of the new millennium, the intellectual champions of the
free market were riding high. They were buoyed by the election of a US
president who promised small government, greater freedoms for
entrepreneurs and an end to extensive nation-building programmes
abroad. Rather than government intervention, the market, in conjunction
with personal liberty, offered the solution to many of the world’s
problems. This view (usually known as neo-liberalism, or neo-
conservativism in its more authoritarian form) was attractive as it tapped
into commonsensical homespun truths: through hard work, self-reliance
and personal freedoms, individuals would be able to make their own
choices in life. Since individuals were likely to behave rationally they
would avoid conflict and violence and would encourage their political
leaders to avoid conflict. Rational individuals would see economic
development as a ladder out of conflict. In short, ‘free markets made free
men’ and free men would not be foolish enough to become involved in
war (Mandelbaum 2002). As President George W. Bush (2007) put it,
‘prosperous nations are less likely to breed violence’ and the way to
defeat violence is to ‘advance peace and prosperity across the world.’
The view that liberalism and free trade offered a universal balm against
the scourge of violent conflict has an impeccable intellectual pedigree.
Thinkers such as John Rawls (1999) and Francis Fukuyama (1989) have
championed the power of individual freedoms, open markets and rational
 Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict • 25

choice to guide individuals and communities away from violent conflict.

The claim that free trade prevents violent conflict is reinforced by
empirical evidence. Krause and Suzuki’s study of postcolonial states in
the 1950–92 period demonstrates that ‘trade openness significantly
reduces the likelihood of civil war onset’ (Krause and Suzuki 2005: 38).
This indicates a virtuous circle whereby trading partners require a stable
environment; the more they trade, the more they profit and the more they
are aware of the disincentives attached to conflict.
However, just as there are strong arguments that champion the market as a
guarantee against violent conflict, there are equally strong arguments that
make connections between market-induced inequality and the causation,
escalation and maintenance of violent conflict (Pugh and Cooper 2004:
2). John Harriss (2005a: 38) observed that ‘war was obviously the world’s
greatest industry in the period of neo-liberal ascendancy.’ Amy Chua
(2004) provides a devastating account of how free trade, in conjunction
with perceptions of ethnic difference, has led to the persecution of
minority groups around the world. Chinese traders in Indonesia, Lebanese
merchants in west Africa and Jewish business families in Russia, all have
been targets of mobs and political campaigns that identify them as
profiting from the poverty of the majority. Naomi Klein (2005) identifies
how ‘predatory disaster capitalism’ profits from both war (arms sales,
capital flight) and post-war reconstruction (lucrative reconstruction
contracts and opportunities to establish new markets). Many authors, and
indeed protagonists in armed conflicts, identify poverty as a key factor in
tipping discontent towards violent conflict. For example, Subcomandante
Marcos, the leader of the 1994 indigenous rising in Chiapas (Mexico),
defended his actions as a way of bringing ‘justice when now there is not
even minimum subsistence’ (Marcos 1994).
So, opinion is polarised on the role of economics (saviour or villain?) in
the outbreak of civil war. This chapter will examine the often
contradictory literature on conflict and development, using examples to
illustrate the linkages between conflict, poverty and profit. One
explanation that will be referred to throughout the chapter is the ‘greed
thesis’, which suggests that economic motives are the most reliable
indicators of the behaviour of protagonists in the outbreak and
continuation of war (Collier 2000b). This has been much criticised, but it
has also been incredibly influential (finding favour with governments and
international organisations) and so it deserves serious scrutiny.
The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section examines the
various economic and development-related arguments on the causation
26 • Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict

and escalation of violent conflict. There is little consensus on the precise

linkage between the market, development, poverty and profit on the one
hand, and conflict on the other, so this section will attempt to summarise
the main arguments. The second section examines the factors behind
conflict maintenance and pays particular attention to the political
economy of violent conflict, or the peculiar economic dynamics that
sustain war. Often dismissed as symptoms or manifestations of war, the
politico-economic ecology of contemporary warfare deserves our
attention. An anthropological lens is particularly useful in illustrating the
ways in which individuals, communities, armed groups, businesses and
states variously prosper, starve or ‘get by’ during war. The third section
concentrates on the resource environments often found in the sites of
violent conflict and considers the extent to which the presence, absence
and distribution of resources such as diamonds or water can fuel or calm
violent conflict.

Conflict causation and escalation

Despite the assertions of some authors, there is no universal theory of

conflict causation. The idea of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ theory is attractive, not
least because a general theory of conflict causation may lead to a general
theory of conflict management. But the sheer variety of conflict actors,
environments and dynamics complicates matters for conflict analysts.
Each conflict has a peculiar ‘conflict DNA’. This may be a partial match
with other conflicts, but will contain factors specific only to that conflict.
Moreover, there is no unilateral cause of conflict. Instead, conflicts have
multiple causes that interact in highly specific ways according to the
context. Certainly conflicts can have primary causes that take precedence
over secondary causes, but the variegated nature of human polities,
economies and societies means that a single factor cannot spark a conflict
in a vacuum. Different factors will have different weight at different
stages of a conflict trajectory. For example, a single atrocity or grievance
may prove inflammatory at the outbreak of a civil war, but it becomes
overtaken by other factors that sustain the conflict in the longer term. The
task for the conflict analyst is first to identify conflict causes (plural) and
then establish the connections between them. This is rarely an easy task,
since the public rhetoric used by protagonists may mask truer motives, or
because protagonists (such as the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda or
Shia and Sunni militias in Iraq) may be secretive and offer few public
clues as to their motivations.
 Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict • 27

Complicating matters even further is that antagonists may have different

motivations for engaging in conflict. This applies within and between
groups. Consider the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. At the intra-group level,
recruits may be motivated to join Islamic Jihad for any number of
reasons: spiritual fulfilment, to avenge a grievance, peer pressure, family
tradition, belief in its political and strategic aims, to boost personal
esteem or to make a private profit. Israelis may join the Israeli Defence
Forces because of a desire to defend their state and community, to gain
new skills and further their career, to continue family tradition and fulfil
conscription obligations or to avoid being branded deviant or cowardly by
not joining up. At the intergroup level it can even be argued that Islamic
Jihad and the Israeli Defence Force are engaged in different conflicts.
Although they share the same ‘battlefield’ and pledge themselves to the
destruction of the other, their conflicts have very different aims. For
Israel, the conflict is largely justified in terms of defence and security. For
Islamic Jihad, it is about righting grievances and promoting a religiously
inspired worldview. The conflict analyst is faced with a bewildering array
of ‘evidence’ and, ultimately, must make a judgement call on which
factors they believe to be most significant in the escalation of a conflict.
Box 1.1 illustrates, with reference to Colombia, how multiple factors
compete for the attention of the analyst. Rather than a science, conflict
analysis is an art and involves human – and therefore potentially frail –
judgement.

Box 1.1

Colombia: a confusing conflict stratum

A single word explanation is often given for the long-running war in Colombia:
drugs. Drug money fuels both the legal and illegal economies with anti-state
guerrillas, pro-state paramilitaries and elements of the state all implicated in the
drugs trade. In 2000, Colombia was responsible for 74 per cent of world coca
production (Guáqueta 2007: 438). But scratch the surface and a more complex
conflict stratum is revealed. Certainly the drugs trade is important, but its primary
significance has been in maintaining the conflict once it had already begun and
creating a political economy of war that provides a disincentive to most
antagonists to explore serious and comprehensive peace initiatives. At the heart of
the conflict is the contested legitimacy of the weak Colombian state. From the
nineteenth century it has been attempting to assert control over all of its territory
and has faced a series of failed peasant revolutions for the past 150 years (Richani
2002: 23). At each stage of its development, the state has attempted to reform
28 • Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict

itself so as to protect the interests of an expanding and increasingly urban middle

class. Right-wing paramilitaries (often linked with large landowners) have
provided the state with a private (but poorly controlled) security force while left-
wing guerrilla groups have sought to exploit the grievances of the dispossessed.
World Bank studies have found that the size of large farms is increasing and the
land tenure system makes it ‘nearly impossible for productive small farmers to
acquire land through the land sales market’ (Deininger et al. 2004: 3). The weak
state has been prone to regional influences from leftist ideologies, interventions
from the United States and a ready supply of arms through porous borders. So, are
drugs the cause of the Colombian conflict? No, but drugs money has become a
fuel for a pre-existing conflict with long-term roots.
Sources: Richani (2002), Deininger et al. (2004), Guáqueta (2007)

Given that the focus of this book is on conflict and development, the bulk
of this section will dwell on development and economic-related
explanations for conflict causation. Yet there are entire subfields of
literature on conflict causation that make little reference to development,
economics, profit or poverty. Non-economic or non-development-related
explanations for the outbreak of violent conflict include the often
overlapping categories of biological disposition (Simmel 1955),
psychology (Tajfel 1978), religion (Appleby 2000), identity (Sen 2006),
ethnicity (Connor 1994; Young 2003), nationalism, ideology, history and
ancient hatreds, bad neighbours, manipulative leaders (Brown 1997), the
security dilemma (Posen 1993), cultural dysfunction (Kaplan 1994), the
nature of the state (Tilly 1985) and incompatible worldviews (Huntington
1998). Many of these explanations regard economic factors as contingent,
or providing a context in which the primary factor operates. Thus, for
example, an ethnic group may develop an elaborate self-narrative of
grievance, how its rights are denied, and how it is distinct from other
identity groups. Declining economic conditions, in which the competition
between identity groups becomes more intense, may provide the backdrop
or even tipping point for a slide into violent conflict. A group may
become convinced of its own ‘relative deprivation’, especially if
inequality is visible along religious, ethnic or racial lines (Jacoby 2008:
103–13). But, in this explanation, economic and development-related
factors are secondary and only come into play when stimulated by other
factors or if a prior existing condition (entrenched ethnic or religious
difference) is in place.
The important point to bear in mind is that conflicts are caused by
a combination of factors. Those who promote economic or
 Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict • 29

development-related explanations for the outbreak of violent conflicts,

need to take account of non-development-related explanations and how
these interact with development-related factors. Amartya Sen makes the
point that poverty on its own is not enough to cause conflict. He recalls
his own childhood memories from Calcutta during the 1943 Bengal
famine and ‘the sight of starving people dying in front of sweetshop
windows with various layers of luscious food displayed behind glass
windows, without a single glass being broken, or law and order being
disrupted’ (Sen 2006: 143). Other factors, especially ‘the illusion of
singular identity . . . in a world so obviously full of plural affiliations’,
were required to transform inequality and destitution into violent conflict
(Sen 2006: 175).
Conflicts do not just happen. Just because a society is ethnically, racially
or religiously fissured does not mean that conflict will follow. Seattle (a
diverse multicultural city) is a more common model than Sarajevo (one
riven by ethnonational conflict). Indeed, given the multiplicity of identity
groups that claim to be distinct from others, there is remarkably little
violent conflict on the planet (Brubaker and Laitin 1998). This suggests
two points. The first is that many human societies have developed systems

Plate 3 A Muslim cemetery in Bosnia: just because a society is ethnically

fissured does not mean that conflict will follow
30 • Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict

that manage or suppress difference, often in non-violent ways. The

second is that violent conflict requires active instigation agents,
particularly if latent tensions are to be escalated into overt violence.
These instigation agents may take the form of political leaders or
ethnic entrepreneurs who purposively inflame and mobilise their
supporters, or circumstances – such as an assassination or shock
election result – that agitate already tense group sensibilities
(Zartman 2005: 268–73).

Economics and civil war

Unsurprisingly, economists have been at the forefront of arguments that

conflict causation can be explained by economic rationalism. Paul Collier
and a number of collaborators have produced a corpus of studies that link
the onset of civil war to economic factors (Collier and Hoeffler 2002;
Collier et al. 2003). Many of these studies are based on econometric
modelling and are attractive because they allow analysts to avoid
considering nebulous and difficult-to-define potential conflict contributing
factors such as identity or historical grievances. Two main arguments have
been advanced under what has been termed the ‘greed thesis’ or
economic explanations of violent conflict:
● that economic factors can act as predictors of violent conflict (or help
identify civil war prone societies)
● that combatants are motivated by economic predation.
The first argument identified economic factors – usually at the national
level – that make a society prone to civil war. In particular, the level of
per capita income, its rate of growth and the structure of the economy
(especially its dependence on commodity exports) were identified as the
key risk factors for the onset of civil war (on a dataset of fifty-two civil
wars in the 1960–99 period). Collier and colleagues found that a doubling
of per capita income halved the risk of civil war, and that when
commodity exports account for 25 per cent of gross domestic product
(GDP) the risk of civil war is 33 per cent, as opposed to an 11 per cent
risk of civil war if commodity exports are at 10 per cent (Bannon and
Collier 2003: 2–3). Findings such as these have encouraged governments
and policymakers to promote poverty reduction and economic
diversification programmes – often based on free market remedies – as
part of conflict prevention strategies (International Development
Committee 2006).
 Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict • 31

The second argument identified the profit motive – or ‘greed’ – as the

primary motor behind civil war. Collier noted that ‘conflicts are far more
likely to be caused by economic opportunities than by grievance’, but that
rebel organisations will engage in a public discourse of grievance ‘since
they are unlikely to be so naive so as to admit to greed as a motive’
(Collier 2000a: 91–2). Thus, ‘civil wars occur where rebel organizations
are financially viable’, with the ability of antagonists to generate revenue
being the principal reason why civil wars break out in some locations and
not in others (Collier 2000b: 2). Münkler (2005) reinforces the view that
civil war is economic rationalism taken to the extreme: the availability of
weapons and untrained young men makes contemporary civil war
‘downright cheap’ and ‘highly lucrative’. ‘In the short term the force used
in them yields more than it costs and the long-term costs are borne by
others’ (Münkler 2005: 74, 77). In this view, civil war conforms to a
straightforward business model that seeks to maximise resource extraction
through banditry, ‘taxation’, or the trafficking of diamonds, timber or
people. It also aims to reduce costs by overlooking social responsibilities
to citizens and cutting the costs of running a regular army. By boosting
income and cutting costs, profit will be maximised. ‘The entrepreneurs of
the new wars’ often emerged from the criminal underworld and used
nationalist or ethnic movements as convenient vehicles from which to
pursue their business interests (Münkler 2005: 80). William Reno’s
analyses of the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia paint a dystopian
picture in which political leaders drop all pretence of maintaining a
functioning state that offers basic public services and protection to citizens
(Reno 1997a, 1997b). Instead, leaders formed alliances with business
organisations (often from overseas) to extract mineral resources.
Ultimately, the civil wars in both territories resembled privatised conflict,
with control of mineral resources the key aim (Keen 1998).
The claim by Collier and others that economic motivations must be given
precedence over non-economic issues (such as identity) amounted to an
intellectual cruise missile aimed at scholars who held that ethnicity or
religion held the key to the onset of civil war. They responded in kind, and
were particularly annoyed that the economic rationalism arguments found
favour with the world’s main international financial institutions (IFIs)
which were playing an increasing role in the management of conflict and
post-war reconstruction. The econometric methodologies favoured by the
greed theorists matched the bias of the IFIs towards rational quantifiable
explanations for social phenomena and the technocratic, free market
remedies they favoured. Critics of the greed thesis pointed out that
societies experiencing civil war were a poor environment for the
32 • Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict

collection of statistics, and so urged caution over the datasets employed to

suggest that certain countries offered a permissive economic context for
the onset of civil war (Cramer 2002). Collier was also criticised for using
proxies, using high male unemployment as a proxy for greed rather than
grievance (Kandeh 2005: 96). But those who rejected the greed thesis or
the economic explanations for civil war had two more serious objections.
The first was that the greed thesis located the causes of war inside states
and conveniently absolved external (mainly western) actors from any
blame (Pugh and Cooper 2004: 2). This was especially the case in relation
to the iniquitous international trading regimes that condemned many
developing world states to prolonged economic retardation. The single
state lens also tended to ignore regional dynamics, such as the flow of
weapons and people across a border or interference from a neighbouring
state, which often contributed to violent conflict. The second objection to
the greed thesis was that its proponents mistook correlation for causation
(Mac Ginty 2004). Few denied that a permissive economic environment
could encourage conflict or that a self-sustaining political economy of war
could develop. What they did object to was the argument that economic
factors were the primary engine of war. Instead, they argued that political
and identity factors were the key initiation agents of war and that
economic factors often subsequently came into play to change the nature
and aim of the conflict.
Over time, the greed or grievance academic debate has given way to an
emerging consensus that greed and grievance are responsible for the
outbreak of civil war (Ballentine and Nitzschke 2003). The precise weight
to be afforded to each is still contested, though since this weighting will
change from conflict to conflict it is sensible to avoid building a general
theory of conflict. We can say that most civil wars take place in poor
countries, though poverty and inequality per se are not sufficient factors
in the outbreak of civil war. Moreover, certain economic characteristics
(such as low growth and a dependency on commodity exports) predispose
societies to civil war. But a permissive environment does not amount to a
causation factor. Certainly economic factors can enable civil war, but for
combustion to occur, the economic factors need to spark with other
factors (Homer-Dixon 1994).

It is also important to note that development, rather than offering a ladder

out of conflict, can contribute to conflict. Many of the social processes
associated with development create conditions in which conflict is less
easily restrained or is more easily escalated. As Box 1.2 and the example
of cattle-raiding in Kenya and Tanzania show, urbanisation,
 Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict • 33

environmental degradation, the breakdown of family structures and a

lessening of respect for traditional sources of dispute resolution may
all create conditions permissive for violent conflict. Yet, to some, these
social processes may simply be the by-products of social progress.
China’s rapid economic development illustrates the potential of
development to contribute to conflict. An aggressive state-led
development programme has resulted in the displacement of millions of
people (well over 1 million people were displaced as part of the Yangtze
Dam project: Aird 2001: 24), severe environmental degradation, land
confiscations, and the perception among many rural peasants that they are
the collateral damage in the country’s economic liberalisation. The
Chinese regime admitted to 87,000 riots and demonstrations in 2005,
despite a 9 per cent economic growth rate (Cody 2006). The key point is
that development often produces community dislocation and uncertainty,
and may materially disadvantage some groups, encouraging them to view
their status in relation to other groups. In such circumstances the
restraints on conflict may lessen.

Box 1.2

Cattle-raiding in Kenya and Tanzania: development

escalating conflict
Pastoral communities in Kenya and Tanzania have a long history of inter-tribal
cattle-raiding (Fleischer 1998). Traditionally, the cattle-raiding was sustainable in
that relatively small numbers of cattle were taken and casualty figures were low
because traditional weapons were used. Often cattle raids were linked with rites of
passage ceremonies, with adolescents using the raids as an opportunity to prove
their valour (Hendrickson et al. 1998). In recent years, however, development-
related changes in society have transformed the character of cattle-raiding. As a
result, the fall-out of cattle-raiding – in terms of casualties and displacement – has
increased markedly. There has been an increasing monetisation of exchange, with
the result that cattle-raiders are stealing cattle to sell to urban-based criminal
gangs rather than for the traditional reasons of individual/group esteem and
subsistence pastoral farming. An increasingly urban and aspirational population is
fuelling a demand for a meat-based diet, a demand that entrepreneurs are keen to
satisfy. Meat consumption in the developing world has doubled between 1987 and
2007 (Bittman 2008). In addition to these development-related drivers, the
intensity and effect of cattle-raiding have escalated as traditional weapons are
being replaced by firearms (readily available from conflicts in the region).
Sources: Fleischer (1998), Hendrickson et al. (1998), Bittman (2008)
34 • Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict

The political economy of conflict maintenance

In some cases, the economic rationale of long-running violent conflicts is

so apparent that it is possible to think that armed groups are motivated
only by profit. Towards the latter years of Northern Ireland’s 1969–94
Troubles, pro-British loyalist militants were perhaps better known for their
drug dealing and protection rackets than for their actions to defend the
Union with Great Britain (Silke 2000). Economic rationales often become
more visible once a conflict is established and once markets and
entrepreneurs have determined ways in which to exploit the opportunities
of war. When established, conflict economies can become self-
perpetuating and entrepreneur-combatants may see few incentives to
explore an end to the conflict. Economists have developed sophisticated
models to show how looting and other forms of economic predation
provide a powerful motive for combatants. But such models reveal little of
the human character of civil war economies and the trials faced by citizens
in time of war. Anthropologists, on the other hand, have succeeded in
illustrating the extraordinary lengths to which individuals, families and
communities go to in order to survive. These studies show the adaptability
of humans in their attempts to ‘get by’ and the extraordinary complexity of
civil war economies (McIlwaine and Moser 2004).
A common misconception is that civil war economies are very much
removed from the faraway mainstream economies of the developed world.
The shiny shopping malls and online banking systems of the post-
industrialised west seem a million miles away from civil war economies
in which many economic transactions are illegal, unregulated or
conducted under duress. But as anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom (2008)
reveals, combatants and civilians in the midst of civil wars are often
closely connected with the globalised international economy. This insight
is important as it suggests that western states and financial institutions –
and indeed western consumers – are complicit in the perpetuation of civil
war economies in the developing world. Nordstrom (2008) argues that all
civil wars rely on technologies (arms, communication, money transfer)
and networks (trading partners and political supporters) that are to some
extent international and transnational. As a result, the shadow economies
of the civil war environment must come into contact with the licit
international economy: ‘illicit profiteering must make use of legal
production, transport, and monetary institutions’ (Nordstrom 2008: 290).
As David Keen (1998: 42) observes, ‘even bandits need to sell what they
steal’. The globalised ‘buy/sell now, ask questions later’ free market
makes it easier for the licit and illicit economies to interact, and the sheer
 Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict • 35

complexity of international markets (with multiple brokers) means that

the paper trail from manufacturer/grower to consumer is easily obscured.
Nordstrom makes the case that rather than being marginal to the world
economy, the apparently ‘illicit’ and ‘shadowy’ civil war economies are in
fact central to it. Warlords and conflict entrepreneurs convert their
illegally made profits into legal investments in the formal international
economy or demand the same consumer goods that western shoppers
aspire to. Vast sums of money of dubious origin lubricate the international
financial markets. Thus, drugs barons’ money from Afghanistan and
Colombia, once suitably laundered, is invested alongside the pension
funds of Anglican bishops. One estimate suggests that $1.6 trillion of
illicit money moves across international boundaries annually, much of it
through apparently legitimate institutions, and much of it out of
developing states, thus further weakening their economies (Baker 2005).
Just as consumers in war-torn societies demand goods and services from
developed economies, consumers in the developed world demand goods
from the sites of civil war. The high street shops selling mobile phones
(in 2007 there were 71 million handsets for the 45 million adults in the
UK (Schofield 2007)) are just one end of a network of economic

Plate 4 A Porsche showroom in Beirut: people in war zones want the same
consumer goods as those in the peaceful countries
36 • Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict

exchange stretching from the coltan mines of the Democratic Republic of

Congo (DRC) from where an essential component in phone circuitry is
extracted (Moyroud and Katunga 2002). Similarly, despite extensive
international regulatory mechanisms, Sierra Leone’s ‘blood diamonds’
manage to reach apparently legitimate retail outlets.

Corruption

Western analysts, and particularly the western news media, can be shrill
in their condemnation of corruption in developing world and civil war
contexts. Certainly kleptocracy by ruling cliques and routine skimming by
state functionaries can reach staggering proportions. Mohammed Soharto,
Ferdinand Marcos and Mobutu Sese Seko are reputed to have embezzled
a collective $50 billion during their respective reigns in Indonesia, the
Philippines and Zaire (Denny 2004). But the peculiar economic context of
societies experiencing civil war means that we need to reassess our
understanding of ‘corruption’ and ‘illegal’ market activities. Can
corruption be said to exist if the formal economy has broken down and
people need to rely on informal market mechanisms simply to survive?
The formal economy may be so dysfunctional (and often over-priced) that
citizens have no choice but to operate in the informal sector. In cases of
state collapse, there may be no legal economy at all. More commonly the
state is weak and only able to regulate a fraction of economic activity
within its borders. It is estimated that up to 90 per cent of Angola’s
economy operates via extra-state exchange networks (Nordstrom 2004),
while the post-Saddam British-American protectorate in Iraq has not
attempted to institute a general taxation system (Chandrasekaran 2007:
138). Afghanistan’s drugs industry was valued at $2.7 billion in 2006, or
equivalent to over half the size of the legal economy. In 2005, the Afghan
government was able to raise only $330 million in tax revenues and was
largely sustained by western handouts (Coghlan 2006).
Just as the formal, monetised and regulated economy has become a way
of life for most people in the UK and other western states, the informal
economy is a socially embedded behavioural and entirely rational norm in
many civil war and post-civil-war societies. It makes sense to use non-
patented medicines when patented medicines are either unavailable or
exorbitantly priced. The formalisation of the medical industry, through
the protection of pharmaceutical patents, would not be in the interests of
the vast majority of citizens because it would entail rocketing prices. The
 Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict • 37

careless branding of certain economic activities as ‘corrupt’ or ‘illegal’

says as much about the western worldview as it does about the activities
themselves (Brown et al. 2004). This is not to deny that corruption takes
place and that it poses a real hazard to development and donor activity.
Instead, it is to caution against the unthinking extension of western
yardsticks to non-western, war-torn contexts. Box 1.3 illustrates the
absurdity of some western norms in war-affected societies. Kolstad et al.
(2008) stress the importance of distinguishing between different types and
scales of corruption. There is a difference between administrative
informality and petty corruption found in everyday exchanges in a remote
town where state officials feel the need to augment their wages, and large-
scale frauds perpetrated by political leaders or senior bureaucrats.
Simplistic moral and ethical judgements may not always be sensitive to
the context in which corruption takes place. We should also be alert to the
potential for international assistance to use and reinforce existing
clientelistic and patronage networks. What begins as the rational use of
‘local systems of disbursement’ can reinvigorate networks that are less
than transparent and may even reinforce warlord politics.

Box 1.3

A clash of cultures: Taliban-run Afghanistan and the

British insurance industry
A British colleague, who worked for a major aid agency in Afghanistan in the
mid-1990s, tells of his luggage being stolen on his arrival at Kabul airport. The
luggage contained an expensive camera, so he thought it would be worth claiming
on his worldwide travel insurance. He rang his UK-based insurer, who told him
that they would post a claim form out to him (the internet was in its infancy) and
that he would need to get it stamped by the police in Kabul. He explained that the
Taliban’s police did not operate according to western models of criminal justice
and public safety, and that with no insurance industry operating in war-torn
Afghanistan, they would have no knowledge of what the funny foreigner would
be asking for. And anyway, the international postal service to Afghanistan was
extremely unreliable. It was beyond the comprehension of the British insurer that
a society would not have a police force like that in the UK and that they could not
assist in the certification of insurance claims. The claim never got off the ground.
The key point is that institutions and activities that may seem ‘normal’ in a
western environment do not necessarily have universal application. Effective
bureaucracy and regulated markets, accepted components in western states, may
be uncommon in non-western contexts.
38 • Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict

In some cases, international connections have served to prop up weak

states and their corrupt patronage networks. Bayart (2000) notes how
many African leaders have become adept at fobbing off international
donors with the message they want to hear:
[D]emocracy, or more precisely the discourse of democracy, is no
more than yet another source of economic rents, comparable to earlier
discourses such as the denunciation of communism or of imperialism
in the time of the Cold War, but better adapted to the spirit of the age.
It is, as it were, a form of pidgin language that various native princes
use in their communication with Western sovereigns and financiers.
Senegal, one of the main recipients of public development aid in
sub-Saharan Africa, is a past master in this game of make-believe. It is
no exaggeration to say that the export of its institutional image . . . has
replaced the export of groundnuts.
(Bayart 2000: 226)

Essentially, the argument runs, international support has allowed corrupt

regimes to continue systems of neo-patrimonialism and defer
redistributive political and economic reform.
Legitimate monies often reach civil war societies in the form of external
donor aid. Once there, these funds risk fuelling the conflict. For decades,
bilateral donors have boosted the Sri Lankan education budget, but it can
be argued that this frees up money for the Sri Lankan government to use
in its war with the Tamil Tigers. In an ethnically divided society, the
infusion of external assistance is likely to be jealously scrutinised by all
sides to make sure that their group gets ‘its share’. The cash injection
might lead to renewed conflict (Herring and Esman 2003: 13). For
example, controversy has attended the distribution of reconstruction aid in
Lebanon following the 2006 Israeli–Hezbollah war. Shia districts, the
main victims of the war, have complained that the Sunni-controlled
government has withheld reconstruction funds. In a politically fragile
state like Lebanon, such arguments can be potentially destabilising (Mac
Ginty 2007: 462). External humanitarian and development agencies are
often placed in an invidious position in war-torn societies. Do they sit on
the sidelines, refusing to give assistance for fear that aid may fall into the
‘wrong hands’, or do they muck in and hope that their efforts help the
genuinely needy despite the risks? An honest acceptance that civil war
contexts are unlikely to leave ethical principles unscathed is required.
Moreover, in some contexts, the sheer scale of donor assistance can
distort the economy. As one observer noted, ‘other than the state itself, the
aid business is today the single biggest employer in most African states’
(van de Walle 2001: 58).
 Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict • 39

Just as there is a political economy of war, there is a political economy

of humanitarianism and development assistance. Perhaps this is most
visible in the micro-economies that spring up to service international
humanitarian workers in war-affected societies. The cluster of
western-style bars, internet cafés and fast food outlets are often
identifiable because of the white 4⫻4s parked outside. But at the
macro-economic level, as will be discussed in later chapters, international
economic and development interventions are often deliberately aimed at
reshaping the war-affected economy to reconnect it with the formal global
economy. Many of the liberal economic ‘reforms’ actually lead to the
further immiseration of citizens: state employees are sacked (‘rightsizing
bureaucracy’), debts run up by previous regimes must be paid
(‘respecting international financial obligations’), prices rise as exchanges
are formalised and monetised (‘regulation’), and indigenous businesses
cannot compete with cheap imports (‘the global free market’). Kiely
(2007: 434) notes how ‘liberalisation undermines the capacity of
developing countries to develop dynamic comparative advantages’, yet
liberalisation seems to be the main tool in the international toolbox.
The chief points of this section are that as war further distorts economies,
people in war-affected societies (combatants and civilians alike) will take
extraordinary measures to survive and this may involve activities that
western observers may judge ‘corrupt’ or ‘illegal’. But outside observers
may be hypocritical in such judgements: civil war economies are
hardwired into the very fabric of the formal international economy.
Consumer demand in western states and the international economic
structures erected by western states influence the choices and constraints
faced by people on the ground in civil war societies. While we can paint
an abstract picture of the economic impact of civil war (the ‘typical’ civil
war costs $50 billion (Collier 2004)), it is important that we recognise the
human experience of civil war and how many people are brutalised and
humiliated by civil war economics, whether by being trafficked, being
forced to sell family heirlooms or living in an environment in which theft
is regarded as a normal survival mechanism (Mac Ginty 2004).

Natural resources and conflict

As already noted, economists have claimed that an economic dependency

on natural resource exports increases the likelihood of the outbreak of civil
war. But the mere presence of natural resources does not lead to armed
conflict. As Cramer (2006: 117) observes, ‘scarcity and violence are a
40 • Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict

product of social relations rather than inherent in the relative abundance of

a particular good, object or resource.’ In other words, it is the management
of the resources that really matters. Despite being ‘blessed’ by nature’s
largesse, a significant number of resource-rich states are chronically
poor. Ross (2003: 22) found that twelve of the world’s twenty most
mineral-dependent economies were classed as ‘highly indebted poor
countries’ and that five had experienced civil war in the 1990–2002 period.
So, in the case of mineral extraction, it is the labour practices (voluntary or
coerced), distribution of licences (open competition or patronage) and
destination of profits (public or private coffers) that will determine whether
states face a resource curse or windfall. Patterns of land ownership are
particularly important in developing world contexts, as access to land (and
the quality of that land) may afford subsistence and thus some measure of
autonomy in economic matters (Miall 2007: 125–9).

Crucially, the perception of the management of resources is important. In

a number of cases, minority ethnic, nationalist or religious groups have
pursued grievances stemming from allegations that the state was
plundering ‘their’ natural resources with few obvious benefits in return.
Thus the Acehenese in Indonesia, Muslims in Mindanao (Philippines),
Christians in southern Sudan and the Ogoni in the Niger Delta (see
Box 1.4) have all engaged in secessionist conflict with the state and have
campaigned for their ‘fair share’ of returns from resource exploitation.
Although natural resources play a crucial role in these conflicts, it is
incorrect to conceive of them as pure ‘resource wars’. Instead, the conflict
arises from a complex mix of the presence of resources, the pattern of
resource exploitation, the perception of the benefits of that exploitation
and identity affiliations. If the stakes are high, identity affiliations can
mutate, with groups and individuals attaching increasing weight to the
purity of their ethnic group and rediscovering (or inventing) their ‘unique’
history (Wilmer 2002: ix). In such ways, conflicts become ‘ethnicised’
and exclusion from the benefits of natural resources may provide a
powerful impetus to escalate conflict.

Winston Churchill’s observation that ‘God put the West’s oil under
Middle Eastern feet’ is a reminder of competitive geo-strategic interests
in natural resources that make resource-rich developing world states
prone to intervention by powerful states. Quite simply, advanced and
developing economies are dependent on oil. Their ways of life, politics
and economics would be utterly unsustainable if ready access to oil were
not secured. In the main, the market has been successful in procuring oil,
 Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict • 41

Box 1.4

Oil extraction in Nigeria’s Niger Delta

Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region has experienced significant levels of
conflict, criminal violence and environmental damage for several decades. The
central government has encouraged major oil corporations to exploit the oil
reserves, but residents in the Delta region claim that any benefits bypass local
communities and that pollution has seriously affected quality of life. Armed
criminal gangs regularly steal oil from pipelines and kidnap foreign oil workers
for ransom, while other local groups have been vocal in their condemnation of
the profiteering, corruption and environmental disregard of ‘imperial Abuja’ or
have encouraged labour unrest. On top of this, there have been clashes between
rival ethnic groups. Oil company attempts to co-opt tribal chiefs through
payments have made chieftaincies extremely lucrative, sparking conflict and
changing community perceptions of chiefs. In response to the oil-related tension
and violence, the Nigerian government has variously declared a state of
emergency and sent in the army, attempted to buy-off local leaders, reassured
foreign oil companies, promised to invest a greater share of oil in the region and
occasionally mounted prosecutions against corrupt officials (including one
against two rear-admirals accused of stealing an oil tanker: Clayton 2005).
The violence has seriously disrupted oil production, but the potential rewards for
the government, local and national political leaders, and overseas oil companies
are simply too great for anyone to contemplate withdrawing from the region
(Bekoe 2005).
Sources: Bekoe (2005), Clayton (2005)

and major western states are not as dependent on oil from conflict-
affected areas as some analysts suggest. The United States was the
world’s third largest oil producer in 2006, and most oil-producing Gulf
states are compliant with western economic and geopolitical strategy.
Indeed, the oil profits of most Gulf states are tied up in the New York and
London stock markets, so oil-rich states have no incentive to spark
economic instability by coming together and attempting to use leverage
over oil supply. But as demand for oil in the developing world (especially
India and China) surges, pressure on apparently finite oil resources
increases. Both the market and states can be expected to act in
self-interested ways to ensure continued access to energy. As the cases
of post-Saddam Iraq, Colombia and Nigeria show, consumer demand is
so great that complexes of private companies and state bodies will come
together to create oases of petrochemical calm in the midst of wider
conflict just to ensure that oil continues to flow.
42 • Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict

Demand for oil, water, timber, diamonds and other minerals continues to
be the source – or at least fuel (literally in some cases) – of violent
conflict. As populations become richer, the natural resources of landscape
and aesthetic beauty come under increasing pressure from tourism. This
is despite a growing awareness of the environmental costs of most forms
of tourism. In a number of cases, western ‘tourist bubbles’ exist alongside
local inequality, repression or conflict (Rogers 2000: 2). The resorts of the
Maldives have soared in popularity, despite the suppression of political
opposition by the ruling regime (Amnesty International 2003). Perhaps
the starkest juxtaposition of the western tourism industry with conflict has
been the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s virtual annexation of a piece of
Haiti as a stopping-off point for its cruise liners. Branded as ‘Fantasy
Island’ or ‘Magic Island’, the term ‘Haiti’ (let alone its recent history of
civil war) is not mentioned in the brochures, and passports are not
stamped as tourists enter the leisure enclave. Visitors are warned not to
venture beyond the resort boundaries (Orenstein 1997). But over those
walls in Haiti proper, life expectancy in 2005 was 52 years, and GDP per
capita was one-twentieth of the figure for Norway, the top-ranked nation
in the Human Development Index (UNDP 2006: 283). Fantasy Island
represents one version of the ‘no war, no peace’ phenomenon, whereby
violent conflict is compartmentalised in certain parts of the state, allowing
other parts to function as ‘normal’ (Mac Ginty 2006). In another example
of this compartmentalisation of conflict, Shaw and Mbabazi (2007)
demonstrate how southern Uganda has been able to become the poster
child of African development, while the north of the country has been
mired in conflict.

Concluding discussion

There is growing consensus among policymakers, academics and others

that the escalation, maintenance and transformation of conflict are linked
to development. The precise nature of these linkages is still debated.
In truth, there is no exact science linking conflict to development; the
constellation of variables is simply too great given the variations in
context and timescales. Despite the apparent sophistication of
econometric modelling or the ‘seen it all’ world-weary cynicism of
development practitioners, conflict interventions and development
programming contain a good deal of guesswork and finger-crossing.
Western donor governments, such as the Department for International
Development (DFID) in the UK, show a commitment to conflict-sensitive
 Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict • 43

programming, or development interventions calibrated to have a minimal

or positive impact on a conflict situation. But the volatility and lack of
regulation in many war-torn or post-conflict societies mean that the
precise effect of development inputs is unknown. The bottom line is that
development or reconstruction assistance is a resource and political and
militant actors will act rationally in attempting to maximise their access
to, or benefit from, the resource. Despite good intentions, development
inputs may actually fuel conflict. Moreover, and as will be discussed in
Chapter 2, many of the factors that influence development in a war-torn
society will be exogenous to that society. Just as many citizens may feel
powerless in the midst of conflict, they may also feel that development is
a process that is done to them.
The relationship between security and development is fraught with thorny
questions, especially in the post-9/11 world in which the ‘security
imperative’ is easier to justify among many audiences than a
‘development imperative’. Development and reconstruction require a
certain level of order if they are to be long-term endeavours. At its most
benign, this order can take the form of institutionalisation and regulation;
in effect a process of ‘normalisation’ whereby the uncertainty of a violent
context is replaced by the certainty of stability. But in a less benign
scenario, there can be unacceptable costs associated with ‘stabilisation’,
such as restraining civil liberties or empowering private security
contractors. In a number of cases, most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan,
those empowered to make the decision on where the balance between
order and development must lie are located outside of the country. In
effect, a process of development and post-war reconstruction is as
disempowering as the war once was. If a holistic view of development is
taken, in which development extends far beyond the narrow confines of
economic growth, then the process of development involves a good deal
of de-development.

Summary

● Explanations of the causes of violent conflict have focused on issues of

‘greed’ (economic causes) and ‘grievance’ (such as identity).
● Most scholars argue that a mixture of greed and grievance factors contribute
to violent conflict.
● The factors that cause a violent conflict may differ from the factors that
sustain a conflict.
44 • Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict

● Resources alone, such as oil, diamonds or water, do not cause conflict. What
is important is the nature of the extraction and management of those
resources.
● Just as violent conflict can distort an economy, so too can aid and
peace-support, with issues of ‘corruption’ gaining increasing attention in
recent years.

Discussion questions

1 Do you find that the criticisms of the greed thesis of conflict causation
are justified?
2 What are the economic factors that can sustain violent conflict once it
has started?
3 Can there be corruption if the formal economy has broken down?
4 Should aid agencies halt all assistance to a conflict area if they know
that some of their aid will be siphoned off by combatants, or should
they take this as a necessary evil of operating in a conflict zone?

Further reading

There is an enormous literature on conflict causation. A good starting point for

the econometric perspective is Collier, P. et al. (2003) Breaking the Conflict
Trap: Civil war and development policy, Washington, DC: World Bank and
Oxford University Press and Collier, P. (2007) The Bottom Billion: Why the
poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it, Oxford: Oxford
University Press. Wider studies of conflict that make connections with
international dynamics and structures include two books Duffield, M. (2001)
Global Governance and the New Wars: The merging of development and
security, London: Zed Books and Duffield, M. (2007) Development, Security and
Unending War: Governing the world of peoples, Cambridge: Polity. Work by
journalists and anthropologists is particularly good at showing us what it is like to
live in conflict areas. See, for example, Nordstrom, C. (2004) Shadows of War:
Violence, power and international profiteering in the twenty-first century,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; McIlwaine, C. and Moser, C.
(2004) Encounters with Violence in Latin America: Urban poor perceptions from
Colombia and Guatemala, London: Routledge; and Fisk, R. (2005) The Great
War for Civilization: The conquest of the Middle East, New York: Knopf.
 Poverty, profit and the political economy of violent conflict • 45

Useful websites

The World Bank has many reports on ‘Fragile and Conflict-Affected Countries’
at www.worldbank.org/conflict. Reports by the UK’s Department for
International Development can be found at www.dfid.gov.uk/aboutDFID/
organisation/conflicthumanitarianassistance.asp#Conflict%20and%20Poverty,
while USAID’s material on conflict can be found at www.usaid.gov/our_work/
cross-cutting_programs/conflict/links/index.html. Useful information can also be
found via the International Crisis Group at www.crisisgroup.org. On resource
exploitation, details of attempts to reduce the trade in blood diamonds can be
found at www.kimberleyprocess.com/. Details of the anti-corruption organisation
Tiri can be found at www.tiri.com. More critical material on corruption can be
found in Kolstad, I., Fritz, V. and O’Neil, T., Corruption, Anti-corruption Efforts
and Aid: Do donors have the right approach? (www.odi.org.uk/PPPG/politics_
and_governance/publications/GAPWP3.pdf).
 2 Institutions: hardware
and software

Introduction

The twentieth century is often termed ‘the American century’ and there is
little indication that the twenty-first century will deviate from American
dominance. India, China and the European Union (EU) may grow in
influence and economic might, but they are unlikely to knock the United
States off its perch. The twentieth century, particularly from 1945
onwards, has also been a century of international institutions. Institutions
such as the United Nations, NATO, African Union (AU) and EU continue
to play a key role in thwarting and facilitating conflict and development in
the twenty-first century. Indeed, a select group of international institutions
comprise the primary international instruments dedicated to preventing
and minimising the impact of war, spearheading post-war reconstruction
and promoting development. At the same time, a select group of
international institutions are often blamed for underdevelopment and
de-development, and by extension contributing to conflict. To complicate
matters, the same institutions have been blamed for contributing both to
the escalation and transformation of violent conflict.
The chapter sketches the principal international architecture that provides
the context for contemporary conflict and development. Just as it is
difficult to discuss computing hardware in isolation from software, it is
difficult to gain a comprehensive understanding of international political
institutions without discussing their operating ‘software’ or the principles
which define their behaviour. Thus the chapter opens by discussing the
 Institutions: hardware and software • 47

‘liberal peace’, or the overarching philosophy that shapes many

international peace support operations, post-war reconstruction
programmes and development interventions. International institutions are
given shape and purpose by the principles and worldview of their key
members. It is argued here that the liberal peace has a peculiarly western
flavour that reinforces the dominance of existing elites and promotes
highly specialised western ideas, namely versions of liberalism, democracy
and economics. As will be shown, the liberal peace has decidedly illiberal
aspects. A crucial element of the liberal peace is hyper-globalisation which
supports multiple connections through multiple networks so that conflict
and development on various parts of the planet are linked.
The chapter then moves on to discuss ‘hardware’ or the principal
institutions that comprise the international political system. It begins with
a brief discussion of the key constituent feature of the international
system: the state. The important factor from our point of view is the
political organisation of the state, particularly in terms of its relationships
with its citizens and market, and its ability to resist or adapt to exogenous
pressure. The chapter then reviews the roles and effectiveness of the
primary collective security and development promotion organisations,
before examining the role of the international financial institutions. The
chapter concludes by recommending that we adopt the lens of complex
multilateralism when reviewing the role of international institutions in
relation to conflict and development. In other words, we need to move
away from a view in which we have compartmentalised entities such as
states and international organisations that have formal and well-defined
linkages between them. Instead, conflict and development operate in a
much more complex environment in which multiple transnational and
international actors cooperate and clash. This ‘cast list’ is much more
extensive than the traditional list of states and international institutions,
and includes globalised multinational companies, NGOs and transnational
social movements. It is important, when reviewing the international
system and the forces at work within it, to resist any temptation towards
US-bashing. Certainly, the United States, and its allies pursue their own
self-interests, but they are rational to do so and to ‘work the system’ to
their best advantage.

Software

Without guidance, international institutions such as the United Nations,

the Asian Development Bank or the African Union, are merely empty
48 • Institutions: hardware and software

vessels. They do not have autonomous lives of their own. Instead, they
reflect the positions of their most powerful members and lobbies.
Crucially, international organisations are not neutral (despite professions
otherwise). International organisations are the product of a political,
economic and cultural reality that has been, and is, heavily contested. At
the heart of this struggle is the old-fashioned concept of ‘power’; a
concept that once dominated political science and international relations
and now tends to be overlooked. It is not oversimplistic to say that a basic
struggle between power holders and power seekers defines the structure
and operations of many international organisations. The power holders,
who are often rich western states, international organisations,
international financial institutions and corporate interests, wish to
maintain their stranglehold over economic, political and cultural power
over the power seekers. The latter are often developing world and conflict-
ridden states and their populations, minority communities, the
dispossessed and those of a critical perspective. The ‘software’ that
directs international institutions to act in prescribed ways is often
specifically designed to reinforce the position of power holders and thwart
attempts by power seekers to achieve a more egalitarian share of
resources. The power holders, and particularly the hegemon in the form of
the United States, have been remarkably successful in perpetuating their
power. Tim Jacoby (2007: 523) notes how the hegemon is skilled at
convincing states that its perpetual dominance is in their own interests,
maintains enough military power to cow opposition, and guarantees its
material superiority through a heavily biased distribution of resources and
capital. This section discusses ‘software’ or the ‘global computer
program’ that helps run the dominant international political system and
many of the international organisations within it.

The liberal peace

Different scholars use different lenses with which to interpret the world.
Feminists, for example, might argue that the main software package that
drives the international political system is the patriarchy or the male
dominance that is infused into many aspects of life (Tickner 2001).
Marxists might be tempted to interpret their known universe through an
analysis of the means of production and patterns of ownership and
consumption (Maclean 1988). This study finds that the liberal peace lens
is particularly useful in explaining many of the meta-influences at work in
situations of conflict and development. The liberal peace is a highly
 Institutions: hardware and software • 49

specialised form of peace and development intervention promoted by

leading states, leading international organisations and the international
financial institutions in their attempts to shape the international political
system and its constituent parts. It is the ‘ideology upon which life,
culture, society, prosperity and politics are assumed to rest’ (Mac Ginty
and Richmond 2007a: 493). The liberal peace is capable of constructing a
beguiling and attractive rationale for its own promotion. Thus it speaks of
‘responsibility’, ‘development’, ‘common interests’ and above all,
intervention (Williams 2007b: 543).
Sometimes called ‘liberal interventionism’ or ‘liberal internationalism’,
the liberal peace is most visible in societies undergoing western-backed
peace support interventions in the aftermath of civil war. But many of the
tools of the liberal peace, particularly in disciplining societies,
governments and economies, are also at work in developing states that
have not experienced recent war. In non-post-war environments, these
interventions are often covered by the terms ‘good governance’ and
‘reform’ and we find the same commitment to the market as a prerequisite
for debt relief and poverty reduction strategy funding (Craig and Porter
2003; Abrahamsen 2004).

Plate 5 The UN in Jordan: the UN can be considered as an agent of the liberal

peace
50 • Institutions: hardware and software

The case study approach is perhaps the dominant method in the study of
conflict and development. This is often entirely legitimate and allows
scholars to explore in depth the lessons of a particular context. One
potential failing of the case study methodology is that scholars are so
engrossed in their particular case that they are often unable to make
comparisons and connections between cases. The liberal peace tool
allows us to make comparisons, sometimes across contexts that may not
have obvious similarities or connections. It also allows us to make sense
of the strategy employed by the leading political and economic actors in
the international system. The liberal peace can be seen as a normatively
neo-liberal system of compliance that is variously recommended, induced
and enforced by leading states, leading international organisations and
international financial institutions. Developing world states and states
emerging from conflict often have little choice but to accept the liberal
peace.
Many aspects of the liberal peace are deeply illiberal. It promotes a highly
specialised form of liberalism that is often highly prescriptive and
reflective of western norms (Mac Ginty 2006: 33–57). Rajiv
Chandrasekaran’s (2007: 7) exposé of life inside Baghdad’s Green Zone
provides a stark illustration of the crass ethnocentrism at the heart of the
liberal peace as manifested in Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA). He tells of how US administrators lived in a hermetically sealed
compound complete with air-freighted fast food, US sports television
channels and other home comforts. The security situation meant that
many administrators rarely left the compound, while only a very few
Iraqis could gain access to their new rulers. Many CPA-staffers were
woefully inexperienced college graduates whose sole work experience
had been as an intern for a Republican Member of Congress. This was
often enough to justify their appointment to tasks such as helping to write
the new Iraqi constitution or organising the privatisation of public
services. Most US CPA personnel got their first passport to travel to
Iraq, and six of the young ‘gofers’ were ‘assigned to manage Iraq’s
$13 billion budget, even though they had no previous financial
management experience’ (Chandrasekaran 2007: 104–5).
The liberal peace promotes the individual as the primary unit of society.
While such a viewpoint is unproblematic in western societies, it clashes
with many developing world and non-western contexts in which the
family or clan-group may also have significant importance. By
empowering individuals (for example, as consumers or as voters with free
choice) the liberal peace introduces a cultural clash (sometimes
 Institutions: hardware and software • 51

characterised as traditionalism versus modernism) in many societies (see

Box 2.1). The version of liberalism promoted by the liberal peace is
perhaps most significant for its adherence to neo-liberal economic
principles. Deudney and Ikenberry (1999: 190) observe the political
ambitions of the promotion of open economies: ‘liberal states have
pursued economic openness for political ends, using free trade as an
instrument to alter and maintain the preferences and features of other
states that are politically and strategically congenial.’
If one searches the liberal peace or the operating philosophy of leading
states for ‘red lines’ or non-negotiable elements then the belief in open
markets seems to be one of the few inviolable principles. Other possible
red lines wilt under scrutiny. Commitments to democracy, international
law, human rights or ideas of common humanity waiver according to
circumstances. They are upheld in certain cases but conveniently
overlooked in others. Even commitments to the inviolability of state
sovereignty are abrogated when actors feel strong enough to do so. In the
first few months of 2008, for example, there were startling cases of the
overriding of sovereignty: Kosovo’s declaration of independence, US
missile strikes on Somalia, and Colombia’s raid on guerrilla bases in

Box 2.1

A clash of cultures?

One of the authors’ postgraduate classes was having a discussion on

democratisation in post-war societies. The author asked a female Afghan student
if she was looking forward to voting for the first time when she returned to
Afghanistan. She said that she was not. ‘My father will decide who I should vote
for. So this is not a vote for me. It’s an extra vote for him.’ She continued to say
that she wanted access to decent health care, education and other basic social
services more than participating in an election. Moreover, she did not see a direct
link between participating in an electoral process and the delivery of such
services. ‘Afghan society is clientelistic.’ she explained. ‘It’s all about who you
know and not how you vote. For me, voting isn’t a “gift” from the west. At best
it’s an inconvenience.’ Her views were something of a shock to her western
classmates – particularly the females who had been brought up to believe that
gender equality was both a right and a norm. The chief point is that the staging
of elections in post-Taliban Afghanistan was more a priority for western
governments anxious to legitimise the rule of their appointed leader than a priority
for many Afghans.
52 • Institutions: hardware and software

Ecuador. This leaves us with a commitment to the free market (thus

reinforcing the existing hegemony) as the core of the liberal peace.

If it is the case that a commitment to the market is the key defining point
of the international political and economic system operated by leading
western states then this says much about the ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’
upon which it is based. It also explains how radical movements, such as
anti-globalisation campaigners or even violent fundamentalists in the
form of Al-Qaeda, are able to depict ‘the west’ as an ethical vacuum.
Indeed, a number of the martyrdom videos of actual and failed suicide
bombers in the United Kingdom mention the baselessness of western
popular culture. Perhaps there is merit to Huntington’s (1993a) much
criticised ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis, though according to violent
fundamentalists, the clash is between an empty mammon-obsessed west
and the more sophisticated entities of non-western identity, religion and
customs.

The absence of a unifying political framework is perhaps most visible

in Belgium, a wealthy first world post-industrial state in which increasing
numbers of citizens and political figures are questioning why the state
exists at all and are investigating ethnonational alternatives. The key
point is that the combination of economic globalisation and a hollow
form of liberalism risks producing soulless societies with few
centripedal forces. Those with particularist agendas, for example
promoting ethnic or religious worldviews, may find western liberalism
an easy target.

As noted earlier, the manifestations of the liberal peace are most visible in
situations of internationally supported peacebuilding and post-war
reconstruction. Here the levers of the liberal peace include: western
encouragement (or coercion) to reach a peace deal, direction in writing a
new constitution, assistance in establishing and advising political parties,
a donors’ conference to fund and direct post-war reconstruction, help in
holding electoral contests (and sometimes outright interference in the
result), programmes of capacity building for the state and civil society,
the introduction of ‘good governance’ targets and the attaching of
economic reform conditions to any reconstruction assistance. In effect,
the liberal peace has manifested itself in post-peace accord societies as a
conveyor belt of western inputs. This has resulted in criticisms that it has
been formulaic, using a template style of intervention that is unresponsive
to the variations demanded by local circumstances (Mac Ginty 2006: 176)
(see Box 2.2).
 Institutions: hardware and software • 53

Box 2.2

The viceroy of Bosnia-Herzegovina

Following the 1992–5 civil war, the new state of Bosnia-Herzegovina was ruled
first by a NATO and then a European Union interim administration. Certainly, the
international community provided the stability and security that was required to
pave the way for humanitarian and reconstruction interventions. But critics have
pointed out that the extent of international intervention by leading states has
diminished the ability of Bosnia-Herzegovina to stand on its own feet and
determine its own course. This view contends that in their desire to protect the
peace and the rights of minorities, the international community has resorted to
draconian methods. The International Crisis Group sums up the western liberal
peace point of view thus: ‘Bosnia remains unready for unguided ownership of its
own future – ethnic nationalism remains too strong’ (BBC 2008). This view has
led to intense intrusion into Bosnia’s affairs to the extent that ‘expatriates make
major decisions . . . key appointments must receive foreign approval, and . . . key
reforms are enacted at the decree of international organisations’ (Knaus and
Martin 2003: 62). The Office of the High Representative, not an elected official
from Bosnia-Herzegovina, remains the point of ultimate political authority and
has not been afraid to exercise authority in such a way that it has been likened to a
‘European Raj’. Until 2005, officials and representatives dismissed by the Office
of the High Representative had no legal right of appeal (Zaum 2006: 471). Indeed
Chandler (2007: 605) notes that ‘sovereignty has in effect been transferred to
Brussels.’ The liberal peace imposed a very particular type of order on
Bosnia-Herzegovina and sparked enormous resentment among many sections of
the population who felt disempowered despite the language of ‘inclusion’,
‘empowerment’ and ‘participation’ that accompanied European interventions.
Sources: Knaus and Martin (2003), Zaum (2006), Chandler (2007), BBC (2008)

The liberal peace is not only restricted to international interventions in

societies emerging from civil war. Instead, international interventions can
be detected in a range of developing world societies. The main means of
advance is through economic reform and leverage, and the ‘good
governance’ agenda of bureaucratic reform. Such ‘reform’ can often
sound innocuous, particularly in its promotion of concepts such as
accountability, transparency, the regularisation of bureaucracy and
empowerment. Yet the cumulative effect of such interventions (often
multiple interventions by multiple international organisations, bilateral
relationships, INGOs and NGOs) may have profound cultural and social
impacts capable of influencing the relationships between states, their
citizens and markets.
54 • Institutions: hardware and software

Fundamentally, liberal peace interventions are capable of altering the

locus of power within a state. For example, citizens in a clientelist
political system may have been used to transferring their allegiance to the
ruling party at municipal level in return for resources (Martz 1996). This
was a rational transaction for both the citizen and the local political
leader, and such relationships would have been deeply embedded into the
socio-political culture. Politicians from the ruling party would be
routinely invited to family weddings and in return for this public
expression of loyalty, the family may expect a share of patronage such as
public sector employment for a son (Hamieh 2007). According to the
western mindset, such behaviour may be regarded as ‘corrupt’ or
‘nepotistic’ (and indeed, it is often deeply inefficient and patriarchial).
‘Good governance’ interventions by western states and international
organisations in many developing and post-war contexts have attempted
to reform political and economic cultures in order to promote
transparency and accountability. In order to build the capacity of
municipalities, the United Nations Development Programme may place
one of its own personnel in the municipality offices to introduce new
administrative procedures. This might involve the ending of
discriminatory employment practices whereby loyal supporters received
sinecures and protected employment according to who they knew rather
than what they knew. The municipality may be unable to refuse the
deployment of UNDP staff to its offices because of a directive from
central government or because the capacity-building scheme comes with
financial inducements. Observers from a western liberal perspective may
applaud the introduction of meritocracy at the municipality. But they may
be blind to the impact that such good governance ‘reforms’ have on
altering power relationships within the target society. The citizen may no
longer attach legitimacy to the municipality, a factor that is likely to have
consequences for political participation, legitimacy and stability. So rather
than ‘state-building’, capacity-building activities funded by the
international community might actually help to undermine the state or
make apparent state weakness. Chandler (2006: 478) refers to the process
as ‘the privileging of governance over government’. The key problem is
that while people can vote for governments (and government opponents),
they cannot vote for governance.
The impact of such capacity-building interventions are often quite subtle,
and sometimes seem incredibly minor, but their cumulative effect can
transform the operating culture and orientation of state institutions
(Abrahamsen 2000; Larmour 2005). Whereas a verbal promise between
 Institutions: hardware and software • 55

the local mayor and the head of household may have been sufficient in the
traditional dispensation, good governance reforms may require the filling
in of a standardised form. This apparently innocuous change goes to the
heart of some core political and cultural relationships involving issues of
trust and reciprocity upon which many societies operate. Under this
description, liberal peace interventions and good governance reforms
often involve many pinprick involvements. It is also clear that many
actors are involved in the liberal peace chain, with much delegation (and
abrogation of responsibility) along the way. Thus, international
organisations and leading states may direct or encourage developing
world states to adopt a set of administrative and economic reforms (in
return for being able to access credit on international markets). Many of
the reforms would be implemented at national level, but others would be
passed down the political chain to regional governments and
municipalities and eventually to citizens. INGOs and NGOs may be
co-opted as implementation agents for the liberal peace and good
governance agenda. Although INGOs and NGOs are well aware of the
criticisms of good governance and western-backed peacemaking as a
form of neocolonialism that exports a peculiarly western worldview, they
find it difficult not to become involved in programmes and projects that
fall under the ‘good governance’ rubric. Often good governance and the
liberal peace are the only games in town. They attract funding, whereas
other programmes based on alternative worldviews do not.
It should not be assumed that everything connected with international
intervention, the liberal peace and good governance is harmful. Often, for
example in the case of state collapse, it is only international actors who
are empowered to organise national processes (such as elections) or have
the capacity to provide the security necessary for the introduction of
humanitarian or development assistance. Since the end of the Cold War,
western-backed interventions have saved and improved lives across war
zones and development contexts. Defenders of the liberal peace point out
that many underdevelopment and conflict situations would be worse off if
there was no international intervention and that we should swallow
objections to the imposition of western values and look to the bigger
picture of stability and the potential for economic growth (Quinn and Cox
2007: 518). Moreover, we should not conceptualise the liberal peace as a
dastardly plot solely perpetrated by the United States. Rather than being
coerced into the liberal peace, many states, organisations and enterprises
see it as a way to further their own ends. France, for example, protested
loudly at the prospect of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. It did not, however,
56 • Institutions: hardware and software

sever its ties with the United States, impose sanctions or take any real
steps to prevent the invasion. In short, France had much to gain from its
generally good relations with the United States and its connections with
the global economy.
We should be under no illusions that international assistance is neutral.
It reflects the worldview of those who fund and direct it. Although the
liberal peace and the good governance agenda have standardised
elements that are applied to different societies with minimal regard to
local circumstances, it is important to note that western interventions
and reforms are applied with different levels of enthusiasm in different
locations (Richmond 2005a: 217–18). Moreover, we must be careful
not to represent developing world and post-conflict states and
communities as mute, powerless actors without agency. In fact, there
are many cases of communities resisting, modifying and subverting
the original intentions of western policymakers (Richmond and Franks
2007; Franks and Richmond 2008). Whether in Bosnia, Sierra Leone
or Timor-Leste, local political leaders, bureaucrats and communities have
found ways to exploit the resources and intentions of international
organisations and states involved in peacebuilding and development
activities.
While this book is interested in contemporary conflict and development,
the parameters of the modern liberal peace are historical. We have had
numerous ‘defining moments’ in which political leaders make ‘never
again’ pronouncements and boldly set a ‘new’ course: Versailles, Yalta,
and the declaration of a New World Order at the end of the Cold War are
just a few examples. Yet many of the apparently ‘new’ structures,
institutions and modes of operation seem to resemble those of the
previous era (Williams 1998: 5–18). Alex Callinicos (2005: 596) finds
that the key to explaining the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq
lies not only in the contingencies of the Bush White House but also in
long-maintained historical projects: ‘The ideal of a global order in which
free markets and democratic institutions promoted peace and prosperity
was eloquently articulated by Woodrow Wilson during the First World
War.’ These continuities guide us towards examining international
structures that can survive the tectonic shifts in the international economy
and polity. In order to understand ‘structural liberalism’ we now turn to
the ‘hardware’ or international institutions that define contemporary
conflict and development (Deudney and Ikenberry 1999: 180).
 Institutions: hardware and software • 57

Hardware

States

Rather than provide a ‘political science 101’ conceptualisation of the

ideal state, this section will content itself with making three points about
the state or the principal unit in the international political system (see
Box 2.3). In lieu of an elementary exposition of the concept of the state,
readers may wish to consult classics on the subject such as Waltz’s (2001)
Man, the State and War or Migdal’s (1988) Strong Societies, Weak States.
The first point is an obvious one: there are enormous variations in the
resources, power, legitimacy and capabilities of states and thus in their
conflict and development status. Indeed some states are ‘lucky’ in that
they are in a stable region with dependable neighbours though (as we saw
in Chapter 1) states ‘fortunate’ enough to have natural resources are often
cursed with conflict over the distribution of these resources. The massive
variance in state capability leads to uneven international institutions, with
some states (and corporate bodies and lobby groups) wielding
disproportionate influence. In stark terms, while some states and lobby
groups can afford to maintain extensive bureaucracies at international
organisations, other states cannot (Robbins 2003: 105). Indeed, Japan is

Box 2.3

Pakistan: strong or weak state?

Ostensibly Pakistan is a strong state. It covers a huge area (over twice the size of
Germany), is rich in resources (including natural gas) and is strategically located (it
borders China, India, Iran and Afghanistan). It has an enormous army, is a nuclear
power and its economy, though underdeveloped, has experienced strong levels of
growth in the post-2004 period. Yet the state is chronically weak. It does not
control all of its territory (with insurgent groups regularly defeating the national
army in the Waziristan region). The bureaucracy is unable to fulfil its stated aims;
thus a large proportion of the economy is corrupt and unregulated and – unable to
conduct a census – the state can only estimate the population. Democratic
institutions are weak, with the result that military coups, states of emergency, mass
riots, human rights abuses and political assassinations have become commonplace.
Long-running boundary disputes with India, and the Kashmir conflict, have been a
drain on state coffers and attentions. So is Pakistan a strong or weak state? The
answer, despite its formidable nuclear arsenal, must be that it is weak. The state
faces too many alternative sources of power to be able to assert itself.
58 • Institutions: hardware and software

reported to pay the International Whaling Commission membership fees

for some states in return for support on the right to hunt whales
(McCurry 2008).
State capacity is a crucial factor in facilitating, developing and
constraining conflict. Adrian Leftwich’s (1996: 284) concept of the
‘developmental state’ is useful in illustrating how states need to
‘concentrate sufficient power, authority, autonomy, competence and
capacity at the centre to shape, pursue and encourage the achievement of
explicit developmental objectives’. As Leftwich (1996) points out, states
have pursued this capacity to develop in very different ways, with Taiwan
and South Korea achieving very high rates of growth under authoritarian
political systems. This leads us to the second point, that the type of state
matters, particularly in terms of its internal political organisation. Some
forms of state organisation may be more conducive than others to
promoting development and constraining conflict. Democracy and
development may not always be compatible, and it is unlikely that China
could achieve such high economic growth rates if it were embarking on a
serious programme of political liberalisation. The state is often the central
clearing house for societal conflict, providing rules and mechanisms to
allow individuals and groups to coexist. But it may also be inept or
incapable, or may have little interest in maintaining its conflict-regulating
responsibilities. William Reno (1997b) paints a dystopian picture of west
African states in the late 1990s, in which ruling elites regarded citizens as
an expensive encumbrance and thus made no pretence at offering public
services. Instead, they fixed their energies on the extraction of precious
minerals, usually in concert with external commercial interests. In some
cases, especially societies with identity fissures, the state may privilege
some groups and discriminate against others. An enormous literature
posits a link between democracy and peaceful relations between states,
but the relationship is by no means simple, and this ‘democratic peace’
literature tends to overlook the locus of most violent conflict: within the
state itself (Doyle 1980; Henderson 2002: 2).
A key point to bear in mind is that in many societies the state is the only
political and economic prize worth having. To be excluded from the state
means to be cut off from virtually all public resources. Indeed, one can
see this quite literally in parts of Africa where the road and electricity
pylons stop abruptly because a district did not support the ruling elite.
Ian Taylor (2005) observes that
control of the state serves the twin purposes of lubricating patronage
networks and satisfies the selfish desire of elites to enrich themselves,
 Institutions: hardware and software • 59

in many cases in quite spectacular fashion. That is what lies at the heart
of the profound reluctance by African presidents to hand over power
voluntarily and why many African regimes end messily, often in coups.
(Taylor 2005: 4)
He goes on to note how neopatrimonialism or clientelistic ‘big man’
politics is alive and well across the region. This is despite enormous
democratisation and ‘good governance’ interventions over many years. In
other words, a political culture may be surprisingly resilient regardless of
externally promoted institutional engineering.
The third point to make in relation to the state is to note the international
community’s near addiction to statebuilding as the standard response to
civil war or political transition. It seems as though the only tool in the
toolbox is state rebuilding (as manifested through the already mentioned
capacity-building programmes, good governance, public sector reform,
etc.). In development contexts, Kenny (2003) notes:
The state is either the solution, the only way to combat structural
weaknesses that hold back growth, or it is the problem, tying down the
invisible hand; or it is the facilitator, vital for the efficient functioning
of the free market.
(Kenny 2003: 413)
Either way, the state is a key ally or enemy in international efforts to
promote development or reduce conflict.

Failed states
Yet in some parts of the world, the state is patently a dysfunctional
political and economic model. It has failed in entire regions. Peter
Schwab (2004) notes:
West Africa seems to be in a permanent state of either volcanic
eruption or desperate economic crises. Its terrorized and poverty-
stricken populations are exhausted by apocalyptic furies that have
besieged them, while the world at large has become both leery and
fatigued by having to constantly come to the rescue of African states.
(Schwab 2004: 139)
Albert Einstein defined madness as someone repeating an electrical
process even though it didn’t work the first time. So if a light switch did
not work at first, it would be irrational to repeatedly turn it on and off
again. But given that statehood (or pre-statehood in the form of some
interim international administrations such as Kosovo or the Palestinian
territories) is the only internationally recognised form of political
60 • Institutions: hardware and software

organisation, then the international community is addicted to shoring up

and rebuilding states through bilateral support, development and military
assistance, and reconstruction programmes. The fear of statelessness
(regarded by many as a deviant form of political organisation) is very
grave indeed. According to one observer, ‘Failed or failing states are often
Petri dishes for transnational criminal activity such as money laundering,
arms smuggling, drug trafficking, people trafficking, and terrorism’
(Wainwright 2003: 486).
While immense international resources are poured into shoring up and
reconstructing states, it is worth noting that the international system is
selectively tolerant of different types of state. This tolerance often
depends on three factors: the ability of a state to resist or subvert western
influence (for example, China), the strategic importance or unimportance
of the state (for example, oil-rich Iraq or strategically marginal Haiti), and
the points of economic and geopolitical confluence between the state and
leading states in the international political system. Consider the Gulf
region for example: the oil-rich monarchies that hold power in the region
can at best be described as authoritarian and controlling, and at worst as
despotic and tyrannical. That it is illegal for a female to drive a motor
vehicle in Saudi Arabia is commentary enough on the level of political
suffrage enjoyed by citizens. Although a limited reform agenda is
underway in some Gulf states, it is clear that the geo-strategic concerns of
leading western states outweigh the desire to upset regional power-holders
(Ehteshami and Wright 2007). The worldviews of the ruling elites in the
Gulf region are congruent with western political and economic interests
and so their unsavoury political backyard is spared scrutiny and
intervention. Gulf states invest their oil wealth in western economic
markets, buy prodigious quantities of western arms and are on the ‘right
side’ in the war on terror and the Sunni versus Shiite struggle. In one of
the many contradictions that defines the international political system,
this western laissez-faire attitude to capable and compliant Gulf states
contrasts with ‘failed’ or ‘failing’ weak states that are not in a position to
resist western intervention. As George Orwell might have put it: some
states are more equal than others.

International organisations

That international organisations exist at all is remarkable. The jealousies

attending state sovereignty and national interests, as well as the fallout
from international crises, have meant that the international institutions of
 Institutions: hardware and software • 61

previous eras often resembled short-lived tactical alliances rather than

permanent forums for the regulation of international society. Even more
remarkable has been the existence of some international institutions for so
many decades (the United Nations, World Bank and International
Monetary Fund for over six decades, and the European Union – albeit in a
greatly modified form – for almost five decades at the time of writing).

The United Nations

As the planet’s premier collective security organisation, the United

Nations is the target of immense criticism. Common chants are that it’s
too inefficient, bureaucratic, slow, corrupt, under-funded and unwieldy
(MacFarlane and Khong 2006; Weiss and Daws 2007). Yet, the
organisation is merely the sum of its parts (member states) and is a largely
accurate reflection of states’ relationships with one another and their
attitudes towards pooling sovereignty for the collective good. That it tends
to be reactive rather than proactive, is highly selective in its interventions,
and is inconsistent in its attitude towards state sovereignty is not the fault
of international mandarins working in a vacuum in New York and
Geneva. Instead, it is the fault of the national governments who have
created and maintained the system. While it is easy to criticise the United
Nations, it is also easy to overlook the immense (and often unsung)
development, conflict amelioration and humanitarian work it undertakes
(Berdal 1996: 106). Often this work is conducted through specialist
agencies, has long-term impacts, and makes a qualitative difference to the
lives of millions in underdeveloped and war-torn states. Thus UN
agencies are responsible for the physical security, legal protection,
nourishment, shelter and repatriation of substantial numbers of
individuals and communities: a fact that is routinely overlooked by those
who use broad-brush criticisms against the organisation.
The United Nations has developed as a result of disjointed incrementalism.
Rather than planned strategic growth, UN capabilities have developed
reactively in the face of crises, with the end of the Cold War
simultaneously lifting an immense constraint on its ability to operate and
presenting it with a vastly increased workload. It responded in the 1990s
by having ever more ambitious operations in an increased number of
theatres. The growth in peacekeeping operations occurred despite the UN
Charter not mentioning the term ‘peacekeeping’. In the post-Cold War
period there has been a trend towards ‘outsourcing’ or ‘subcontracting’,
with the employment of regional organisations, INGOs and NGOs to carry
62 • Institutions: hardware and software

⫻4 vehicle: the UN is the planet’s premier collective security

Plate 6 A UN 4⫻
organisation

out peace-support and development activities on behalf of the United

Nations (Richmond and Carey 2005). On the positive side of the ledger,
the UN’s post-1990 operations showed that the organisation was adopting a
more sophisticated understanding of conflict, especially with regard to the
complexities of the relationship between conflict and development. On the
negative side of the ledger, there was discomfort at the more robust aspects
of some peacekeeping interventions in which peace ‘keeping’ became
peace ‘making’ and peace ‘enforcing’ (Boulden 2001). Such qualms
echoed those over the notion of ‘humanitarian war’ and concerns that
humanitarian interventions could prolong and intensify war (Janzekovic
2006; Belloni 2007). There were also accusations of ‘mission creep’,
whereby originally modest UN interventions became victim to
ever-broadening mandates. This was especially the case in missions that
required extensive nation and statebuilding, activities that are necessarily
long-term and expensive (Pugh 1997). The term ‘mission creep’ came to
prominence in relation to an originally modest UN effort in Somalia in the
early 1990s. What was originally an attempt to secure supply routes for
humanitarian aid convoys led to direct conflict between UN contingents
and Somali warlords.
The United Nations has undergone significant reform, and embarked on
major initiatives, since the 1990s. Its eight Millennium Development
Goals helped inject focus into development interventions undertaken by it
and its member states. The 2001 Brahimi Report, although not fully
implemented, recognised many of the UN’s organisational shortcomings.
The 2003–6 High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenge and Change
 Institutions: hardware and software • 63

considered the new range of transnational threats faced by states and the
utility of UN structures and practices to deal with them (Hannay 2005;
Stedman 2007). The 2005 establishment of a Peace Building Commission
illustrated that member states were willing to systematically take on board
the lessons from its previous and ongoing peace support operations.
The principal problem facing the United Nations is the perennial struggle
between state sovereignty and the collective good. On many occasions the
two are simply incompatible. Neo-conservative elements in the United
States are at least honest when they voice their suspicions about
multilateralism or the potential of any national or multilateral power
source to rival its hegemonic position (Callinicos 2005: 598). As the 2003
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and its bloody aftermath showed,
leading states are willing to override the UN when it suits, but not above
appealing for UN assistance when they find themselves in a mess.
Important decisions on restructuring the Security Council to make it more
representative have been dodged and it is likely that the pattern of
disjointed incrementalism will continue.
Other international organisations, particularly regional security and
economic organisations, have shown themselves to be increasingly
capable of pursuing conflict-amelioration and development agendas. The
African Union has ambitious plans for an expansion of its activities but,
thus far, its capacity remains limited (Murithi 2005). Moreover, it has not
fulfilled its promise of adopting ‘African solutions for African problems’.
Its definitions of peacebuilding, for example, seem to be cut and pasted
from western sources and overlook indigenous and traditional forms of
dispute resolution that might be found closer to home (Mac Ginty 2008).
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) did have
some success in re-establishing stability in Liberia (though less success in
Sierra Leone) in the 1990s. NATO and the European Union are probably
examples of the most capable regional security organisations. In part, this
is because decision-making is easier among smaller groups of states and
because of the wealth of their members.
The Afghan and Iraq adventures are interesting in that they reveal that the
primary motivation among leading states is security. But there has been a
realisation among these leading states (often in the wake of tough lessons)
that the promotion of development is essential to long-term security. The
‘secure, hold and reconstruct’ military strategy road-tested in Iraq, and
the deployment of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan, are
testament to the internalisation of development programming within
security. Clearly this securitisation and militarisation of development also
64 • Institutions: hardware and software

raises profound ethical questions about humanitarian motives and

practices (Gallis 2007: 14).

International non-governmental organisations

Although not strictly ‘international organisations’, INGOs have
transformed international responses to conflict and development since the
1970s. Organisations such as the International Committee of the Red
Cross and Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders or Oxfam have been
important for at least three reasons. First, they have allowed official
development assistance, conflict prevention and peacebuilding activities
to have a much further reach than traditional bilateral or international
organisation activity. INGOs are often cheaper and more flexible than
official modes of aid delivery, particularly in cases where they subcontract
to local NGOs (Richmond and Carey 2005). Second, INGOs have
prompted more cases of development intervention by leading states and
international organisations. This has been particularly the case in their
ability to ‘bear witness’ and engage in advocacy, thus bringing
humanitarian emergencies and chronic development and conflict
situations to the attention of publics and polities. The third, and most
significant, point has been the ability of INGOs to play a role in shaping
the development, conflict prevention and development assistance agenda
of leading states, leading international organisations and international
financial institutions. This influence has been by no means total, nor has
the process been one way, yet INGOs have been incredibly important in
broadening governmental understanding of conflict and making obvious
the multiple connections between conflict and development.
Yet some INGOs have been co-opted into the liberal peace project. Rather
than acting as bulwarks against the ambitions of rich western states, some
INGOs are the principal transmission agents of the liberal peace through
their promotion of the good governance and reform agendas (Richmond
2005b). The privatisation of development and humanitarianism (for
example, through tender processes for development contracts) leaves
many INGOs with little choice. To stay in business (and to stay relevant
and to fund their other advocacy work) they must compete for contracts
released by governments and international organisations. Yet all contracts
come with conditions, and some of these conditions may constrain the
original development and conflict-amelioration objectives of the INGO.
As Box 2.4 shows, increasing privatisation in the humanitarian and
development sectors has raised many practical and ethical questions.
 Institutions: hardware and software • 65

Box 2.4

Privatising security, humanitarianism and development

The private sector is often considered to be more efficient and cost-effective than
state-run organisations. The rigour of the private sector has been increasingly
applied to the provision of security, humanitarian and development interventions
in some contexts as donor states and organisations seek to limit costs and devolve
responsibilities. Private military contractors (PMCs, or what used to be called
‘mercenaries’) have been employed in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect embassies
and reconstruction projects. Controversy has abounded, especially in relation to
the immunity from prosecution enjoyed by some PMCs in some contexts (Baer
2007). For states sensitive to headlines of body-bags coming home, non-state
partners (whether charitable or private) are an attractive proposition. A number of
scholars and aid practitioners, however, have pointed out that the apparent
privatisation and securitisation of humanitarianism and development are leading
to foundational changes in how we conceptualise ‘charity’, ‘aid’, ‘neutrality’ and
‘humanitarianism’ (Duffield 2007; Spearin 2008).
Sources: Baer (2007), Duffield (2007), Spearin (2008)

International financial institutions

UN and INGO personnel are often highly visible in conflict and
development environments through their blue helmets, white 4⫻4s and
prominent banners advertising their projects. Yet one set of highly
influential international actors are frequently less visible: the international
financial institutions (IFIs). The World Bank (originally the International
Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and International Monetary
Fund date from the era when Adolf Hitler was still in power. The framers
of both organisations were conditioned by their experiences of the 1930s,
with the contraction of world trade and state attempts to ‘beat’ economic
depression through tariffs. Although the IMF and World Bank are often
discussed in the same breath, and although both share the same aim of
facilitating free trade, they are ‘not identical twins’ (Hanlon 1996: 25).
The IMF’s chief role is to smooth international trade through short-term
balance of payments assistance to states. Its main focus is on
macro-economic matters and it regards low inflation (achieved by tight
government spending regimes) as the most important weapon in the
regularisation of trade and the stabilisation of currencies (Pollard 1997:
79). The World Bank has a broader brief, and is focused on development
and longer-term interventions. It aims to encourage states to change the
66 • Institutions: hardware and software

structure of their economies so that growth and trade can operate

unhindered. A welter of associated bodies and permanent conferences
(the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Trade
Organisation, G8, the United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development and the Uruguay and Doha Rounds of negotiations, etc.)
assist in the overall aim of promoting free trade.
As was made clear in the Introduction to this book, the international
financial architecture has been heavily criticised as being designed to
perpetuate the poverty and the disadvantaged positions of developing
world states (Stiglitz and Charlton 2005). Thus, the IMF and World Bank
are routinely demonised as being ‘the high priests of neo-classical
orthodoxy’ (Shutt 1998: 160) or progenitors of ‘predatory globalisation’
(Falk 1999). The reasons for this derision are clear: the international
financial architecture has facilitated the post-Second World War growth in
the disparity between rich and poor states and the income disparities in
developing states (Seligson 2003: 2). Falk (1999: 13) characterises the
international economy as structurally racist: it is an ‘economic apartheid’
that reinforces a rich white world and is comfortable with the
impoverishment of the non-white world. Joseph Stiglitz (2003), for many
years an economist with the IMF, pursues a similar theme: the IFIs
prioritise the interests of global capital above those of global community.
Given our interest in the international financial architecture is in how it
facilitates and thwarts conflict and development, three points can be
made. The first point is that the IFIs are here to stay. Although many
commentators paint them as pantomime villains (with considerable
justification), there are no alternative sources of international economic
regulation waiting in the wings. The IFIs have undergone considerable
change throughout their history and have presided over many economic
downturns (for example, the 1973 oil and dollar shocks, the 1994–5
Mexican peso crisis and the 1997–8 Asian financial crisis, the 2007–9
market instability and credit crunch). Yet, for all of this mismanagement
and the disjointed incrementalism of their institutional evolution, there is
no political appetite among leading states for root and branch reform
(Harris 1999; Underhill 2001: 191). Despite the iniquities of the situation,
societies emerging from civil war or suffering from underdevelopment
simply have to work with the IFIs. States emerging from civil wars are
unable to avail themselves of reconstruction loans or to conduct
international trade unless they sign up to IFI strictures. These strictures
may include honouring the external debts of the previous regime, even if
that regime lacked a democratic mandate.
 Institutions: hardware and software • 67

The second point concerns the worrying absence of democracy and

transparency in the affairs of the IFIs. There is a certain irony here in that
while democracy and democratisation are often pushed on states
emerging from conflict as the route to guarantee them stability, these
states must also enter into deeply undemocratic relationships with the
IFIs. Joseph Hanlon (1996: 24) noted how, in the aftermath of a civil war,
Bretton Woods officials in Washington had ‘more power in Mozambique
than any Mozambican, up to and including President Chissano.’
Unelected IFI officials have been present at many civil war peace
negotiations: they are difficult guests to refuse in that reconstruction
assistance is often routed through them. While the World Bank, IMF and
other international agents encourage transparency among recipient states,
the World Bank’s own lack of transparency was illustrated by the
controversy surrounding a massive pay rise awarded to its president’s
girlfriend in 2005. George Monbiot (2006) castigates the IMF as ‘the
world’s most powerful dictatorship’. Decision-making power in the IMF is
based purely on financial clout, with states enjoying voting rights
commensurate with their contributions to the Fund. The world’s eighty
poorest states share 10 per cent of voting rights (Monbiot 2006).
The third point is that IFI strictures can have profound impacts on social
harmony in the aftermath of a civil war and the ability of a post-civil-war
government to fulfil its social provision pledges. This can have serious
consequences, since the post-civil-war political dispensation will require
a broad base of stakeholders if the peace accord is to hold. IMF and
World Bank mantras of ‘small government’ can severely restrict the
ability of governments to honour the ‘peace dividend’ pledges that
accompanied a peace accord. As Addison (2003: 264) notes, ‘Decisions
made in the early phase of the war-to-peace transition alter the
distribution of productive assets and thereby the benefits of growth to
the rich and the poor for years to come.’ The 2006 Nepalese peace
agreement, for example, contains a highly ambitious list of social
pledges that would make a 1970s Scandinavian socialist government
proud. The peace accord has had a shaky start, and different ethnic
groups (previously overshadowed by the Maoist–government struggle)
are voicing grievances at their poor share of public resources. Yet the
Nepalese state does not have autonomy over how it disburses the contents
of the public coffers. There is an acute danger of civil war recidivism, and
even if the government were minded to throw money at the problem, tight
regulation from the IFIs would make that impossible. Post-independence
Timor Leste finds itself in a similar situation. Mass rioting in 2005 and
68 • Institutions: hardware and software

the 2008 assassination bids on the prime minister and president

have largely been due to the failure of the government to address
socio-economic aspirations. While the IFIs do not have peacekeepers or
storm troopers on the battlefields, they are not entirely removed from the
dynamics that encourage conflict and development.

Concluding discussion

To return to the software and hardware analogy, it would seem that an

incredibly sophisticated and deft software prevails in the form of the
liberal peace. Through a mixture of subtle and not-so-subtle inducements
and compliance mechanisms, states are encouraged to conform to an
order that reinforces existing power-holders. Its chief aims are to stabilise
dysfunctional war-torn states, to promote liberal economics, and to
perpetuate the control of leading states (Duffield 2001: 10). The liberal
peace regime allows some wriggle room: it has been softened by the
human security perspective, will face increasing challenges from a more
internationally active China and – in certain circumstances – can be
subverted by states and communities. Moreover, there are signs that the
liberal peace is suffering from a crisis of confidence and credibility if
not a crisis of actual influence (Cooper 2007: 606). While the dominant
software is constantly upgraded, the hardware (in the form of
international institutions) is clunky, slow and often fails to work. In a
sense, the software has found ways in which it can work without
hardware, or certainly without the original hardware. To stretch the
analogy and risk entering geek territory, leading states and international
financial institutions have modified parts of the hardware through the use
of ‘add-ons’ or specialist devices that allow them to induce the
international system and its states to operate in ways that suit them.
The institutional factors that shape contemporary conflict and
development are undergoing simultaneous processes of continuity and
change. The forces of continuity are to be found in the rigidity of a UN
Security Council that reflects the 1945 balance of power and in the
inflexibility of state sovereignty as interpreted by some states. But there
are many signs of change, all of which impact on the ebb and flow of
conflict and development and the ability of international institutions to
react. The range of factors deemed capable of causing conflict (or
instability) and thwarting economic and human development is deemed to
have grown in the post-Cold War era. The transnational nature of many of
 Institutions: hardware and software • 69

these threats (for example, legal and illegal labour flows or environmental
degradation) means that traditional state-centric institutions are often
poorly equipped to deal with them. While many international institutions
have been changing to anticipate or react to a new range of threats, it is
not at all clear that the current suite of collective security organisations
and development organisations is the best equipped to deal with these
threats. It is an incontrovertible fact that none of the current international
or regional security organisations in existence was explicitly formed to
deal with contemporary civil war or underdevelopment. Quite simply, the
international political system is stuck with the wrong tools for the job.
Having said that, many international organisations have undergone
processes of reform and there are growing interconnections between the
traditional international units (such as states and collective security
organisations) and more modern units in the form of INGOs and
organised global capital. Shaw et al. (2006) refer to this as ‘complex
multilateralism’, whereby numerous multilateral associations come
together, often on specific issues and for limited time periods. Thus
campaigns to address blood diamonds, child soldiers or landmines
will see ‘mixed-actor coalitions’ of states, international organisations,
pressure groups and private sector bodies cooperate on a single issue.
Great strides have also been made since the end of the Cold War in
increasing the awareness of the linkages between conflict and
development. Thus international organisations and bilateral donors
routinely engage in ‘conflict-sensitive development programming’, or
realise that a post-civil-war peace depends as much on socio-economic
inclusion as it does on more overt security or identity-related issues.
There seems to be no end in sight to the perennial problem of reconciling
the national interests of states and the need for states to put aside narrow
national interests to deal with pressing collective problems such as global
warming or poverty. International organisations are the clearing house for
many of these tensions. In some cases, such as agreement on the
Millennium Development Goals, states have been able to cooperate on
joint aspirations. Logjams in international organisations, however, have
tempted some states and interests to act either unilaterally, or
multilaterally though not through an international organisation. Some
commentators have suggested the need for a ‘league of democracies’ or
an alliance of western democratic states who could act without the
encumbrance of an unwieldy international organisation (Kagan 2008).
The advantage would be swiftness of action and unity of purpose in the
face of a humanitarian or complex political emergency. Critics, however,
70 • Institutions: hardware and software

have pointed out that such a league would amount to a charter for
interventionism and would conveniently free western states of the need to
persuade non-western states of the merits of their case.

Summary

● Rather than simply look at international institutions, it is also important to

look at the principles and values behind the institutions.
● The concept of ‘the liberal peace’ has been used to describe the peace and
development support interventions by leading states, leading international
organisations and international financial institutions in war-affected and
developing societies. According to critics, the liberal peace is guilty of
western bias and equates to neocolonialism.
● While good governance reforms might seem wholly sensible to western eyes,
they can have a profound effect on important relationships in target societies.
For example, they might alter how citizens interact with and perceive the
state and fellow citizens.
● The international financial institutions wield immense economic and political
power, but it is difficult to think of alternatives to them.
● The international political system increasingly operates according to ‘complex
multilateralism’ whereby a constantly shifting mix of states, international
organisations, INGOs, NGOs and private sector interests coalesce and
recoalesce at different times on different issues.

Discussion questions

1 If the United Nations collapsed, what would you replace it with? What
principles should underpin any new collective security organisation?
2 Is there any way around the tension between the national interests of
states and the collective needs of a community of states?
3 Are there any serious alternatives to the state as the basic political unit
in the international system?
4 What advantages can private sector firms bring to security,
humanitarian and development interventions?
 Institutions: hardware and software • 71

Further reading

Williams, A. (2006) Liberalism and War, London: Routledge covers some of the
key ideas behind western intervention since 1918. Douglas, M. (1986) How
Institutions Think, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press provides a seminal
account on the inner workings of large organisations. Insider’s guides to the role
of the IMF and US capital in the developing world can be found in Stiglitz, J.
(2003) Globalization and its Discontents, New York: Norton, and Perkins, J.
(2004) Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, San Francisco, CA: Berret-Koehler.
An extremely good survey of some of the problems facing INGOs and NGOs is
Yanacopulos, H. and Hanlon, J. (eds) (2005) Civil War, Civil Peace, Oxford:
James Currey. Revealing insights into western interventions in Iraq and
Afghanistan can be found in Stewart, R. (2007) Occupational Hazards: My time
governing in Iraq, Pan Macmillan; Chandrasekaran, R. (2007) Imperial Life in
the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, London: Bloomsbury; and Rick, T.
(2006) Fiasco: The American military adventure in Iraq, London: Penguin.
A wonderfully honest (and funny) reminder of how western preconceptions
sometimes travel poorly can be found in Barley, N. (1983) The Innocent
Anthropologist: Notes from a mud hut, London: British Museum Publications.

Useful websites

Most international organisations, international financial institutions and INGOs

have content-rich websites. Major international organisations include the United
Nations (www.un.org), the European Union (http://europa.eu/), the African
Union (www.Africa-union.org), the Organisation of American States (www.oas.
org), the League of Arab States (www.arableagueonline.org), and the South
Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (www.saarc-sec.org). Some of these
organisations have agencies or sections with a specific remit for conflict and/or
development. For example, the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid
Office (http://ec.europa.eu/echo) and the UN’s Peacebuilding Commission
(www.un.org/peace/peacebuilding) or Department of Peacekeeping Operations
(www.un.org/Depts/dpko). The World Bank (www.worldbank.org), IMF
(www. imf.org), Asian Development Bank (www.adb.org) and European
Bank for Reconstruction and Development (www.ebrd.com) are all represented
online. The final report of the Princeton Project, which reviews threats and
opportunities for the United States in the twenty-first century is available at
www.princeton.edu/~ppns/report.html.
 3 People: participation,
civil society and gender

Introduction

Public participation is widely regarded as the elixir or silver bullet of

western democracy. Through participation comes legitimacy and with
legitimacy comes a discourse to justify a particular course of action. In
recent years, ‘public participation’, ‘local participation’ and ‘local
ownership’ have become prominent themes in relation to development
and peacebuilding processes. This chapter examines the issue of
participation in relation to conflict and development. One of the overall
themes of this book is that people are often written out of the major
decisions that surround war, peace and development. The chapter will
illustrate how this ‘writing out’ occurs and consider the steps that have
been taken to include or ‘write people in’ to political and economic
processes connected with war and peace.
A fundamental point to make in relation to the inclusion or exclusion of
people from conflict and development processes is that human beings are
engaged in constant processes of social stratification and discrimination,
whether consciously or unconsciously. Social identity and social
categorisation theories tell us that people are continuously engaged in
mental processes that attempt to order their social environment (Tajfel
1978; Turner at al. 1987). Often these processes of social categorisation
and identification are totally innocuous. A walk across any university
campus involves many such (often unconscious) calculations: ‘He’s a
bore, I should avoid him’; ‘Look at that awful football jersey – there’s no
 People: participation, civil society and gender • 73

way I would wear that’; ‘She’s got coffee – good idea’. But in societies
with ethnic, racial, religious or political fissures, these calculations can be
more harmful and define who is to be included or excluded from political
decision-making and who is to be afforded or denied resources. The
attitudes of many Israelis towards Arabs and Palestinians (and vice versa)
are so deeply ingrained that they may be termed as ‘structural’. Entire
societies and cultures operate according to politico-cultural norms of
discrimination. Perhaps the most significant of these norms can be found
in relation to attitudes towards women. The 1997 United Nations Human
Development Report noted starkly that ‘no society treats its women as
well as its men’ (UNDP 1997: 39).
Just as individuals and groups are involved in processes of discrimination
that lead to decisions about the inclusion or exclusion of other individuals
or groups, it is worth noting that states and international organisations
engage in similar discriminatory judgements – often with profound
consequences. States often use extreme precision in their use or avoidance
of terms such as ‘genocide’, ‘civil war’ or ‘terrorism’. The label
‘genocide’, for example, carries particular historical connotations and an
expectation that states and international organisations will intervene to
prevent it. As a result, states tend to be very careful in their use of the
term. The way in which states and elements of the international
community frame conflicts (an internal matter, of international
significance, terrorism) and actors in conflicts (terrorists, an oppressed
minority, a legitimate government) can have the effect of including or
excluding certain actors from peace processes and post-conflict
development processes.
The chapter will begin with a discussion of participation and ways in
which states, societies and organisations encourage and discourage
participation in development, peace and conflict processes. It will then
discuss one of the key platforms for the widening of participation beyond
closed sets of institutions: civil society. In the final section, the chapter
will concentrate on the issue of gender and conflict, peace and
development.

Participation

As Chapter 2 revealed, many of the structures and institutions connected

with conflict and development are elite-led and non-participatory. In fact,
parts of the international financial architecture have been deliberately
74 • People: participation, civil society and gender

designed in order to maintain an oligopoly (Glenn 2008). Similarly, many

political structures are maintained to limit participation, or channel it in
particular directions. Consider British politics: it is dominated by three
London-based parties who offer essentially the same menu of policy
choices. They are united by much more than divides them and are
committed to the same political structures – particularly the perpetuation
of the dominance of the traditional political parties. Electors in the United
Kingdom are shoehorned or directed along a particular path in expressing
their political views. Even the most minor demonstrations require police
permission and will be monitored. Against a backdrop of the essentially
conservative nature of many political and economic structures, there has
been a growing realisation by some international organisations,
governments, INGOs and others that popular participation is the key to
legitimacy and thus sustainability. Interestingly, this realisation has tended
to be projected from the western developed world towards the developing
world, and has not been reflected back into developed world polities,
many of which also suffer from democratic deficits. Across many
development and peacebuilding spheres there has been an increased
emphasis on ‘local participation’, ‘ownership’ and ‘partnership’.

Plate 7 An Israeli tank on display at a Hezbollah museum in Lebanon: only a few

states can engage in high-tech war
 People: participation, civil society and gender • 75

Before examining participation in development and peacebuilding, it is

worth noting that popular participation (voluntary and involuntary) is
required in conflict (Conteth-Morgan 2004: 112–13). There is a startling
disparity between the war-fighting practised by a handful of western
electronically advanced states and that practised by combatants on the rest
of the planet. Techno-war as practised by the United States or UK
requires relatively few direct protagonists. The actual number of troops
deployed on the ground is often quite small due to technology and a
division of labour. Even operations in Afghanistan, Iraq or Sierra Leone,
in which large numbers of US and UK troops are deployed, benefited
from tremendous ‘back office’ support in the form of communications
and coordination bases thousands of miles from the combat theatre
(US military operations are directed from Tampa, Florida: Mulligan
2002), while many support functions (for example, catering and logistics)
may be conducted by private contractors (Boot 2007). By late 2003, there
were more private security contractors in Iraq than British soldiers
(Traynor 2003). Indeed, the combination of professional militaries and
‘outsourcing’ to private firms means that many citizens in the United
States and the United Kingdom are insulated from the fact that their state
is at war.
This position differs enormously from most other violent conflict
environments. In such cases, the impact and costs of conflict are often felt
closer to home and more difficult to avoid. One of the defining
characteristics of the so-called ‘new wars’ in the post-Cold War period
has been the deliberate targeting of civilian populations through ‘ethnic
cleansing’ or the calculated displacement of civilians to cause refugee
flows (Kaldor 2005). While this is not unique to the post-Cold War
period, the displacement of populations often leads to serious knock-on
effects in terms of humanitarian emergencies. All organised violence
involves ‘violence specialists’ or actors who take on specific roles during
conflicts (Tilly 2002: 20–1). Yet many conflicts involve the mass
mobilisation of people whether through rallies, the formation of popular
movements or recruitment into militant or militant support groups
(Horowitz 1985: 443–59). While western armed forces may be defined
by their high-tech methodologies, many other military forces (state and
non-state) are decidedly informal and low-tech, and rely on large numbers
of lightly armed combatants. In some cases, this may involve child
soldiers, militias (who farm their land by day, but serve as a ‘home guard’
by night), ‘dollar soldiers’ (whose loyalty is bought) or clan groups (as in
Afghanistan) (Marriage 2007). The presence of young unemployed or
76 • People: participation, civil society and gender

underemployed males (‘a disposable population’ in neo-Malthusian

parlance) may aid this mass involvement in violent conflict. The chief
point is that war may be a mass-participation activity.
In addition to actual combatants, mobilisations require political support.
Pro- and anti-Syrian forces in Lebanon sought to demonstrate their
strength through rallies and counter-rallies in 2006–8. ‘Ethnic
entrepreneurs’ may seek to mobilise large crowds in support of their
cause, often using public demonstrations as a way of indicating their
popular support and thus their legitimacy (Kaufman 2001: 5–7).
Nineteenth-century commentator Charles Mackay sums up the danger of
mobilising crowds in his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the
Madness of Crowds (1852):
We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds on one
object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become
simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, til their
attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.
We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest
members, with a fierce desire for military glory; another as suddenly
becoming crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them
recovering its sense until it has shed rivers of blood and sown a
harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity.
(Mackay 1995: preface to the 1852 edition, xv)

Political leaders, aided by symbolism and references to an historic past

(real or imagined), may be incredibly successful in mobilising large
numbers of people (Mac Ginty 2003: 235–44). War and conflict become,
in many cases, mass events involving large numbers of people as
participants or active supporters. Over fifty thousand people were
estimated to have taken part in rioting in Kosovo in March 2004 (United
Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) 2004). Importantly, mass
participation war and conflict may contrast sharply with the situation that
prevails during peace negotiations and subsequent peacebuilding in which
the opportunities for popular participation are severely constrained.
Populations that felt involved in a ‘people’s war’ may find peace or peace
negotiations a much less inclusive process. Box 3.1 illustrates the secrecy
that surrounded the origins of the ‘Oslo Process’ between Palestinians
and Israelis.
The example of peace negotiations in the aftermath of civil war illustrates
how many political networks are ‘closed systems’ that have firm
boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. In the case of peace negotiations,
 People: participation, civil society and gender • 77

Box 3.1

The Oslo Peace Process: a closed system

The 1990s ‘Oslo Process’ between Israel and the Palestine Liberation
Organisation (PLO) began as clandestine negotiations in a secluded house owned
by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the outskirts of Oslo (Pruitt
et al. 1997: 177–82). Staff at the house were told that the occupants were
academics working to a strict deadline imposed by an exasperated publisher. At
the time of the negotiations, it was illegal for Israeli citizens to meet with
members of the PLO. The talks were so secret that many senior members of the
PLO and the Israeli government did not know of their existence. The talks were a
useful way for each side to test the seriousness of their adversary should more
formal and detailed negotiations develop. Problems arose when news of the talks
was made public (Wolfsfeld 2003: 92–3). Both the Israeli government and the
PLO had invested heavily into demonising the other side, so they now had to
prepare their respective constituencies for the prospect that it might be possible to
make a deal with their historic enemies. The seriousness of this task was made
clear with the 1995 assassination of one of the architects of the Oslo Process,
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, by a right-wing Israeli who thought that the
peace process would lead to ruin. Those involved in the early phase of the Oslo
Process faced a real conundrum: do they try to make advances away from the
glare and turbulence of publicity, or do they open up the process to public
scrutiny before it has had a chance to take root in the minds of the negotiators?
Ultimately, the Oslo Process was not sustained. Crucial in its demise was the
differential perception of gains and losses held by Israelis and Palestinians. ‘Each
side to the conflict has continued to see the “other” as being the sole recipient of
all the benefits, while not offering anything in return’ (Hermann and Newman
2000: 110–11). It is, of course, overly simplistic to say that this perceptual
differential was due solely to a failure by each side to prepare their constituencies
for the give and take of a peace process, but the interface between the public and
private aspects of a peacemaking process requires careful management.
Sources: Pruitt et al. (1997), Hermann and Newman (2000), Wolfsfeld (2003)

this may be due to understandable security reasons; spoiler groups may be

tempted to use violence outside the conference room to influence events
inside it (Darby 2001). In practical terms, complex negotiations are often
best left to small and dedicated teams who have mastery over their brief.
In many cases (for example, peace processes involving Sri Lanka or
southern Sudan) the talks have taken place away from the locus of the
conflict to allow negotiators to concentrate on wider issues without being
blown off course by the immediacy of political violence and the attendant
headlines. Problems arise when the existence of talks are made public.
78 • People: participation, civil society and gender

Antagonists often invest considerable energy in demonising their

enemies, so to turn around and to admit to having talks with ‘the enemy’
requires a delicate massaging of the message. Similarly, the contents of
the talks and an admission that compromises may have to be made, also
requires the preparing of constituencies that are more used to being sold
messages of complete victory (Darby and Mac Ginty 2003: 267–8).
Opportunities for public involvement in peace negotiations may be
limited to public demonstrations to signify a desire for peace (or at least
an end to violence), a referendum on a peace accord or new constitution,
or the election of a post-peace accord government (Reilly 2003). Given
the circumstances, these opportunities may be valuable (for example, if
elections had not been held before or for a very long time), yet they can
be best described as one-off events rather than sustained processes that
allow for continued and meaningful relationships between citizens and
wider political processes. Specialist post-conflict programmes may
require or invite the direct participation of particular sectors: for example,
members of the security forces may be compelled to take part in a truth
and reconciliation process or combatants may be required to disarm and
take part in retraining programmes. For many people though, a peace
process may be something that occurs elsewhere (in a capital city) or their
only connection with it may be through the media or word of mouth.
Thus, the peace process might be ‘a creature of the international
community and their co-opted national elites and [have] limited
connection with the bulk of citizens in the war-affected state’ (Darby and
Mac Ginty 2008: 5). There may be few opportunities to affect what
Harold Saunders (1999) calls ‘a public peace process’, in which the
citizenry can have a substantive input and broaden out formal political
processes to involve a wider constituency.
A growing interest in participation among international organisations,
INGOs and NGOs is partially a recognition of the dominance of closed
systems and the failings that accrue from excluding key constituencies.
The pro-participation consensus is based on a belief that people can
become ‘stakeholders’ in projects and feel that as a result of their
investment they have ownership in a process. The theory continues that
such locally ‘owned’ processes are more legitimate and more likely to
succeed because local constituencies will be able to mould them to suit
local needs and aspirations. In such circumstances, external assistance
and direction will not be as necessary and local actors will be able to
sustain the process. International organisations, INGOs and NGOs
now routinely pay attention to issues of participation regarding it as
 People: participation, civil society and gender • 79

‘a fundamental human right’, a way of enhancing ‘the sustainability of the

settlement’ and a means for ‘managing inclusion’ (ACCORD 2003).
There has, however, been criticism that many participatory schemes are
superficial and less empowering than their advocates would suggest.
Cooke and Kothari (2002) point to the ‘tyranny of participation’, whereby
communities in developing world and post-conflict environments are
shoehorned into superficial participation mechanisms that suit the
requirements of donors (allowing them to tick a box attesting to ‘local
participation’), but do not necessarily involve local communities in
meaningful and sustainable ways. Similarly, Alternative Dispute
Resolution techniques have been criticised for their ‘coercive harmony’
whereby individuals and groups are encouraged to participate but find
themselves pressured to reach an accommodation even if it leaves
grievances unaddressed and unbalanced power structures in place (Nader
1997). Rather than being truly inclusive, the criticism made in many
development and post-conflict environments is that participation
mechanisms are just another part of a suite of essentially western
mechanisms that are top–down, and conceived and funded in the west.
According to this view, many participation mechanisms are actually part
of a process of disempowerment. Different cultural explanations of
‘participation’ may be in operation. Western notions of participation may
prioritise institutional and technocratic mechanisms that enable
participation. There is a danger of reducing participation to quantifiable,
one-off events such as elections or consultation exercises. In other
societies, participation may be interpreted in more people-centric and
relationship-orientated ways, in which participation is a process rather
than an event (Lederach 1995: 26). It is important, though, not to
romanticise non-western and indigenous means of popular involvement in
political or economic decision-making since many of these processes are
not above reinforcing social order and conservatism.
Certain phases of development and peacebuilding processes may be more
open to public participation than others. Necessarily, for example, the
security and ‘stabilisation’ phases in the aftermath of a violent conflict
might actively exclude people and concentrate power in the hands of
military forces and a limited number of ‘institution builders’.
‘Institutionalism before Liberalisation’ (Paris 2004) or the belief that
stability and functioning bureaucracy must be achieved before
democratisation has been accepted by most states and international
organisations in post-war reconstruction contexts. Yet, at some stage, all
development and peacebuilding processes require legitimacy. The ways in
80 • People: participation, civil society and gender

which political leaders (international and national) seek to build and

maintain legitimacy are crucial. In some societies, guerrilla movements
have transformed very quickly into political parties (the morphing of the
Kosovo Liberation Army into the Kosovo Democratic Party provides one
example). While the transition from protagonist to pragmatist is obviously
crucial in any post-civil-war transformation, there is a danger that some
political parties are too narrowly based and merely continue the civil war
by peaceful means (Gormley-Heenan 2001). The case of Robert
Mugabe’s Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe provides an example of a party reluctant
to leave behind its civil war roots. When under pressure it has repeatedly
used the language of liberation and evoked the independence struggle
against white rule: a good strategy for mobilising supporters but of little
help for Zimbabwe’s economic woes. Many post-civil-war societies have
struggled to find a political process that sustains public interest and
participation. High levels of voter turnout in initial post-civil war
elections may be replaced by more modest levels. In Guatemala and
El Salvador, for example, voter turnout is low and declining (as low as
30 per cent in Guatemala’s 1995 election). Lehoucq and Hall (2004) note
that poor social provision means that many potential voters do not see the
relevance of the electoral system to their lives.

Civil society

Civil society can be regarded as both an institution and as an actor and is

often regarded as a bulwark against arbitrary control by government. It is
defined by the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) in the following way:
Civil society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around
shared interests, purposes and values. In theory, its institutional forms
are distinct from those of the state, family and market, though in
practice, the boundaries between state, civil society, family and market
are often complex, blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly
embraces a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying
in their degree of formality, autonomy and power.
(Centre for Civil Society 2008)

Through the media, trade unions, businesses, professional associations,

voluntary and church groups, citizens can become organised, voice their
concerns, and engage in activities that may support or challenge a
government (Burnell and Calvert 2004). In the western political mind, a
free civil society is regarded as a key indicator of political freedom.
 People: participation, civil society and gender • 81

Plate 8 An anti-war protest in Boston: civil society often acts as a bulwark

against the state

American sociologist Robert Putnam (2000), whose classic study Bowling

Alone captured the decline of community in the United States, listed the
ways in which US citizens could become politically involved:
contacting local and national officials, working for political parties and
other political organizations, discussing politics with our neighbors,
attending public meetings, joining in election campaigns, wearing
buttons, signing petitions, speaking out on talk radio, and many more.
(Putnam 2000: 31)

To this we can add the internet, which has opened up a new forum
through which political views can be aired. For many of us, civil society
is non-contentious, has regular and structured access to the corridors of
power, and adds colour to the dull routine of politics.

In authoritarian, deeply divided or post-war societies, however, civil

society can play a more delicate role and may face significant difficulties
in organising and expressing itself. The Chinese regime, for example,
attempts to control civil society, believing that civic organisations should
merely be a reflection of state institutions. Thus it has engaged in
campaigns of ethnic and religious suppression against Tibetans and
82 • People: participation, civil society and gender

Uighurs, often branding religious groups as separatists or terrorists

(Human Rights Watch (HRW) 2005; Cumming 2008). In Pakistan, some
of the most vocal protests against General Musharraf’s 2007 imposition
of emergency military rule came from professional associations of
lawyers (Perlez and Rohde 2007). In Sri Lanka, a number of journalists
have ‘disappeared’ or were assassinated during 2006–8, prompting
speculation that government agents are intent on suppressing reporting on
a renewed military offensive (International Federation of Journalists
2007; Greenslade 2008) (see Box 3.2). The key point is that civil society
is often on the front line in development processes, the prevention of
conflict, and peacebuilding and reconciliation in the aftermath of conflict.
Civil society actors are often most prominent in ‘bearing witness’ or
publicising injustice. However, many actors in conflict and developing
contexts make it their business to sideline civil society actors. For
example, most peace negotiations include armed groups (state and
non-state) but tend to exclude civil society actors.
Recognising the utility of civil society, international organisations and
INGOs often regard it as a key transmission agent for development,

Box 3.2

Press freedom
By August 2008, the NGO Reporters Without Borders reported that 18 journalists
had been killed and 132 had been imprisoned so far that year. While all states and
organisations will attempt to influence the media so that they are reflected in a
flattering light, some states and organisations attempt to control or suppress the
media. From 2001 onwards, Cambodia has witnessed a property boom. With most
land records destroyed during the Khmer Rouge regime 1975–9, property
speculators have sought to buy up huge tracts of land for resource extraction and
development purposes (Leitsinger 2005). In many instances, this has involved the
forcible removal of peasant farmers. Journalists who have sought to expose the
land grabbing, and the proximity of senior politicians to the land grabbers, have
been harassed (Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) 2006). In July 2008, a
journalist who had exposed land grabbing was murdered by unknown assailants
(Human Rights Watch 2008). The threats to journalists mirrored a wider state
unease with civil society organisations that sought to draw attention to the
eviction of small farmers and the resulting social hardship. The police and other
officials were reported to have confiscated anti-land petitions (Chamroeun and
Shelton 2008).
Sources: Leitsinger (2005), SEAPA (2006), Chamroeun and Shelton (2008), HRW (2008)
 People: participation, civil society and gender • 83

conflict prevention and peacebuilding. As a result, immense energy and

resources are invested into creating or shoring up civil society. It is here
that problems can emerge. Western interveners may have a particular
concept of civil society in mind that may not always fit with the political,
social and cultural norms of the host society. Western actors may attempt
to create civil society in the image of their home civil society, oblivious to
the fact that a vibrant civil society exists in the post-war or developing
world context. A classic example of this comes in the form of the US
response to the looting that followed the 2003 Anglo-American invasion
of Iraq (Mac Ginty 2004). According to US military commanders, the
problem was that there was no civil society which could control the
civilian population and coordinate attempts to repatriate looted goods
with their original owners (BBC 2003). The view that Iraq was bereft of
civil society was widespread. According to Toby Dodge, ‘Before the
liberation of Baghdad it was impossible to talk about civil society in Iraq
. . . autonomous collective societal structures beyond the control of the
Ba’athist state did not survive’ (cited in Pirouz and Nautré 2005: 3–4).
Yet, notwithstanding the brutalities of the Saddam Hussein regime, there
was some sort of civil society in place: mosques, family groups,
professional associations, local Red Crescent societies and other
networks. Certainly these networks were very far removed from the plural
and voluntary forms of civil society found in western liberal democracies.
Yet, to assert that there is ‘no civil society’ may overlook various forms of
social capital that may not be immediately visible to western eyes.
In many post-war societies, western interveners have taken upon
themselves to create civil society, often in the image of western models
(Prusher 2003). Through ‘local capacity building’ schemes and the direct
funding of NGOs, international actors can create a civil society that is
recognisable to them, but may not necessarily have deep and effective
roots in the host society (Adamson 2002: 200). One may be forced to
ask: what is the essential purpose of this new civil society? Its key role is
often to provide a recognisable interface with which international
organisations and INGOs can engage. The connection between civil
society and the host society may be thin, limited to a particular strata of
the host country that has been artificially created by international actors.
The new civil society may be unsustainable because of its dependence on
western funding streams. A western created and inspired civil society, or
the ‘democracy sector’, is often highly visible in post-war societies. It is
often urban, metropolitan and English-speaking (Mac Ginty 2006: 52).
Indeed, in many cities, it often inhabits the same physical space as the
INGO sector that was responsible for spawning it, and fuels the same
84 • People: participation, civil society and gender

micro-economy of vehicle hire, western-style coffee shops and bars, and a

conference support sector. The key issues with civil society in any context
are the extent to which it can be inclusive, voluntary and act as a real
counterweight to state institutions. These issues are particularly acute in
deeply divided societies in which society may be structured in a way that
excludes or discriminates against particular groups. Elaborate structures
(for example, human rights commissions) or legal codes (that outlaw
discrimination) may be created in the wake of a civil war, but it does not
always follow that institutional engineering will bring with it changes in
societal behaviour and thought. Donald Horowitz (2005: ix) warns of the
‘adverse consequences’ of overly prescriptive constitutional designs.
It is worth stressing that the ‘creation’ of civil society by external agents
and consequent problems between the new civil society and the host
society are by no means restricted to post-conflict settings. The
phenomenon of the artificial civil society, especially the democracy-
promotion sector, is common in many non-conflict developing contexts.
Importantly, civil society need not be restricted to one polity or location.
Civil societies can be transnational, especially so in a globalised and
digitally connected age. Indeed, given that so many conflict and
development-related problems are transnational, it makes sense that civil
society mirrors this. Moreover, some locations are so unwelcoming to
dissenting civil society organisations, that the only meaningful opposition
can come from outside the state boundaries in the form of diaspora
organisations.

Gender

Discussion of gender issues in relation to conflict is made difficult by a

potential minefield of stereotyping in which women are characterised as
life-givers, nurturers and generally pacific, while men are depicted in the
warrior mode (Jacoby 2008: 92). Such stereotypes are best avoided. There
is also a tendency in some literature and practice to lump women together
as ‘victims’ or an undifferentiated category without agency. Having
opened with a caveat, we can then say that development, conflict and
peace impact on men and women in different ways, with the burdens and
benefits shared unevenly. But we cannot make blanket statements that
have universal applicability; clearly circumstances and context matter.
The principal gender distinction between men and women in times of
conflict is that men are often (but not always) the main combatants, while
 People: participation, civil society and gender • 85

women often perform (but not always) ancillary or support roles (Turshen
and Twagiramariya 1998; Rehn and Johnson Sirleaf 2002). But as has
been pointed out frequently in this book, contemporary civil wars and
contexts of political suppression are very far removed from the classical
notion of warfare with professional militaries and clear lines of
distinction between combatants and non-combatants. This blurring of the
demarcation between combatants and non-combatants has implications
for how war impacts on men and women. Often entire ethnonational
groups are targeted or mobilised, regardless of gender. Within these
groups men and women may be affected in different ways (women
more prone to sexual violence or men more prone to arrest and torture)
but the group may suffer the same overall experience.
Development processes and the ending of wars provide ‘transition
moments’ in which it is possible to make significant societal changes, for
example in relation to land reform, public access to power, or the
treatment of women. It is not always clear that these opportunities are
taken. Certainly in peace negotiations, issues of territory, security and
constitutional design are often prioritised before ‘secondary’ issues such
as gender, truth recovery or social inclusion. If, at best, peace processes
can be labelled as ‘gender blind’, then they bring with them the danger
that they reinforce the existing patriarchy. It may be the case that external
actors, such as foreign governments and INGOs, favour the inclusion of
gender reform in peace negotiations or the formulation of a new
constitution. Local actors may not agree: either they may not see the issue
as urgent or they may see it as undesirable as it confronts dominant
cultural norms. Or local civil society may advocate gender reforms that
mark a significant advance for the country in question but are not as
radical as some western actors would favour. This raises an interesting
series of questions: whose definition of gender equality is to be followed?
What are the main components of any gender equality programme? Will
the promotion of gender equality place women in danger? Such ‘clashes
of culture’, between western norms and indigenous practices, are
common in virtually every aspect of development and post-conflict
reconstruction. It is important to note that ‘western’ and ‘indigenous’ do
not comprise discrete categories: they vary enormously and all social
organisations and practices are – to some extent – hybrids. But the key
struggle between western and indigenous norms persists. It manifests
itself in western notions that there are ‘proper’ forms of social
organisation and governance and development programmes aimed at
promoting such ‘proper’ norms and practices. Conflict may arise as
different elements in developing and post-conflict societies may attempt
86 • People: participation, civil society and gender

to resist, accept or subvert external development interventions and the

cultural baggage associated with them.
It is one thing to outlaw gender discrimination, but it is another thing to
change the cultural norms and thought processes that support it. As
Antonia Potter (2008: 105) notes, ‘reality lags far behind rhetoric on
women’s involvement in peace processes’. Certainly an impressive legal
and normative framework has been erected internationally and in many
national contexts over the past few decades to protect the rights of women
and encourage their full participation in political life. The 1979
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against
Women, the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action and the
2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and
Security, all count as international landmark documents for the inclusion
of women. These, and other initiatives, are testament to the incredible
energy of women’s movements that often operate in unwelcoming
environments. Crouch (2004) calls women’s mobilisation ‘a great
democratic phenomenon’ that has included
extreme radicals; sober reformist policy-makers; cunning reactionaries
taking the movement’s messages and reinterpreting them; both elite
and popular cultural manifestations of many kinds; the gradual
suffusion into the conversation of ordinary people of elements of the
language of an initially esoteric movement.
(Crouch 2004: 62)

Yet, as Potter (2008) politely observes,

it might not be unreasonable to worry that the slow pace of change
implies that misogynist or bigoted views continue to hold a certain
amount of sway in the most progressive and liberal societies, even if
unconsciously . . . A review of the literature and case studies on
post-conflict situations, reveals . . . a depressing paucity of examples
of implementation.
(Potter 2008: 107)

It is sobering to think of the enormous gender differentials that exist

despite the enormous political, economic and social change experienced
by many societies since the 1950s and the massive development and
peace-support interventions since the end of the Cold War. Janet Hunt
(2004b) sums up the situation thus:
Women are said to be 70 per cent of the world’s poor; have only about
10 per cent of all parliamentary seats in most countries; and in
developing countries, on average, they earn only 73 per cent of male
 People: participation, civil society and gender • 87

earnings. There is not a single developing country in which women

and men enjoy equal rights under the law. In particular, women are
discriminated against in areas such as their right to land and property,
and their right to conduct business independently. The result is that
women are more vulnerable to poverty than men, especially as a result
of widowhood, separation or divorce, and the consequent loss of
access to productive assets.
(Hunt 2004b: 243)

Many development interventions have sought ways in which to include

women in economic growth. Thus women’s participation or inclusiveness
is a built-in part of many development projects or programmes (see Box
3.3 on micro-finance). The hope is that multiple small schemes will have
a cumulative impact, not only on the lives of women but also on the
societal and structural factors that dictate women’s position in society.

Box 3.3

Women’s empowerment through micro-finance

initiatives
Many micro-credit or micro-finance initiatives have had a deliberate gender
dimension. Indeed, in 2006 seven out of ten micro-finance clients were believed
to be women (Armendáriz and Broome 2008). Small loans have been targeted at
women in the hope that the resulting small businesses will first help alleviate
poverty for them and their families, and second act as a means of empowerment.
Women have been given loans to establish themselves as small-scale chicken
farmers or to come together as a cooperative to market their handicrafts (Bigsten
2003: 115). Mayoux (2002) notes how
Microfinance programmes have significant potential for contributing to
women’s economic, social and political empowerment. Access to savings
and credit can initiate or strengthen a series of interlinked and mutually
reinforcing ‘virtual spirals’ of empowerment. Women can use savings and
credit for economic activity, thus increasing incomes and assets and control
over income and assets.
(Mayoux 2002: 76)
There has been something of a bandwagon championing micro-credit. The UN
declared 2005 the ‘Year of Micro-credit’ and the Grameen Bank (a Bangladeshi
initiative that has subsequently spread to twenty-eight countries) was awarded a
Nobel Prize. There is no doubting that micro-credit schemes have economically
empowered some women, and there is evidence that there have been additional
one-off benefits in terms of social capital and public perceptions of women
88 • People: participation, civil society and gender

(Sanyal 2006). Critics, however, argue that not only are the economic benefits of
micro-credit schemes often overblown, but also the schemes may not be as
liberating as their advocates suggest. For example, it is suggested that if economic
empowerment is not linked to other empowerment (for example, greater legal
powers for women such as the right to buy and sell land in certain countries) then
stand-alone micro-credit schemes will have limited impact (SIDA (Swedish
International Development Cooperation Agency) 2006). Others have noted that
indebtedness loads women with an additional burden and may bring them into
conflict with men in the home. Just as importantly, without structural change to
the organisation of the economy (almost impossible given the power of
international economic forces), any changes linked with micro-credit schemes or
pro-poor growth strategies are likely to be sporadic and dependent on local
circumstances.
Sources: Mayoux (2002), Bigsten (2003), Sanyal (2006), SIDA (2006), Armendáriz and
Broome (2008)

Concluding discussion

Many war-torn or deeply divided societies are marked by very strong

social capital, but this tends to be ‘bonding’ rather than ‘bridging’ social
capital. Bonding social capital, as the term suggests, denotes group
cohesion and refers to strong social ties and shared beliefs among a single
group, such as Tamils in Sri Lanka. Bridging social capital refers to social
ties and shared beliefs that encompass multiple groups, for example
Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims in Sri Lanka. Lebanon provides a good
example of a society in which bonding social capital predominates. It has
many social organisations and has a strong history of volunteerism.
Divisions in Lebanese society however, mean that many social and civil
society organisations are located in and operate for one community. Thus
different groups have their own media outlets, charitable organisations
and social spaces. In themselves, these single-identity organisations and
venues often provide very useful social functions. But taken in the context
of a deeply divided society, they can be regarded as helping to perpetuate
division, stereotypes and insecurity (Morrow 2006: 3–8). Civil society in
Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland and other deeply divided societies
can be exclusive rather than inclusive, and decidedly uncivil. The task of
transforming bonding social capital (which can be intuitive, comfortable,
inexpensive and good fun) into bridging social capital (which can be
awkward, artificial and expensive) can be incredibly difficult. Hectoring
from civil society ‘do-gooders’ and expatriate ‘blow ins’ is unlikely to
work. The most effective means of ‘civilising’ deeply divided societies
 People: participation, civil society and gender • 89

tend to be indirect. Rather than peace projects that consciously attempt to

‘correct’ a dysfunctional society or ‘teach’ its members to alter their
behaviour, the most meaningful changes in attitudes and behaviour often
occur as a by-product of other activities. Thus, for example, if citizens
from different traditions can mix in pursuit of a common goal (for
example, through employment or accessing public goods) then barriers
can break down. Most importantly, such intergroup links are likely to be
sustainable and not dependent on the continuation of time-limited project
funding. It is not always clear that an internationally created civil society
is the best vehicle for this ‘civilising’ mission. Economic development
seems to be a far better vehicle, but as other chapters in this book
demonstrate, such development needs to be empowering rather than
limiting, inclusive rather than exclusive, and contributory to the local
economy rather than purely extractive.
A fundamental issue running through this book is culture and the
potential of western norms and practices connected to conflict,
peacebuilding and development to clash with local, indigenous or
traditional norms and practices. We should, of course, be careful not to
build a strict dichotomy in which everything from ‘the west’ (by no
means a discrete category) can be described as top–down, legalistic and
rational, and everything found in situ in developing and post-conflict
environments as bottom–up, organic and traditional. There is a very real
danger of romanticising the local and the traditional. At heart is the
question of the appropriateness of western intervention and the
appropriateness of the type of intervention. A case by case approach is
best. In some cases, western states and actors are the only ones with the
capability to effect change. In other cases, the actions of western states or
actors undermine the capability of local states and actors. Many
development and peacebuilding contexts are the scene of a cultural
conflict between what might be described as variations of western
liberalism, and local belief systems and practices of social and political
organisation. These conflicts revolve around the extent to which
liberalism is adopted, enforced or resisted.
It is worth ending a chapter on participation by restating the agency of
local populations. It is tempting to depict local communities as passive
actors who receive or consume conflict, peace and development that is
made elsewhere. Certainly the international and transnational nature of
conflict and development means that there are few hermetically sealed
contexts on the planet. All societies are penetrated by external forces
to some degree or another, and the sheer scale of development and
90 • People: participation, civil society and gender

peace-support interventions is awesome in some contexts. But we should

not overlook the local. Keesing (1992: 2) stresses the importance of
seeing ‘peripheral populations as active agents in shaping and controlling
their engagement with the outside world, giving local meaning to alien
ideas, institutions and things, in various ways resisting them.’ Local
communities have indeed power to absorb, renegotiate, subvert and resist
external pressure. Clearly, this power will differ from context to context,
but one of the most remarkable aspects of globalisation and liberal peace
interventions is the extent of local variation. If nothing else, this local
variation is a sign of participation in development, conflict and pacific
processes.

Summary

● Different types of conflict, peacebuilding and development have different ways

of excluding and including people.
● Peacebuilders and those engaged in development processes often struggle to
establish wide levels of popular participation in their projects.
● Civil society is often regarded as an important bulwark against the
unrestrained actions of governments or corporations, but there is a danger
that western notions of civil society are regarded as best.
● Development and peacebuilding processes consistently sideline women.
● There is a serious clash between western notions of gender rights and notions
of gender rights in non-western contexts.
● At the centre of many conflicts and tensions between western and non-
western actors is culture: an issue that western observers often overlook.

Discussion questions

1 How should development projects attempt to gain popular legitimacy

and acceptance in the context of a developing country?
2 What avenues of political participation are available to you in your
own country?
3 Must civil society be open to all groups, especially in a deeply divided
society?
4 Should women in Afghanistan enjoy the same rights as women in
America?
 People: participation, civil society and gender • 91

Further reading

Issues of culture (and how we interpret other cultures) are very important to
inclusion and exclusion in development and conflict. Good starting points are
Chabal, P. and Daloz, J.P. (2006) Culture Troubles: Politics and the
interpretation of meaning, London: Hurst, and three modern classics: Huntington,
S. (1993) The clash of civilizations?, Foreign Affairs 72(3); Kaplan, R.D. (1994)
The coming anarchy, Atlantic Monthly, February; and Said, E. (1979)
Orientalism, London: Vintage. Anthropology, journalism and personal testimony
often give the best perspectives on the impact of conflict on women. See, for
example, Drakulic, S. (1994) Balkan Express: Fragments from the other side of
war, London: Perennial. See also Enloe, C. (2000) Maneuvers: The international
politics of militarizing women’s lives, Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.

Useful websites

Many international organisations and international non-governmental

organisations have information on their websites labelled ‘participation’ or ‘local
partners’ though it is useful to consider where the power lies in relationships
between local and international actors. See, for example, the Asian Development
Bank (www.adb.org/Topics/) or ECHO – the European Commission’s
Humanitarian Aid Office (ec.europa.eu/echo/index_en.htm). The United Nations
Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) website (www.unifem.org) contains
very useful information on gender, development and conflict. Other development
related organisations, such as the World Bank (www.worldbank.org) or USAID
(www.usaid.gov) contain material on the gender dimension of their programmes.
You may have to use the search function on these organisation’s websites. See
also the gender-related information maintained by Human Rights Watch
(www.hrw.org/women/conflict.html), the Hunt Alternatives Fund (www.
huntalternatives.org), International Alert (www.international-alert.org) and
Amnesty International (www.amnesty.org).
 4 Conflict resolution,
transformation,
reconciliation and
development

Introduction

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are essentially about attempts to effect ‘transitions’

from conflict and war to a kind of ‘peace’. To put it in the words of the
OECD’s (2007) Handbook on ‘Security Sector Reform’:
Recent debate within the international community has centred on the
challenge of insecurity and conflict as a barrier to political, economic
and social development. If states are to create the conditions in which
they can escape from a downward spiral where insecurity,
criminalisation and under-development are mutually reinforcing,
socio-economic and security dimensions must be tackled
simultaneously. The traditional concept of security is being redefined
to include not only state stability and the security of nations, but also a
clear focus on the safety and well-being of their people.
(OECD 2007: Foreword)

The language of the ‘failed state’ has now become universal and could
be said to apply to many of the cases that now obsess developed world
governments and intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) alike. By
this is often meant what Ghani and Lockhart (2008) refer to as the
‘sovereignty gap’: as they define it, the gap ‘which exists between the
de jure sovereignty that the international community affords such states
and their de facto capabilities to serve their populations and act as
responsible members of the international community’ (Ghani and
Lockhart 2008: 3–4).
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 93

This chapter on the challenges of conflict resolution and reconciliation,

Chapter 5 on ‘reconstruction’, and Chapter 6 on the role of humanitarian
aid in violent conflicts, harbour a common concern, to examine whether
the existing mechanisms used by theorists and practitioners of conflict
alleviation are of any real utility to solve the problems caused by conflict
and the associated development dilemmas. They also ask whether those
who plan and study development in general understand the needs of, and
constraints on, those who try to manage, settle, resolve or transform
conflicts on one hand (the ‘institutions’ that we have identified), and the
people who are the supposed beneficiaries on the other. Or are those who
are supposed to be helped by these obviously linked concerns slipping
through the gaps between them? Do the military, bureaucratic and other
mechanisms of the international community fail to come to grips with the
complexities of how to bring about peace through development, to agree
on the appropriate mechanisms, and to better attune these mechanisms to
local necessities? However, we are fully aware that, as Tony Addison has
put it: ‘[i]f lack of analysis were a real barrier to ending war, we would be
much further forward in achieving real peace in poor societies’ (Addison
2005: 409). We all need to approach such difficult questions with due
humility.
These three chapters collectively will therefore, first, look at the main
strategies employed by the international community or individual powers
or groups to try and do something about the conflicts and wars of which
we have so far described the genesis. This can be by way of gentle or
more muscled intervention, often referred to generically as
‘peacebuilding’, which we will discuss at some length on pages 96–8.
Second, they will ask how successful such strategies have or have not
been. Third, they will ask why such strategies have failed or succeeded
and how we might try other tactics, up to any including the possibility of
total non-intervention.
In all these considerations we have to take into account that the
overarching categories we use are shorthand for much more complex and
integrated issue areas. Reconstruction, the delivery of aid, or other
peacebuilding attempts cannot be separated from attempts at conflict
resolution or ‘reconciliation’ after wars. They may take place sequentially,
or simultaneously, while the violence continues at varying levels of
intensity (see the debate on ‘contingency’ in Fisher and Keashley 1990).
Equally, each of these concepts is a matrioshka doll of other concepts –
disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) of former
combatants being one important embedded ‘doll’ that will be explored in
Chapter 5.
94 • Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development

This chapter will, first, look at the concepts that can be used for
understanding the practices of conflict resolution (or as we prefer,
‘transformation’), as most famously epitomised by attempts to bring
about peace in the Middle East. That section will encompass a discussion
of the differences between bottom–up and top–down approaches to
conflict settlement, management and resolution or transformation as they
are discussed in the mainstream literature. It will, second, look at other
techniques and ideas that have been developed to try and heal
communities after wars, and in particular techniques of ‘reconciliation’
and ‘retributive justice’ through truth and reconciliation commissions and
war crimes tribunals. The overarching philosophical questions that
underlie this inquiry and that we will engage with will be: how can we
arrive at a shared understanding of the past, and of ‘truth’, and how can
we envisage the ‘reintegration’ of a society damaged by war, or as Rigby
(2001: 12) puts it, the ‘envisioning of a common future together’?

Dealing with conflict: from ‘settlement’ to ‘sustainability’

In the 1990s there were approximately five intrastate conflicts for every
one international war, and the overwhelming evidence is that these ‘civil’
conflicts have had a habit of becoming regional problems, as we can see
in the contagion effect in many parts of the world (Long and Brecke
2003: 5). This is evident in West Africa, where Liberia, Sierra Leone and
arguably Côte d’Ivoire have been sucked into a regional conflict; Central
and East Africa, where Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of
Congo, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Kenya – among others – have become
part of an arc of conflict; the Horn of Africa, with Eritrea, Ethiopia,
Somalia, Sudan and Chad forming varying geometries of interstate and
intrastate conflict since the end of the Cold War; and in many other parts
of the world, as with the archipelago of Indonesia, where East Timor is an
integral part of a network of conflicts.
The above, very selective, list of civil conflicts that have erupted since
about 1990 gives a clue as to why war has become both much less
devastating on one level while simultaneously being seen as more vicious.
Arguably, contemporary wars are not nearly as terrible as the Indonesian
civil war of 1965, the Biafran war of 1967–70, Cambodia in 1975–9, not
to mention the appalling displacements and death tolls of the two world
wars and the Chinese, Russian or Spanish revolutions (Kalyvas 2001:
110). The Dutch think-tank PIOOM (Interdisciplinary Research
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 95

Programme on Root Causes of Human Rights Violations) reported that

the 1990s had one of the lowest number of battle deaths of the twentieth
century (‘World Conflict and Human Rights Map’ by PIOOM,
atf_world_conf_map.pdf). One explanation of this seeming contradiction
is that the fighting in previous decades was between industrial powers
fighting traditional wars, a ‘settlement’ of conflict through war, though
even here the evidence is of civil wars always having been more
numerous than interstate wars (Mack 2006: 6–8). The answer maybe lies
in changed perceptions of war itself.
During the last twenty years or so of the Cold War, the Powers (and
especially the United States and the Soviet Union) slowly realised that the
use of force had its limits as a way of creating peaceful outcomes to
conflict. In the early post-Cold War era, with the exception of the
intervention in Iraq in 1990–1, the levers of ‘hard’ power were less
willingly used by democratically cautious western states that saw no
evident national interest at play for them in many ‘obscure’ conflicts.
Powers now aimed to try and bring about internally ‘sustainable’ ends to
wars, ones that did not need continual revisiting. It became more
fashionable, and responded well to a post-Cold War desire for a ‘peace
dividend’, to discuss the use of ‘soft’ power (Nye 2005), and in particular
a rise in the idea that conflicts could be talked down in workshops and off
the battlefield. Joseph Nye (2005) defined this as follows:
[Soft power] is the ability to get what you want through attraction
rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a
country’s culture, political ideals, and policies. When our policies are
seen as legitimate in the eyes of others, our soft power is enhanced.
(Nye 2005: Preface)

The peaceful transitions in South Africa, Mozambique, most of Latin

America, even Israel/Palestine (with the Oslo accords of 1993) and, most
of all, in Eastern Europe, led to a swathe of books touting the benefits of
‘Track One’ and ‘Track Two’ problem-solving, mediation and the like
(see pp. 99–105 for more discussion on these distinctions). There was, in
the words of Samuel Huntington (1993b), a ‘third wave of
democratization’ that seemed to bring a tantalising possibility that war
was now ‘obsolete’. Huntington soon reversed his own optimism by
declaring the Clash of Civilizations (Huntington 1996).
A real change began to happen at the end of the 1990s as a result of the
terrible events in Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in 1994–5. In the late
1990s, and even more so after that, there was a resurgence in the use of
96 • Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development

hard power in ‘pre-emptive’ mode in Afghanistan and Iraq and a refusal

to negotiate with ‘insurgents’ in the ‘war on terror’. Some writers believe
that the UN and some major western states have now embarked on a
policy of ‘international pacification’ and ‘pre-emptive regime change’
(Duffield 2007 is one such example) which leaves no room for the kinder
and less muscular forms of conflict resolution.
It might be more accurate to say that a belief in the use of hard power, as
opposed to softer versions, as a way of bringing about an end to conflicts
in developing (and more ‘developed’) countries fluctuates in effect in line
with optimism or pessimism about the prospects for different tools to end
conflicts and the self-confidence of the underlying belief in prospects for
a ‘liberal peace’. So much ink has been spilled trying to show the
differences between conflict ‘settlement’, ‘management’ and ‘resolution’,
often referred to as the ‘three generations’ trying to bring about peace.
However, it must be understood that different approaches are often tried
simultaneously or in sequence depending on the conflict being dealt with.
So any attempt to be prescriptive about the use of such approaches has to
be cautious and hedged around with caveats. History has an unfortunate
habit of proving wrong any linear explanation of ‘what is happening’.
So why attempt to define such terms? The reason is because they are so
described in much of the literature on conflict and because they tend to
coincide with particular approaches to international politics more
generally. But first we need to put these concepts within the broader
emerging paradigm of ‘peacebuilding’.

The practice of peacebuilding and conflict transformation

As Jeong has pointed out, ‘[t]he practice of peacebuilding originally

evolved out of an institutional adjustment to peacekeeping and
humanitarian intervention responding to internal conflict situations’. It
‘involves a wide range of sequential activities, proceeding from cease-fire
and refugee resettlement to the establishment of a new government and
economic reconstruction’ (Jeong 2005: 1). But it has to be said that such
neat definitions often hide real epistemological and practical problems.
Sarah Nayani aptly quotes Knight, who suggests that peacebuilding is
more ‘described than defined’ (Knight 2003, cited in Nayani 2006: 32).
The very term often comes with or without hyphens and it still does not
appear in the Oxford English Dictionary. Johan Galtung (1996) describes
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 97

his version of ‘peacebuilding’ as ‘building structural and cultural peace’

possibly as vague as his core idea of ‘structural violence’; John Paul
Lederach (1997) writes of it encompassing the ‘full array of processes,
approaches and stages needed to transform conflict toward more
sustainable, peaceful relationships’ (Galtung 1996; Lederach 1997, both
cited in Nayani 2006: 32–3).
Consequently we might say that it has changed in line with historical
context, not only in the ‘target’ areas where conflict is a problem, but also
in the institutional reaction to these areas, for the United Nations itself is
also subject to a certain amount of definitional imprecision when trying to
explain what peacebuilding aims to do. But what is common to all
peacebuilding approaches is a realisation that violent conflict (not conflict
per se) ‘is inflicting immense damage on the societies and economies of
the developing world’. Collier and Hoeffler (2004) have been quoted as
estimating that a ‘typical’ developing country civil war inflicts at least
US$64.2 billion of economic and social damage (Collier and Hoeffler
2004, quoted in Addison 2005: 406).
Hence, where they are appropriate and there is some sort of peace to
keep, in post-Soviet Russia, Former Yugoslavia and many other parts
of the previously communist world, economic and political levers have
been consciously used by the United Nations and the west to encourage
peace-observing behaviours. This is often a key part of what is generally
referred to as ‘conflict prevention’. The United Nations (UN 1992, 1995,
2000), the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (1997)
and many other bodies have tried to develop strategies that would identify
signs of impending conflict before conflict broke out; to prevent their
spread; to resolve the underlying causes and to heal the wounds they
cause.
Consequently, no matter which political or economic standpoint one
takes, there is a consensus they have to be looked at in tandem (Addison
2005). This ‘peacebuilding consensus’ has been fed by ‘humanitarianism’
and accelerated by the process of globalisation itself. ‘Public and
political pressure and awareness’ has become tied up with a generalised
desire to ‘[re]construct a liberal peace’ around the planet that all can
benefit from. The danger is that governments and IGOs often attempt to
find a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model to implement these laudable intentions,
often with disastrous results (Richmond 2007: 74).
The core aim of all of the theoretical and policy tendencies embedded
in these terminological turns is the pursuit of a ‘sustainable’ or even a
98 • Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development

‘stable’ peace. This was classically defined by Karl Deutsch as being

when there is the ‘real assurance that the members of [a] community
will not fight each other physically, but will settle their disputes in some
other way’, which he defined as a ‘security community’ (Deutsch 1957,
quoted in Kacowicz et al. 2000: xi). More recently, it has been defined as
where ‘[political] leaders craft political institutions that will sustain the
peace and foster democracy in ethnically divided societies after conflicts
such as civil wars’ (Roeder and Rothchild 2005: 3). Of course this is a
tall order, but in terms of what humans crave as a ‘normal’ state of
affairs not one that would strike most people in the ‘North’ or ‘West’
as over-demanding. The problem is that what is ‘undemanding’ for us
in the global North would be an extreme luxury for most people in
developing countries. At its heart such a definition also begs a number
of sub-questions: what is the necessary link between ‘democracy’ and
the ‘solutions to ethnically divided societies’, and who says what a
‘civil war’ is?
This illustrates the vital point that underlying much of the debate about
conflict resolution and reconstruction, as with many of the other debates
described in this book, is the concept of the ‘liberal peace’. In Chapter 2
we talked about how traditions of ‘liberal internationalism’ have ceased to
be one among a palette of potential ideological and policy platforms for
dealing with the causes, results and aftermath of conflict. These traditions
have become transformed into a much more dogmatic belief that the
encouragement or imposition of liberal democracy and capitalism will
somehow solve all the problems associated with conflict and civil wars in
developing countries. As many development specialists are now keen to
point out, this ‘West is Best’ presumes a ‘hierarchy of cultures’ and all the
dangers of determinism inherent in such thinking (Chabal and Daloz
1999, 2006: vii).
One of the purposes of this chapter, as with the previous and subsequent
ones is therefore to ask if such a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach can live up to
its billing as a universal solution to the problems of post-conflict
situations in developing countries. Another is to revisit the central
premise of this book, that people have tended to be ignored in discussions
about conflict and development. The ways in which they are excluded
from the discourse of the search for the ‘liberal peace’ and the reality of
its imposition by intergovernmental institutions and western and
developing country governments alike seems to us to be a main driver in
making sure that ‘resolution’ efforts often, even usually, fail.
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 99

Conflict ‘settlement’, ‘management’ and ‘resolution’

There has been a long-standing tradition in international relations and

conflict analysis of saying that different practical approaches to dealing
with conflict can be seen as existing in parallel with certain ‘paradigms’
of international relations theory. This was particularly striking in the
1980s and early 1990s in the so-called ‘inter-paradigm’ debate in
international relations. This is not the place to enter into that debate, or
the ways in which it has been superseded by a much more subtle
conversation about ‘critical’, even ‘postmodern’ theorising about the
nature of international activity. These thinkers have in particular attacked
the ethos of thinking that ‘we’ can intervene to resolve ‘their’ conflicts, a
way of thinking that has accelerated with the recent actions in
Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East more generally. We will touch on
these issues below. They are nonetheless key ideas, for as Jeong (2008)
points out, all of these techniques and theories aim for a ‘just outcome that
is not only fair to participants but also meets the broader ethical concerns
of a given society, and those of humanity’ (Jeong 2008: 243). That is a
tall order and unsurprisingly there are many who scoff at its impracticality.
However, the terms that were developed then are still used currently and
widely so we need to understand how they might apply to particular ways
of dealing with conflict by theorists and practitioners alike. It might also be
mentioned that this is not a linear debate. Conflict analysis has its fashions
and obsessions like every other field of human endeavour, and certain
theorists and practitioners use the terms we will now explore in ways that
defy exact categorisation. There is no clearly and widely accepted one
approach that all in this field agree on, just an ongoing, indeed circular
debate (Ramsbotham et al. 2005 give a good overview of this).
We can break this debate down in many ways, but we think it most useful
to look at it first in the simple terms of top–down or bottom–up and then
at how this might translate into more precise terminology.

Top–down or bottom–up?

By top–down is meant all of those strategies that have been deployed by

third party representatives of a state or IGO. This is often referred to as
‘Track One’ diplomacy. These kinds of action are in most cases
undertaken before the conflict or war has come to the stage of a ceasefire.
Sometimes this can be supplemented by ‘Track Two’ action, which is
100 • Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development

usually conducted by unofficial players, such as NGOs or officials acting

in an unofficial capacity and behind the scenes, or even academics acting
entirely on their own without any form of support.
Track One has been given huge prominence by the activities of US
presidents and their advisers (like Henry Kissinger) in the Arab–Israeli
context since the 1970s starting with the Camp David discussions of 1977
(Touval 1982). The main advantages of Track One are the legitimacy such
discussions provide; the resources that can be marshalled in support of
any agreement (military and economic aid for example, as has been the
case of Israel and Egypt since the late 1970s), and the guarantee of media
interest in, and usually support for, such efforts. The disadvantages are
that the Powers will use such occasions for their own interests and will
cajole, bully or otherwise intimidate the parties and not in any way
transform their basic unhappy relationship.
By bottom–up is meant the introduction of a methodology for the local
participants and victims of war or conflict to resolve their own problems
using their own methodologies and systems. In many cases, but not all,
these have indeed been elaborated locally with minimal outside help.
Such actions usually occur after the fighting has ended, though hostilities
may still simmer and flare up.

Conflict settlement

‘Settlement’ is usually seen within a power-based realist paradigm where

force is the arbiter. This can include ‘mediation with muscle’ as in the
context of the United States using its power to broker agreements over the
Middle East (as with Kissinger’s mediation at Camp David, 1977: cf.
Touval 1982).

Aim

Conflict settlement’s aim is Order, and often it does not shrink from a
‘realist’ use of military force, sometimes on a huge scale, as in the First
and Second World Wars or from zero-sum outcomes. Realists take the
view that all peace is a lull between wars and that trust between states and
nations is a plausible but unlikely scenario (Mearsheimer 2001; Waltz
2001). They also deny that there is any such thing as an ‘international
society’ with clear rules and processes, but if such a thing exists it is due
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 101

to a temporary balance of power and the dominance of a hegemon for a

given historical period. Indeed, it has been pointed out that: ‘War appears
to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention’ (Sir Henry
Maine, quoted by Howard 2000: 1).

Problems

Conflict settlement often does not work in the sense that only the
maintenance of force keeps the ‘lid’ on the problem, but does not address
the underlying problems. Indeed it cannot work, as states are always
getting ready for the next war. We might also say that hard power is
difficult to use when the areas where it has to be applied are those in a
state of civil war (‘realism’ assumes a functioning state system on the
whole) and has a regional nature. As the United States has discovered in
Afghanistan (2001 to the present) and Iraq (2003 to the present), the most
formidable military machine can get very bogged down in an area
wracked by an insurgency with no identifiable ‘head’. As Iraq also shows,
the idea of ‘ending’ a war by force can often create a bitter illusion. Wars

Plate 9 A Tamil Tiger cemetery in Sri Lanka: third parties have struggled to gain
the trust of both sides in mediation efforts
102 • Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development

that are finally ‘ended’ by force alone are in a distinct minority and
arguably always have been (Coker 1997). Even the hardest of realists
understands that, as Clausewitz commented, in war all is friktion, which
might be translated as ‘it’s easy to get into, but unpredictable in the
extreme once engaged upon’ (see, for example, Gray 2005). The ethical
issues for such thinkers and practitioners are clear, and they are largely
ignored.

Conflict management

A slightly less, but still essentially realist, view is taken by conflict

‘managers’ who believe that it is usually impossible to do anything but try
to grease the wheels of a conflict to make it less violent through the
judicious use of a combination of hard power, soft power (usually
economic sticks and carrots) and peacekeeping forces. Roland Paris
(2004) argues that such ‘management’ approaches can encompass
‘liberalization’, which he explicitly equates with ‘democratization’, a dual
concept which we have linked to the ‘liberal peace’ theory and will be
explored further in Chapter 5 (Paris 2004: 5). The ethical problem with
this is of course that the ‘targets’ may not want to be so dealt with.
A feature of such approaches is also the use of ‘Track One’ mediators,
usually in the form of ‘good offices’ or ‘mediation’ between leaders of
insurgent groups, the established ‘state’ and any other regional players, a
time-honoured use of a third party to help oil the wheels of a negotiation
between states. Good recent examples in the 2000s include mediation by
African heads of state in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in
Liberia. In the post-Cold War period mediation has come to also mean ‘an
extension and continuation of peaceful conflict management’ (for a robust
defence of this, see Bercovitch 1997: 127 and passim; see also Bercovitch
2002; Bercovitch and Rubin 1992).

Aim

The aim is the minimisation, but not necessarily elimination of, violence;
stability insofar as it can be achieved; and ‘realist’ expectations of the
difficulty of getting people to agree on underlying causes, symptoms and
solutions to their problems. The recent resurgence in the study of conflict
management in the United States has much to do with the feeling that the
optimism of the 1990s was misplaced and ‘recognizes that the global
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 103

environs are both conflict-ridden and often bloody, and it harbors no

illusions that murderous enmity will suddenly give way to universal
comity’ (Solomon 2007: xi).

Problem

Is conflict management too centred on domestic US obsessions (the

‘War on Terror’ etc.), so we might question as to whether it therefore
sings to a tune not appreciated by others? It does nonetheless ask some
very important questions about whether democracy is the ‘answer’ or
stability the main aim and also proposes interesting ideas about new
forms of sovereignty and other ways of organising societies to make them
less war prone (Marten 2007; Ottaway 2007).

Conflict resolution

Often delivered by Track Two intermediaries, conflict ‘resolution’ is

usually held to mean an attempt to fully (or mainly) resolve the
underlying root causes of a conflict by, it is hoped, resolving (or indeed
transforming) the relationship of the parties so that they develop an
entirely new and peaceful relationship. Institutionally, one of the best
examples was the Oslo Process of the early 1990s, which seemed at the
time to be capable of addressing the underlying problems in the
Israel–Palestine conflict (Corbin 1994), but is in 2008 seen as a false
dawn (for case study, see p. 112).

Aim

Fully airing differences, usually in a closed and confidential environment,

with no pre-conceived agenda and a belief that problems and parties to
conflict can be ‘transformed’ so that a future relationship will be better,
less conflictual and ultimately stable (for a wider summary see Miall et al.
1999: 58). Ideally it will also ‘highlight the wider social and political
sources of a conflict in seeking to break the perpetuating cycle of
oppression and resistance’ (Jeong 2008: 244). One of the best summaries
of the characteristics and methodologies used can be found on the
Berghof Foundation’s website, a resource handbook that is constantly
being added to and updated (Fischer and Schmelzle n.d., www.berghof-
handbook.net/). It is worth quoting their definition at some length:
104 • Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development

First, war as an instrument of politics and conflict management can

and should be overcome. Second, violence can and should be avoided
in structures and relationships at all levels of human interaction. Third,
all constructive conflict work must address the root causes that fuel
conflict. And fourth, all constructive conflict work must empower
those who experience conflict to address its causes without recourse to
violence. In short, conflict transformation must provide those who
experience violence with appropriate and innovative methods and
approaches, and assistance by a third party if necessary. Ultimately,
this is about changing individual attitudes and addressing the issue of
structural reforms.

Problems

An often naive belief in human perfectibility; a belief that ‘basic human

needs’ can be identified and rectified (Mitchell 1981; Banks 1984; Burton
1990). One of the problems with analysing this approach has been the
secrecy that is inherent in these processes, that has led to few of the case
studies being written up for public consumption. This is now being
somewhat addressed by, for example, examining ‘transfer effects’ that
look at how Track Two experiences can be of use in Track One
discussions and vice versa (Fisher 1997, 2005). Another more intractable
problem is that it is seen by some as having been demonstrated to be just
another, if more subtle, use of power by the West to coerce the ‘Rest’.
Maybe, it has been suggested, the insurmountable barrier to successful
conflict resolution lies in the impossibility of understanding another
culture, which is an ‘ontological’ barrier to any real possibility of
transformation, a difficult charge to refute as conflict resolution teams
rarely even understand the language of those they are dealing with, in
developing countries in particular (Vayrynen 2001; Avruch 2003; Jabri
2007). Another criticism that could be directed against such ‘naivety’ is
that in some cases it could be argued that success in transformation is
possible only because some form of ‘settlement’ was already going on.
The successful transition in Ethiopia and Eritrea in 1993 (states that
subsequently resumed their conflict, 1998 to the present) was maybe
because the military victory of the Eritrean and Northern Ethiopian
insurgencies had brought about a radically new situation.
All of these categories of third party intervention have as a central aim the
improvement of communication, whether it be to signal war or threat, or
to enhance understanding of the parties’ views, needs and wishes. Much
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 105

of the theory and practice in third party intervention has been influenced
by what could be described as the western, legal, rational perspective. It
has also been influenced by theories of bargaining and rational choice –
some of which have limited application in the real world. And, as several
analysts (Fisher and Keashley 1990; Webb et al. 1996) have stressed,
multiple conflict transformation approaches can be pursued together, or
one at a time, or in different orders, depending on the conflict in question.
What we tend to see is a hybridity in peacemaking whereby a variety of
initiatives – both internationally and locally inspired – are simultaneously
deployed.
Hence we, and many others, believe that the more overarching category of
‘peacebuilding’ is ultimately a more useful description of the process for
creating a lasting peace, above settlement, management or resolution.
Conflict settlement and management can be likened to holding a lid on a
boiling pot, not attempting to turn the heat down, and conflict resolution
has its own problems, as itemised above. So ‘peacebuilding’ is often
referred to as a ‘third generation’ approach to dealing with conflict
(Richmond 2006) as we grope towards a successor to both conflict
‘settlement’ and conflict ‘management’, again because the underlying
attitudes, causes and structures of the conflict need to be properly
addressed.
Hence, it is on the ideal end goal of conflict resolution that we will
concentrate, that of ‘transformation’, as we believe that should be the
central aim of all approaches to conflict, even if not to the exclusion of
the others, which are still the most widely used. Hence it is our preferred
term, but we are aware that no term can be satisfactory, given the extreme
complexity of many conflicts in developing countries and the limited
resources available for dealing with them (see Chapter 1 for more
discussion of these distinctions).

The issues faced: the need for ‘mapping’ and

‘deconstructing’ conflicts

Without wishing to totally revisit the debate on ‘new wars’ that has been
described in some detail elsewhere in this book, we nonetheless need to
ask if the kinds of conflicts that can be potentially ‘transformed’ are
amenable to the kinds of theory and practical tools that we have at our
disposal. It is now, for example, widely believed that we are dealing with
conflicts that are not between unitary societies (usually states), as was
106 • Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development

believed to be largely the case between 1939 and about 1990, but now
within ethnically or ideologically divided societies. A number of theorists
have put this down to the resurgence of ethnic violence (Gurr and Harff
1994; Gurr 2000; Kaufman 2001). Certainly, compared to the period
before 1990, one of the areas most identified as being truly ‘new’ in the
post-Cold War conflict mix is the huge rise in what is termed ‘ethnic
violence’. Ted Gurr was one of the first to recognise this phenomenon in
the context of conflict studies but of course there was a huge discussion of
nationalism and self-determination well before this (for an excellent
introduction to this and the links to the ethnicity question, see Oberschall
2007: Chapter 1).
We might nonetheless question this now practically embedded wisdom
about the differences between pre-1990 and post-1990 conflicts (Kaldor
2005, 2006). First, as we have already argued, there were many civil wars
before 1990 (Kalyvas 2001; Berdal 2003). And, very unfortunately,
ethnicity has often been assumed since 1990 to be a key component of a
conflict situation both for the participants and for outside supposed
‘conflict resolvers’. This ‘framing’ can have disastrous effects, when it
arguably is not the determinant factor by any means. Kaufman (2001)
wrongly sees ethnicity as the root of most recent conflict in Eastern
Europe for example. A classic example of this was in Bosnia (Campbell
1998a, 1998b), but such misjudged preconceptions have been widely and
unfortunately repeated. It is far more likely that economic or ideological
factors underpin much ‘ethnic’ conflict (Nordstrom 2004; Pugh and
Cooper 2004).
So, although the analysis of all conflict as ‘ethnic’ is a neat and workable
short-hand in many conflicts, it is not sufficient. As Oberschall (2007)
puts it ‘[t]hese theories lack specificity and context’. His preference is for
what he terms ‘conflict and conciliation dynamics’, which essentially
seeks to ‘map’ the conflict by looking at issues, players and their
strategies, and implementation (Oberschall 2007: 29). This idea of
mapping a conflict has also been used quite widely in conflict resolution
and transformation approaches (including those of Mitchell and Webb
1988; Burton 1990; Fisher 1997; Kelman 2005). For all these theorists we
might suggest a widespread belief that a first step has to be to
‘deconstruct’ a conflict before it can be properly understood and analysed,
as a precursor to identifying possible solutions to it (see also Chapter 1
for more discussion of this vital theme).
As we stressed in the Introduction, an important input into this school of
thinking has been the work of Edward Azar, who believed that ‘protracted
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 107

social conflict’ (Azar 1990) needed ‘problem solving’, not military

solutions. Azar’s approach was one that accepted much of what has been
written by theorists of ‘basic human needs’ like John Burton (1990).
Their aim was to get a wider acceptance that most conflicts were due to
‘the prolonged and often violent struggle by communal groups for such
basic needs as security, recognition and acceptance, fair access to political
institutions and economic participation’ (Azar 1990).
If this is true, then unravelling the motives for perpetrators, victims and
interveners alike is far more daunting than dealing with mere ethnic
violence, bad as that obviously is. It is obvious that the use of violence
has multiple motivations, with correspondingly difficult decisions to be
made about how to ‘map’ these motivations. A key, and growing, element
of war has been the reported use of sexual violence, with increasing
debates about motivations and potential solutions to the use of rape in war
(see Enloe 1993; for a more recent, if controversial summary, see
Thornhill and Palmer 2000). We might however also point out that sexual
violence in war was as much a part of the repertoire before 1990 as after
it. Historians such as Anthony Beevor (2002) have catalogued the
widespread use of rape by Russian soldiers in Berlin in 1945 and Edward
Newman (2004) has also made a similar point, again in criticising the
‘new war’ thesis.
Azar’s (1990) approach allowed for the analysis to be on a variety of
levels – ‘identity’ at the ‘communal level’ an analysis of the ‘deprivation
of human needs’; the crucial factor of the ‘governance and the state’s role’
and the need to look at ‘international linkages’ (Azar, after Ramsbotham
et al. 2005: 84–8). All of these need a long-term process that is often
beyond the means of Track Two teams and beyond the mandate of Track
One mediators. We cannot yet be said to be anywhere near resolving this
conundrum (but for some understanding of it, see Fisher 2005).

Strategies of conflict resolution and transformation

So although purists will immediately see flaws in such a narrative, we can

therefore, cautiously, describe most attempts by (usually but not always)
outside parties at mitigating or ‘solving’ conflicts through two major
series of approaches, top–down (conflict settlement and management) and
bottom–up (conflict resolution or transformation). We can also suggest
there is now in place an overall idea of ‘peacebuilding’, defined by Miall
et al. (1999) as ‘the attempt to overcome the structural, relational and
108 • Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development

cultural contradictions which lie at the root of conflict in order to

underpin the processes of peacemaking and peacekeeping’ (Miall et al.
1999: 56–7). This can be seen in terms of actions by states or IGOs, and
as such it is usually used in the ‘reconstruction’ attempts we will describe
in Chapter 5. But the emphasis in the rest of this chapter is on
‘peacebuilding from below’, which is what the term often means in the
context of conflict resolution, transformation, or attempts at
reconciliation, all of which often, though not exclusively, are used by
changing the attitudes and practices of the society in conflict.
To put that into simple language: how would you, our reader, think it best
to deal with (a) two warring factions within a government, or (b) the
reintegration of people who had been killing your neighbours or family?
Would you advocate a policy of justice (or revenge) for paramilitary
forces that may have destroyed your village or killed your relatives, or
their ‘reintegration’ into society (as suggested in Chapter 5), or getting
them to undergo a process of much more personal reconciliation?

Reconciliation: memory, truth telling and forgiveness

One way to bring about a lasting peace is now seen as being through
‘reconciliation’, either through the mechanism of truth and reconciliation
commissions (TRCs), often referred to as ‘restorative justice’, or through
the use of a much older institution, a war crimes tribunal (WCT), often
referred to as a form of ‘retributive justice’. The first usually assumes a
non-retributional and non-jural outcome, the latter assumes the use of
some form of sanction, including imprisonment, or even the death
sentence, for ‘guilty’ parties (Rigby 2001). We will discuss them in turn,
but first look at what they can be said to have in common in addressing
conflicts in developing countries.
Both of these institutional frameworks attempt to work based on the
proposition that we need to establish the ‘facts’ of any conflict, including
the hardest of all, those to do with killing, torture and other massive
abuses of human rights. This, it is assumed, will somehow help both
victims and perpetrators to come to terms with their experiences and
actions and help them to understand, possibly forgive, and hopefully
‘move on’, to a better and more functional relationship. This proposition
is drawn from essentially three sources:
● First, from psychological insights that a ‘talking cure’ (Freud’s term)
will enable individuals and societies to make a transition from hostility
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 109

to peace through the establishment of clearly identified memories

and contending ‘truths’ and that this will then lead to a better ability
to deal with collective and individual trauma (Jeong 2005: 155;
Fierke 2006).
● Second, it bears more than a passing resemblance to ideas in conflict
resolution or transformation theory and practice that a ‘ventilation’ of
grievances and an establishment of the history (or histories) of a
conflict will help establish a new point of departure for the players and
thus a transformation of their relationship discussed above.
● Third, its proponents often link it explicitly to ‘liberal peace’
arguments that ‘transitions to democracy’ necessitate an adoption of
market reforms, constitution building and the establishment of a rule of
law and a consideration of ‘what to do about the past’. Justice and
accountability will go hand in hand with prospects for a stable peace
(Hayner 2002: xi, Chapter 7).
The first attempts at setting up TRCs were in Latin America (Chile,
El Salvador and Argentina in particular) to attempt to draw a line under
the ‘dirty wars’ of the Cold War era (Whittaker 1999: Chapter 2 on
El Salvador; Hayner 2002). After 1990 the most prominent examples have
been in South Africa after the end of Apartheid (see p. 114 for more
detail), the Rwandan genocide of 1994 (Prunier 1995; Corey and
Joireman 2004; Moghalu 2005; also see pp. 114–16 below) and in Sierra
Leone after the Lomé Peace Accords of 1999 (www.trcsierraleone.org/
drwebsite/publish/index.shtml). Suggestions have been made for
similar commissions in Former Yugoslavia, in Northern Ireland and
elsewhere.
One way of assessing the usefulness of such attempts is to analyse the
underlying essential elements of such thinking, and especially the ideas of
‘memory’ and ‘truth’.

Memory, history and ‘truth’

An essential element of reconciliation lies in having common, or at least

mutually comprehended, memories of what happened in a conflict or war
that need to be reconciled. The aim is not only to establish the ‘individual
truth’ of what happened, but also to interrogate what might be called
‘collective’ truths. This, it is hoped, will then lead to mutually acceptable
changes in the versions of the ‘truth’ that have long dogged the peoples
involved in a long-running feud. If, for example, the Irish and the English
110 • Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development

or the English and the Scottish people persist in ‘remembering’ their past
histories as exclusively ones of mutual persecution, with ‘signposts’ along
the way that encourage a prolonged feeling of mutual grievance, or even
hatred, there is little chance of them being able to make lasting peace with
one another. It might be reasonably asserted that the popular film
Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995), which portrayed the heroic and largely
blameless William Wallace as fighting a guerrilla war against the
heartless and brutal English monarchy did little to foster Anglo-Scottish
understanding, and even contributed to the much remarked upon
resurgence of Scottish nationalism since the 1960s (Webb 1978). Equally
folk memories of Cromwell’s massacres at Wexford and Drogheda in the
1650s or the Battle of the Boyne, won by William of Orange against the
rump of James III’s army in 1690, have been constantly evoked in
nationalist propaganda by Republicans and Loyalist alike on the island of
Ireland to justify horrific atrocities. Even more recently the memories of
the First World War of 1914–18 have been used in Ireland to justify
Protestant violence against Catholics in the North (Mac Ginty and
Williams 2007).
Lest this be thought a too British and Irish set of examples, it should be
noted that in Former Yugoslavia, the Croat and Serb leaderships both
evoked historical grievances dating back to the fourteenth century in their
pursuit of ethnic cleansing and other brutality. History is indeed a dragon
that it is dangerous to awaken! But if that is the case, can history be used
as a way of reconciling and resolving conflicts?
Jay Winter, in many ways the Anglophone father of memory studies, has
written about the ‘memory boom’ in contemporary historical studies
(Winter 2000). There has been a widespread re-memorisation of war in
western Europe as part of a process of reconciling the peoples of western
Europe, who only a generation back (and for several before that) were
regularly engaged in internecine warfare of the most brutal and
uncompromising kind (Winter 1995; Evans and Lunn 1997; Mac Ginty
and Williams 2007). The First and Second World Wars were not African
or Asian affairs after all; they were purely European innovations, even if
they had profound effects on the rest of the world. Many of the insurgents
or freedom fighters in wars of decolonisation (Algeria, Kenya, Vietnam,
arguably Israel, are good examples) learnt how to fight their colonial
masters by fighting alongside them in 1914–45. Their resentment at the
pronouncement of adherence to ‘democracy’, and the evident hypocrisy
inherent in such claims, fuelled many uprisings (see, for example, Lewis
2007 on Kenya).
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 111

Plate 10 French First World War cemetery: issues of commemoration can have
long-lasting sensitivity

A number of questions arise immediately:

● How can, or should, these historical ghosts be put back to sleep? Is full
or partial disclosure or amnesia better (Rigby 2001)?
● Does the existence of both national mythologies and, in some cases,
extremely antagonising personal and collective memories matter in
potentially fostering future violence?
● What if there are ‘contested memories’ (no agreement on what
happened) (Beneduce 2007)?
● Who has ‘ownership’ of a historical narrative and could therefore be
trusted to write an account of it that would not (inevitably perhaps) be
merely a version to suit the ‘Victors’, or at least a dominant view of
events or put their spin on commemorative activities (Mac Ginty and
Williams 2007)?
The case of Israel and Palestine is most instructive in this regard (see
Box 4.1).
The main issue is the existence of two opposing historical narratives. If
we accept the Israeli narrative, which essentially sees Jews having fled the
Holocaust in Europe and settling an ‘empty’ land and developing it where
112 • Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development

Box 4.1

History, Israel and Palestine

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is steeped in historical controversy. The British
role in promising the Jews a homeland in Palestine in 1917 (the ‘Balfour
Declaration’) was compounded by British agent T.E. Lawrence making promises
to the Arab rulers of the area that they could have Damascus and Jerusalem as the
capitals of a new Arab state and also the French (the Sykes–Picot Agreement of
1915) that they could have Syria and Lebanon. This has led to endless arguments
about ‘who owns what and by what right’ in the Middle East and is a foundational
problem in finding a solution. This was compounded by the circumstances of the
foundation of Israel in 1947 after which large numbers of native Palestinians were
expelled to neighbouring countries where they and their offspring still live and
form the core of anti-Israeli feeling. Israel has had to submit to being attacked on
several occasions (1948, 1973 and in numerous cross-border incursions) and been
forced (in its view) to carry out pre-emptive wars (1956, 1967, plus major
incursions into Lebanon in 1982, 1994 and 2006). The whole region is thus
affected. In addition to that, as US President Carter put it:
People know if they are from a war torn country how difficult it is to sit
down across the table in the same room with an adversary. Just consider
about the Israelis negotiating with the Palestinians. It is likely adversaries
will say: ‘We cannot negotiate because we despise the other side too much.
They have killed our children, they have raped our women, they have
devastated our villages’.
Past and present grievances become as real as each other and therefore a solution
needs to address such hurts. The Oslo Process of the early 1990s tried to do so by
addressing the triple issues of the ‘right of return’, the status of Jerusalem and the
borders of any future Palestinian state. Those are still the key issues today. The
history and the present issues will need a global solution.
Sources: Corbin (1994), Jones (1999), Fromkin (2000)

before there had been desert and poverty, to the benefit of not only the
Jewish population but also all those within and indeed without Israel’s
borders, then a picture of a blameless Israel being attacked by fanatical
hoodlums makes absolute sense. If we accept the Palestinian mainstream
view that they were expelled in large numbers from their homeland by an
alien invader backed by the Great Powers in 1947–8, Powers which were
themselves motivated more by their guilt about the Holocaust than any
genuine sympathy for either Jews or Arabs, then obviously we can
sympathise with the Palestinians. As historians have pointed out (notably
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 113

Edward Said: see Ruthuen 2003; Bunzl 2008), these ‘mirror-images’ or

incompatible mythologies are the basis of many protracted conflicts.

‘Ruptured histories’
The idea that history is ‘dead’ or that we can have an ‘end’ to it
(Fukuyama 1992) could not be less true than it is today. History informs
most, if not all, of the enduring deep-rooted violent conflicts that afflict
the developing world. Some of them, like those that pit Japan as a former
imperial power against South Korea and China, are vital for
understanding the future stability of the whole of East Asia (Miyoshi
Jager and Mitter 2007).
So what can be done? Should those identified as having responsibility for
crimes of war be brought to book and put before a court of law, national
or international, as mentioned above and often referred to as ‘reformative
justice’? Or should the miscreants be seen as victims as much as
perpetrators and allowed or encouraged to reinsert themselves into
societies that they once sought to destroy? We will now go through the
arguments for both of these courses with the use of historical examples. It
should be noted that there are significant differences that exist in the
theory and practice of how a conflict can be de-escalated and a
peacebuilding process given a chance to begin.
Some general issues need to be addressed first. A conflict might be seen
on one level as an inability to trust. Miall et al. (1999) put it thus:
[l]egitimacy, acceptance and trust . . . are integral to the functioning of
any reasonably stable socio-political system, invisible and often taken
for granted when differences are being settled relatively peacefully,
but palpably lacking when they are not.
(Miall et al. 1999: 206)

They also point out that ‘one of the main obstacles to social and
psychological healing is the cumulative hurt’ (Miall et al. 1999: 207). So
a spiral of distrust develops in an uncanny echo of the ‘security dilemma’
in international politics (for an explanation of this, see Booth and
Wheeler 2007). Because you believe that the other side has more weapons
than you (or is less trustworthy) you arm yourself more (and trust less).
The classic example of a global conflict is the arms race of the Cold War,
a more current and local one the ever increasing use of more and more
sophisticated small arms in pastoralist conflicts in Africa (Riungu n.d.;
Mkutu 2008) (see Box 4.2).
114 • Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development

Box 4.2

The South African Truth and Reconciliation

Commission

The end of apartheid in South Africa came after an all-white referendum in 1992
and the freeing of Nelson Mandela by the National Party, led by F.W. de Klerk.
De Klerk voluntarily handed over power to a new majority administration of the
African National Congress (ANC). The ANC has followed a very ‘liberal’ path
since then, holding a number of elections, encouraging foreign multinational
companies to set up and develop in South Africa and avoiding all of the worst
excesses of neighbouring Zimbabwe by encouraging a process of reconciliation.
This has been concentrated in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC),
set up in 1995, which has heard hundreds of testimonies from former perpetrators
from the South African defence forces and many more victims and their relatives
(for more on this see pp. 115–16). The idea has been suggested by Archbishop
Desmond Tutu, that the truth will heal the trauma of the past and that it will help
in the ‘nation-building’ of South Africa. Some have argued that the process,
which has never really addressed the problems of reparation for the crimes
committed (although there is provision for this in the TRC’s statutes) lets off the
perpetrators too lightly. The TRC finished its work in 2002. The government is
pursuing a policy of gradual and cautious reform of land for example, which it is
hoped will help the reconciliation process along.
Sources: Rotberg and Thompson (2000), Hayner (2002), Williams (2006: 191–4)

Another hard case: Rwanda

The question we have asked above can be summed up as: can or do TRCs
help in dealing with the aftermath of deep-rooted violent conflicts? The
South African case is a hard one in that unravelling nearly a century of
apartheid policies may well take generations. But what about an even
harder case, that of Rwanda (see Box 4.3)?
What can we learn from such episodes for the future of reconciliation
attempts in developing countries? It is evident that in Rwanda, ‘even by
strict definitions the episode qualifies as “genocide”’ (Straus 2007: 123),
so the aftermath of such events is that much more difficult to deal with
than, but also different from, the long-drawn-out agony of South Africa.
In both cases we could argue that these were ‘unforgivable’ crimes. In
South Africa the fight against apartheid came to be seen as the sole
prerogative of the African National Congress (ANC). Mahmood
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 115

Box 4.3

Rwanda
By many calculations 500,000–800,000 mainly ‘Tutsi’ men, women and children
were massacred by their ‘Hutu’ neighbours in 1994, and many women gang-raped,
resulting in a huge subsequent dispersal of the population that committed these
massacres as the new government, which was also ethnically mainly Tutsi, came to
power and demanded retribution. The international community turned a largely
blind eye to the massacres, in spite of anguished pleas to the UN by the UN
military commander in the country, General Dallaire. The French government
(through ‘Operation Turquoise’) has been accused of harbouring the
‘genocidaires’. The massacres were of an ethnic nature but might be argued to
have been about other issues as the two groups were practically indistinguishable.
They were certainly about elite competition and demonstrated the power of a
centrally organised bureaucratic state in organising such events, as Nazi Germany
had previously shown. The post-massacre ‘Gacaca’ courts, set up in 2002, have
attempted to get lesser (that is to say not leading) perpetrators to confront the
reality of what they have done in exchange for a lesser or even no punishment.
The post-genocide era has seen the imposition of another authoritarian state, and
massive intervention by the Rwandan army in neighbouring Congo, though with a
lot less violence being committed within Rwanda. About 110,000 were
incarcerated awaiting trial in 2001. An International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
has also been set up by the UN but its effectiveness has been less than impressive
in terms of the numbers of those bought before it or punished, though important
legal precedents have been established, against sexual violence for example.
Sources: Booth (2003), Moghalu (2005), Kayumba and Kimonyo (2006), Straus (2007)

Mamdani has asked the pertinent question as to whether ‘if truth has
replaced justice in South Africa, has reconciliation turned into an
embrace of evil?’ He also points out that ‘in Rwanda there are a lot of
perpetrators and a few people who benefited; in South Africa there are a
few perpetrators, but lots of beneficiaries’ (Mahmood Mamdani, quoted
by Krog 1998: 146–7).
This conundrum has led many to ask whether the reconciliation in either
country is more than skin deep. The post-apartheid crime figures in South
Africa (where hundreds of white farmers have been killed and the country
has one of the highest murder rates of any country on the planet) suggest
a society ill at ease with itself. So is reconciliation the ‘lesser of two
evils?’ Mothers who lost their children have a different view of the idea
that reconciliation can help us ‘turn the page’. One such mother who
116 • Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development

testified to the TRC, a Mrs Kondile, commented that she could not
forgive a South African policeman, Dirk Coetzee, for killing and burning
her son: ‘It is easy for Mandela and Tutu to forgive . . . they lead
vindicated lives. In my life, nothing, not a single thing, has changed since
my son was burnt by barbarians . . . nothing. Therefore I cannot forgive’
(quoted in Krog 1998: 142). Others have claimed that, in the case of the
TRC, even if the whole truth is not found out, a great deal is learnt and
the process is therefore ‘therapeutic’ (Christie 2000: 173–5).

War crimes tribunals (WCTs)

Some have suggested that a better solution would be to opt for the
forensic truth-seeking of a legal retributive tribunal, as was the case with
the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after the Second World War, the records
of which are still taken as one quasi-‘definitive’ account of Nazi and
Imperial Japanese war crimes (Sands 2003).
In recent times the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia
has drawn a huge amount of media attention and has led to the
prosecution of many alleged perpetrators of war crimes in the Balkans,
most famously of Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and, in
2008, Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader (Williams 2006:
169–74). There is also now a permanent International Criminal Court
(ICC) that serves the international community as a whole, formally
founded in 1998 and directed against individual misdemeanours,
potentially also by peacekeepers (which is why a number of states have
not ratified the treaty setting it up). Its website as of July 2008 tells us that
106 countries are full signatories and that
[t]he ICC is a court of last resort. It will not act if a case is investigated
or prosecuted by a national judicial system unless the national
proceedings are not genuine, for example if formal proceedings were
undertaken solely to shield a person from criminal responsibility. In
addition, the ICC only tries those accused of the gravest crimes.
(www.icc-cpi.int/home.html&l=en, accessed 30 July 2008)

The ICC has been mainly used in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but
most famously in the Darfur conflict in Sudan, the first ever sitting head
of state, Omar Bashir, has been accused of crimes against humanity.
If TRCs might therefore be seen as a ‘soft’ option, as in the cases of
Rwanda or Sudan for example, might not ‘retributive’, legally
enforceable, and punitive criminal tribunals be a better option to help in
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 117

the needed processes of healing described above? The use of the war
crimes tribunal has of course been explored in the context of developing
countries and their conflicts. The International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda (http://69.94.11.53/) has been in existence since 1994, just after
the massacres, and has as its official brief ‘to contribute to the process of
national reconciliation in Rwanda and to the maintenance of peace in the
region.’ The criticism of its breathtakingly slow pace and ineffectiveness
have led to some commentators thinking it brings the rule of law into
disrepute (Moghalu 2005). There is a similar one for Sierra Leone, the
Special Court for Sierra Leone, which used the ICC’s facilities in The
Hague to prosecute Charles Taylor, widely accepted as being a prime
mover in the horrors that afflicted much of West Africa (for more on this,
see Wierda 2006).

One potential problem for such tribunals’ effectiveness in developing-

country contexts is that their roots clearly lie in the Nuremberg and Tokyo
tribunals after the Second World War when the circumstances of global
politics were very different from now and when the justice being meted
out was in the context of inter-state war, not in our predominantly ‘new
war’ era. Another is that which can also be levelled against war crimes
tribunals in the industrialised world – on occasion the needs of ‘justice’
and those of ‘peace’ are in distinct opposition. How can you expect
warlords to lay down their weapons if they know they will be
subsequently accused of war crimes and probably executed or imprisoned
for life? Equally there is some sense in the US criticism of the ICC that it
potentially criminalises soldiers doing their best to do the bidding of the
UN. Against this it could be argued that all ‘proper’ armies prosecute
their troops for criminal behaviour, as have the Americans in Iraq for
example, and that the above ICC stricture about it being a court of last
resort answers that criticism. Maybe more seriously, the ICC was not used
in the prosecution of those deemed to be war criminals in Iraq – the
executions and other punishments inflicted there were by domestic
judicial instances, and might be accused of being essentially Victors’
Justice (Bass 2000; Williams 2006). We feel there is not yet enough
evidence, for or against, to have a judgement on the effectiveness of such
tribunals in the context of conflict in the developing world.

To summarise: the aims of TRCs and WCTs are to try:

● to accommodate the vital role of historical memory: each player in the

conflict believes that history is on their ‘side’ and evokes it to justify
ever increasing cycles of violence and revenge
118 • Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development

● to deflate this spiral by allowing the inverse process of historical

truth-telling to take place, whether through a formal system of justice
(‘retributive’ justice – WCTs for example) or a non-judicial process
(‘reformative’ justice, such as TRCs).
It is important to note that the main aim of both TRCs and WCTs is to
make an attempt to address the above aims. Hayner quotes Michael
Ignatieff ’s caveat that: ‘The past is an argument and the function of truth
commissions, like the function of honest historians, is simply to purify the
argument, to narrow the range of permissible lies’ (Ignatieff in Hayner
2002: 25). This has given rise to frustrations and potential future conflicts.

Concluding discussion

Anthony Oberschall sums up the substance of the issues dealt with in this
chapter in two sentences: ‘Collective Myths are the enemy of truth and
justice . . . conflict management and peace building are hampered by
crisis framing, the victim syndrome and denial’ (Oberschall 2007: 2).
While we might disagree about the exact wording, this seems to us a fair
summary of the problems faced in dealing with the kinds of problems we
see in trying to manage or resolve most conflicts in developing countries,
also in some in the ‘West’ like Northern Ireland, other parts of the
European Union (the Basque Country most notably) as well as the Former
Yugoslavia and the Former Soviet Union. So a first conclusion has to be
that the problems of developing countries are not sui generis. They can
happen anywhere, wherever there are people struggling to find economic,
political or cultural identity and meaning. One of the worst obstacles that
needs to be overcome if we are to improve what is a dismal track record
of dealing with complex deep-rooted conflicts is to assume that they are
easy to resolve, but also that we should not try.
Second, we might also ask whether there are lessons to be drawn from
looking at non-conflict situations, as any thesis has to be falsifiable. Of
course this is the basis of liberal peace arguments. Such theorists would
say that the effective deployment of democratic institutions is what makes
a state succeed in avoiding destructive conflict and enhancing successful
development (see, for example, Paris 2004; Kaldor 2005, 2006). Although
such considerations are very interesting, we feel we need in this book to
concentrate on attempts to address what does not work. What seems clear
to us is that the official discourse of participation and empowerment
through democracy often falls far short of the reality. In most cases the
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 119

evidence seems to be that such discourse and practice can actually

depoliticise and demobilise the poor who are the subjects and objects of
much conflict behaviour (Moore 2001; Williams 2007b).

So the short-term effects of such peacebuilding processes can be

perverse. Many have accused the South African and Rwandan TRCs as
asking the impossible – forgiveness by victims for unforgivable crimes.
An area that needs much more research is in the long-term effects of such
attempts and what might be done to improve the prospects for success.
The phenomenon of ‘intergenerational violence’ has been noted.
Although the evidence is often anecdotal, it would appear that, for
example, in areas of Former Yugoslavia where there were not widespread
atrocities during the Second World War, there was a lower level of
‘revenge’ violence in the 1990s. One obvious area that is now being
explored is that of the effects of education on succeeding generations. The
German example of education changing wider attitudes is often cited
(Dierkes 2007). Likewise the negative evidence of such educational
attempts not being made in the teaching of history in Japan, Korea and
China has also elicited widespread comment (Bleiker 2007; Miyoshi
Jager and Mitter 2007; Yoshida 2007). Not many analyses have yet been
done on developing country cases however.

Third, we must ask whether an outside party should interfere in the

warfare or conflict raging within a developing country, of which there are
many examples in such a situation. And will their efforts stand any chance
of succeeding, and why or why not? As John Darby (2006) has put it:
‘The signing of a multiparty peace accord is unlikely to end violence’. We
need to look beyond such ‘institutional’ concepts as conflict settlement
and management, discussed in this chapter, and democratisation,
disarmament and the reintegration of former combatants, reconstruction
and institutional change, which we will discuss at length in Chapter 5, to
see how deeper mechanisms can be used to try to coax whole populations
and especially elites towards a more gentle and less confrontational way
of solving their inevitable societal conflicts.

Peacebuilding, conflict resolution and the transformation of societies and

individuals from the state of violent conflict or war is never going to be an
easy task. It is difficult in developed countries like Ireland; it is all the
more difficult in conditions of underdevelopment, poverty and state
collapse. Chapters 5 and 6 will address these vital corollary issues. Can
development ‘from without’ help societies become more economically
and politically stable so that peace can have a chance of succeeding?
120 • Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development

Summary

● Theories of how to deal with conflict (settlement, management and

‘transformation’) are often seen as dependent on the observer’s underlying
theory of international relations.
● Most, but not all, conflicts in developing countries are civil wars.
● Peacebuilding and conflict ‘transformation’ approaches can be ‘top–down’ or
‘bottom–up’.
● Protracted social conflict cannot simply be explained by reference to ‘ethnic’
differences.
● Reconciliation within divided societies can be attempted by internally
organised jural or non-jural tribunals, or by international war crimes tribunals.
● We need to understand the historical roots of conflict in order to have any
chance of resolving them.

Discussion questions

1 Is it true to say that ‘new wars’ have now largely replaced the ‘old
wars’ of the era before 1990?
2 Should peacebuilding be approached in a ‘top–down’ or ‘bottom–up’
way?
3 Are commissions such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission a better way to bring about peace than war crimes
tribunals?
4 What role do you think the ‘history’ of a place plays in helping us
understand the causes and potential solutions to conflict and war?

Further reading

The best introduction to conflict management can be found in Bercovitch, J. and

Rubin, J.Z. (1992) Mediation in International Relations: Multiple approaches to
conflict management, London: Macmillan, or Crocker, C.A., Hampson, F.O. and
Aall, P. (eds) (2007) Leashing the Dogs of War: Conflict management in a
divided world, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. The best
introduction to the logic of conflict resolution is still Azar, E. (1990) The
Management of Protracted Social Conflict: Theory and cases, Aldershot:
Dartmouth. The best recent book by far on the subject matter of much of this
chapter is Ramsbotham, O., Woodhouse, T. and Miall, H. (2005) Contemporary
Conflict Resolution: The prevention, management and transformation of deadly
conflicts, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Polity. Recent excellent summaries on
 Conflict resolution, transformation, reconciliation and development • 121

peacebuilding can be found in Jeong, H.-W. (2005) Peacebuilding in Post-

Conflict Societies: Strategy and process, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner; Jeong,
H.-W. (2008) Understanding Conflict and Conflict Analysis, London: Sage;
Lederach, J.-P. (1997) Building Peace: Sustainable reconciliation in divided
societies, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace; and Fisher, R. (1996)
Interactive Conflict Resolution, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. A good
discussion of the causes and potential resolution of conflicts can be found in
Oberschall, A. (2007) Conflict and Peace Building in Divided Societies:
Responses to ethnic violence, London: Routledge. One critical review of conflict
resolution approaches can be found in Jabri, V. (2007) War and the
Transformation of Global Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Two good
overviews of reconciliation after wars are Rigby, A. (2001) Justice and
Reconciliation: After the violence, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, and Whittaker,
D.J. (1999) Conflict and Reconciliation in the Contemporary World, London:
Routledge.

Useful websites

The best website on conflict resolution/transformation is Fischer, M. and

Schmelzle, B. (eds) The Berghof Handbook for Conflict Transformation
(www.berghof-handbook.net/). Various wesbites related to particular
commissions and tribunals mentioned above include South African TRC:
www.doj.gov.za/trc/; Rwanda, the official government website: The International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (http://69.94.11.53/); and a University of
California site which includes a number of related URLs: http://socrates.
berkeley.edu/~warcrime/RW-webley.htm; Sierra Leone: (www.trcsierraleone.
org/drwebsite/publish/index.shtml). The International Criminal Court can be
found at www.icc-cpi.int/home.html&l=en.
 5 Post-conflict reconstruction
and development

Introduction

This chapter will first look at the often-made assumptions about

reconstruction, and its allied concepts, state-building and nation-building,
and democratisation, as they apply not only to the ‘problem’ areas, but
also to those who would cure them of their problems. It will then look in
particular at a number of what might be termed ‘generic’ reconstruction
attempts, starting with those of Germany and Japan (Japan in 1945 was
still a ‘developing country’ and both operations are even now seen as
ideal types), as well as Afghanistan and Iraq. It will ask whether the
reconstruction remedy can provide what the United States Institute of
Peace called a need for Managing Global Chaos (Crocker et al. 1996),
especially in the post-Cold War period.
This period has not been characterised by a linear rise in intrastate wars,
though there was an important rise in 1991–2, but by a decline in such
conflicts until 2007 (Peace and Conflict Website, University of Uppsala,
www.pcr.uu.se). There has been a rise in the number of peace accords,
and a decrease in the number of new wars starting (Gleditsch et al. 2002;
Münkler, 2005; Mack 2006). In practically all of these peace accords
there has been some attempt to remove the factors that caused the fighting
in the first place and further attempts to provide some sort of
‘reconstruction’ help in the aftermath. Understanding these processes
therefore becomes imperative not only for supporters of intervention to
help the cause of peace, but also for their critics.
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 123

We will consequently also look at what might be termed the ‘semantics’

of reconstruction, for it is in the terms of a phenomenon’s description that
its core values can usually be determined. In turn, the presentation of a
term can lead to its being seen as a use of power, positive and negative.
To say as much is not to be ‘anti-American’ or to accuse the Western
Powers of ‘imperialism’, but to identify how these actions can be seen as
such, no matter how pure the intentions of the intervening Powers or even
how effective their actions in helping the cause of long-term peace
(Williams 2006). A casual reader of the literature on how we should go
about bringing peace to war-torn societies after, usually, civil wars is
presented with a plethora of seemingly contradictory terms. Our aim is to
show how the ideal of ‘peacebuilding’ described in Chapter 4 relates to
‘reconstruction’ in the 1990s and since, as well as to ‘state-building’ or
‘nation-building’. This will encompass a review of writing on the
peacebuilding idea as a whole, but also how it can be said to reflect
differing views and policies that have been implemented in particular
cases.

Changing definitions, changing historical contexts

There are many definitions of what we would now loosely call

‘reconstruction’. Many of these arose out of historically specific
situations. The term has two main semantic roots, in the logic of
colonial/imperial administration and in the American Civil War (Foner
1989; Cramer 2006; Williams 2006).
The first of these has maybe had the longest-lasting impact on thinking
about the practice in developing countries and the erstwhile European
Powers. In the nineteenth century, the idea was used a great deal by great
liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill to convey the need to ‘civilise’
the ‘natives’, as Mill put it under the guidance of ‘philosophical
legislators’ to create a ‘Greater Britain’ through colonial emigration to
what are now developing countries in the Commonwealth (Bell 2007: 50).
Unfortunately, the implantation of white farmers, which was often linked
into ‘punitive expeditions’ to clear ‘natives’ from large areas of Africa,
has had the long-term result of causing massive resentment that came out
in such conflicts as the Mau Mau in Kenya in the 1950s and in inter-tribal
violence as a sequel to colonially imposed ‘solutions’ to land and other
problems (Lewis 2007). Many of the issues now facing countries such
as Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa were in part caused by the
unintended consequences of liberal attempts to create modern political
124 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

and economic state structures seen by indigenous peoples as being part of

a system of institutionalised inequity.
In the aftermath of the Second World War the term became synonymous
with the emergence of the first United Nations agency, the United Nations
Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) in 1943, and the Marshall
Plan during 1946–52, which did much to help resettle refugee and
concentration camp populations and rebuild much of the western
European and Japanese economies in the largest such enterprise to date
(Hogan 1987; Williams 2006). The creation of the international financial
architecture (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in
particular) also did much to establish the context in which German and
Japanese reconstruction could take place. Hence macro-level
reconstruction (of the international system) enables micro-level
reconstruction at the country level (for more on this see Box 5.1).
International governance of territories was also given an IGO imprimatur,
as with League of Nations rule over the Free City of Danzig under the
provisions of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles from 1919 to 1939, and the
Saar from 1922 to 1935. In several ways we could see this form of
activity as having had the same effect as with UNRRA in helping improve
the normative image of reconstruction efforts in general. The League’s
administrators undoubtedly did a great deal to protect minority
populations, to act to deal with disputes between the territories and other
nearby states and to develop constitutional guarantees for the population.
This has continued as a successful strategy since the end of the Cold War
by the EU, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe
(OSCE) and UN among other IGOs in Cambodia (UN Transitional
Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), 1992–3), Bosnia-Herzegovina (1994 to
the present), Kosovo (UNMIK, 1999–2008) and East Timor (UN
Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), 1999–2002)
(Caplan 2005: 29, Chapter 1).
These cases have become paradigmatic in thinking about nation-building
and reconstruction ever since. To summarise, the reconstruction
exemplars of Germany and Japan have to be seen in the context of a
‘reconstructed’ macro-international system (especially its financial
architecture), and a clear and enforced change in not only the political,
but also the cultural mindsets of the countries involved. It was made clear
to their populations that only certain beliefs and activities were acceptable
and others deviant.
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 125

Box 5.1

German and Japanese reconstruction, 1945–55

At the end of the Second World War the victorious Allies (the ‘United Nations’,
led by Britain, China, France, the United States and the Soviet Union) decided to
dismember Germany into ‘zones’, dismantle the political, economic and social
organisational structure of the National Socialist State and in effect rebuild the
German nation. The same fundamental logic was used for Japan and, to a much
lesser extent, Italy. The process was interrupted after 1947 by the onset of the
Cold War between the former partners, but the western zones of Germany, Japan
and Italy all benefited from a huge ($50 billion) injection of soft loans and direct
aid to rebuild the shattered infrastructure of the countries and more widely of
western Europe as a whole. This ‘Marshall Plan’ was largely successful in
creating or at least enabling the ‘economic miracles’ in Germany and Japan in the
1960s. There was little or no obstruction from the previous power hierarchies who
had been comprehensively defeated in battle. Reconstruction took place on the
following levels: physical infrastructure; institutions; political and cultural;
‘de-Nazification’ or ‘democratisation’; legal; military; and civil and economic.
The legal efforts aimed at ‘reconciling’ the defeated countries to their neighbours
both internally and by a form of retributive justice (see pp. 116–17) in war crimes
tribunals, some of which were directed by international legal teams.
Sources: Killick (1997); Beschloss (2002), Dobbins et al. (2003)

Reconstruction after the end of the Cold War

There are important differences in the normative background to

discussions of efforts at ‘reconstruction’ in the post-Cold War period.
Primary among these is a changed environment for claims to, and
discussions about, sovereignty, a subject we broached briefly at the start
of Chapter 4. Sovereignty has been termed the ‘master noun’ of
international relations and derives much of its underlying meaning from
classical western political thought, and especially from thinkers like
Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin. This has consequently greatly coloured
the global view of what a state is and what rights and duties states owe
their citizens and vice versa (Slomp 2008). It might be argued that, as
with the debate on democracy, the Western Powers that dominate the
global system have come to be seen in developing countries as moving
the goalposts whenever developing countries interpret sovereignty in
ways deemed unacceptable in western capitals. So, as many writers (e.g.
Caplan 2005; Jackson 2007) have pointed out, the ‘new interventionism’
126 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

Plate 11 Rebuilding a war-damaged bridge in southern Lebanon: post-war

reconstruction includes not only infrastructure but also rebuilding fractured
relationships in society

and its allied concept of a ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) represent both

a realist, national interest-based justification for intervention to address
UN Charter Chapter VII ‘threats to international peace and security’ and
liberal impulses to protect vulnerable populations in civil wars.
Governments and populations in developing countries may be wrong to
see R2P as ‘imperialism’ on occasions, as in Afghanistan, Iraq or Sudan
currently, but they nonetheless do often so feel.
As a consequence of these twin impulses, various new epithets have
emerged to join with the existing ideas of reconstruction and international
administration that predate 1990. Primary among these are ‘nation-
building’ and ‘state-building’. The first of these is usually taken to refer to
the ‘people’ of a given area and to an ethos, the second to the building of
institutions, though the two have often been semantically confused in
recent times. Caplan (2005) distinguishes ‘international administration
. . . from nation- or state-building (the two terms are frequently used
interchangeably) though state-building is very often an integral part of an
international administration’ (Caplan 2005: 3). We might therefore
suggest that the definition of what exactly ‘reconstruction’ means changes
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 127

in line with the state of the international system and the obsessions of the
actors that are prominent power holders within it, rather than the objective
needs of the populations affected by conflict and war.

Nation-building
The successes of the essentially US-funded initiatives between 1943 and
the early1950s gave rise to a belief that the ‘nation-building’ of Japan and
Germany were paradigmatic examples of how it should be done and were
much evoked in subsequent reconstruction efforts, notably, and probably
most misleadingly, in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Francis
Fukuyama (2006), an advocate of the intervention in Iraq, is surely right
when he says that both conservative (for which read mostly Republican)
and Democrat (or ‘liberal’) Americans ‘have come to support nation-
building efforts at different times – conservatives as part of the “war on
terrorism” and liberals for the sake of humanitarian intervention’
(Fukuyama 2006: 1). It might also be said that many Americans would
defend the parallels of the intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq with that
of Germany and Japan and refer to this as ‘nation-building’ – as in both
cases they see it as constructing political institutions, coupled with
economic development. In American minds, nation-building reflects
‘the specifically American experience of constructing a new political
order in a land of new settlement without deeply rooted peoples, cultures
and traditions’ (Fukuyama 2006: 3). However, this was certainly not the
case in Germany, Japan, Afghanistan or Iraq, where there were existing
political and other traditions, albeit illiberal ones.
‘Nation-building’ is explicitly defined by the American think-tank, the
Rand Corporation, as ‘the use of armed force as part of a broader effort to
promote political and economic reforms with the objective of
transforming a society emerging from conflict into one at peace with
itself and its neighbors’ (Dobbins et al. 2007: xvii). This explicit espousal
of military force sits uneasily with those who wish reconstruction to come
from within a society, the basic desire of the liberal, and not to be
imposed from without, the basic instinct of the realist. The Rand authors
call this distinction ‘co-option’, where ‘the local population are actively
involved in all stages of the planning and execution of a nation-building’
exercise and ‘deconstruction’ as was the case in Germany and Japan in
1945 (Dobbins et al. 2007: xx).
This easily gives rise to claims that the United States has used a
relatively benign expression to hide its essential national interest, or
128 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

what Jacoby (2007) calls the ‘Realpolitik of [its] hegemonic interest’.

He finds it strange indeed that parallels with the Second World War
reconstruction efforts have been used uncritically and ahistorically by the
United States’ administration to justify policies that are muddle-headed
and ‘focussing on “how”, rather than “why”’ they should be undertaken
(Jacoby 2007: 522). Other writers also question the ‘purpose, legitimacy,
goals and effectiveness of “nation-building”’ and point to its ‘mixed’
record. Democracy, a prime aim in all such efforts since 1990, has
resulted and brought about a semblance of order in some cases (Bosnia,
Namibia, Sierra Leone and East Timor are key examples), while in others
(like Cambodia) peace, but not democracy, has resulted, and in yet others
(Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti)
neither peace nor democracy have resulted (Hampson and Mendeloff
2007).
What is certain is that ‘reconstruction’ as a term is deeply embedded in
the historical consciousness of the great Western Powers, and especially
of the United States, and that it will have other resonances in other parts
of the world, in particular in the developing countries that are our main
focus. For them ‘reconstruction’ and its successor terms, ‘nation-
building’ and ‘state-building’, have the tinge of ‘imperialism’, inevitable
given the majority of these states’ experience of contact with the west.
What seems like a good idea to a victorious power is not necessarily
experienced in the same way by a vanquished one. It also has direct
consequences for interveners, as happened in Somalia, for example. To
use Keen’s expression: ‘[o]ne of the most important roots of violence is a
sense of having been humiliated’ (Keen 2008: 50, his italics).
Nonetheless we now have books emerging with snappy titles like The
Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building, a kind of do-it-yourself approach to
dealing with failed states, also produced by the Rand Corporation
(Dobbins et al. 2007), with useful graphs and chapters on every
conceivable aspect of the task. More seriously, such manuals do tend to
show us that although: ‘[e]ach nation to be rebuilt may be unique . . . the
nation-builder has only a limited range of instruments on which to rely’.
The ‘instruments’ are itemised as various kinds of military and
administrative personnel, as well as ‘experts in political reform and
economic development’ (Dobbins et al. 2007: vii). It is tempting to point
out that this process tends to exclude the ‘locals’ at the expense of outside
‘experts’, and books like Dobbins et al. (2007) do tend to put such an
emphasis on the outside agents concerned. But can the locals be ignored?
A more liberal school of ‘state-building’ would tend to disagree.
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 129

State-building

The main reason why reconstruction has been so warped in its

conceptualisation and implementation is that it is now usually deployed in
what Kaldor (2006) calls ‘new wars’, and these are nearly always in
developing areas of the world. These wars have the characteristics
described earlier in the book, where globalisation and state failure have
combined to create a caste of freelance economic military entrepreneurs,
often claiming ethnic or cultural motivations, but also often having
distinctly economic motivations, such as the extraction of commodities
for their own enrichment (Pugh and Cooper 2004). This combination of
appeals to ‘greed’ or ‘grievance’ (Collier 1999) has ‘state-disintegrating’
consequences, as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, that are difficult
to deal with locally given the enormous resources that wars put in the
hands of these warlords.
To temper this ‘new war’ emphasis on the negative economic results of
globalisation on many wars, it could also be claimed that economic
factors have persuaded some warriors to lay down their arms in return for
the economic benefits of peace, as in Ireland and, maybe, in Former
Yugoslavia. This could be seen as a consequent explanation of the
seeming paradox of the reduction of the number of wars discussed at the
beginning of this chapter. The effects of economic interdependence on
war and peace are much as they were when first described by Norman
Angell (1910) and now by scholars who follow a broadly similar logic
(Harff and Gurr 2004). But we would still maintain that the logic of
economic gain generally tends to reinforce Pugh and Cooper’s (2004)
thesis above and Carolyn Nordstrom’s findings of the essentially
economic nature of the motivations of many who fuel the new wars in the
context of globalisation (Nordstrom 2004).
In many ways, the features of, and the solutions to, these processes are
analogous to what happened in Europe in the late Middle Ages when
state structures grew and eventually led to the emergence of systems
of security and law. Other writers have referred to a ‘neo-Medievalism’
that characterises the wars we are now seeing, defined by Hedley Bull
as ‘a system of “overlapping authorities and criss-crossing loyalties”’
(Bull 1977, quoted by Winn 2004: 1). Indeed one of the differences
between many developing states and those established ‘developed’ ones
is that they are precisely often not ‘a sovereign entity dominated
by a single predominant national culture. An enormously compelling
mixture of legitimacy and efficiency’. Instead, much of the developing
130 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

world more resembles the City States of Renaissance Italy or Europe

before 1630 than the settled nations of modern Europe (Berdal 2003;
Winn 2004: 2–3).
But, as Herfried Münkler (2005) has pointed out, the difference with the
Europe of the Thirty Years War, which devastated huge areas of Europe
between 1618 and 1648, or the English Civil War (1642–9) is that:
the state-building wars in Europe or North America . . . took place
under almost clinical conditions, with no major influences ‘from
outside’, whereas this has not been the case with the state-
disintegrating wars in the Third World or the periphery of the First
and Second Worlds.
(Münkler 2005: 8, his italics)

We might also add that although the Westphalian system of states was the
ideal after 1648 in many parts of Europe, it was not the reality until very
recently. There were also far more stable groups of states in Africa than in
Europe in 1960, even if many of them have since then not been
characterised by economic or political stability.
So, how can state-building be brought about? As we have seen, the end of
the Cold War has led to a very different set of problems than those which
prevailed until 1990. Caplan (2005) has summed it up as follows:
State-building refers to efforts to reconstruct, or in some cases to
establish for the first time, effective and autonomous structures of
governance in a state or territory where no such capacity exists or
where it has been seriously eroded.
(Caplan 2005: 3)

For the above reasons, and because we think that new thinking on the
term ‘reconstruction’ is required, we use a broader definition than that
usually employed. Hence, we believe that:
[R]econstruction encompasses short-term relief and longer-term
development. It extends far beyond physical reconstruction to include
the provision of livelihoods, the introduction of new or reformed types
of governance, and the repairing of fractured societal relationships.
Thus reconstruction is not merely a technocratic exercise of rebuilding
shattered infrastructure. Instead, it is an acutely political activity with
the potential to effect profound social and cultural change. Post-war
reconstruction holds the capacity to remodel the nature of interaction
between the citizen and the state, the citizen and public goods, and the
citizen and the market.
(Mac Ginty 2007: 458)
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 131

This definition in no way detracts from the aims of the Marshall Plan
period, but it does put them into some stark contrast with the more recent
attempts to emulate the successes of the 1940s which have come unstuck.
The next section will explore how the underlying rationale(s) used in such
efforts may be said both to hold out hopes of success, and to point to
inherent dangers.

The ‘stages’ of peacebuilding: towards ‘sustainable’ peace

Many writers on whatever kind of nation-building, state-building, or
peacebuilding we consider see the process of achieving success in
somewhat mechanistic terms. So, for example, Roeder and Rothchild
(2005) lay down a series of ‘stages’ that they believe are essential if the
international community is to bring ‘sustainable’ peace to an area. Jeong
(2005) sees them as necessarily ‘sequential’. The touted solutions usually
have to do with the encouragement or imposition of ‘democracy’ which
corresponds with the liberal mantra that ‘democracies do not go to war
with each other’. Empirically that is true, but the concern is that countries
in a state of transition to democracy, or even more so in a transition to
statehood do. In recent times, Eritrea and Ethiopia have fought each other
(1998–2000), and both are in transitional processes towards democracy.
Developing countries are often in states of transition of some kind and are
consequently more violent than those that are not.
Paris (2004) has suggested that given the difficulties of transition to
democracy it would be better to concentrate on ‘institutions’ before
changing political practices. The initial problem in the reconstruction of
any developing country, he notes, is the lack of basic security. In success-
ful states the monopoly of power is held by the state; in states that have
experienced a civil war this is certainly not the case. So ‘the first task of
peacebuilding is to restore the monopoly as a foundation and precondition
for all further institution-building efforts’ (Paris 2004: 206–7).
We shall therefore now outline how that initial logic usually unfolds in
terms of policy prescriptions and suggest how many writers have seen
problems in the implementation of those prescriptions.

Actors
The primary actors in the processes of reconstruction and state-building
since 1990 have been:
132 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

● states
● IGOs and IFIs
● NGOs
● the press.

States

In spite of George W. Bush’s famous dictum ‘we don’t do nation-building’

during a presidential candidates’ debate in 2000, that is precisely what the
United States has been doing in many parts of the world. The European
Union has in many ways been an enthusiastic supporter of such efforts,
taking a leading role in Former Yugoslavia through the European Agency
for Reconstruction (www.ear.eu.int/home/), as well as in Cambodia. The
UK has played a determinate role in Sierra Leone with military, civil and
other assistance on a large scale, through the innovative Conflict Pools
system pioneered by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Department
for International Development and the Ministry of Defence (Ginifer
2004). So has France in its former colonies, such as Côte d’Ivoire and
Chad, often through the African Development Bank (ADB). The EU and
other groupings of states, like the Commonwealth, have played an
important role in election monitoring.

IGOs and IFIs

The role of intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) and international

financial institutions (IFIs), like the IMF in Russia in the immediate
aftermath of the Cold War, has been followed by a subordinate role for
that organisation in other places. There has been the establishment of such
specialist bodies as the European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (EBRD) and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation
in Europe (OSCE).
The role of the World Bank has undoubtedly been the most important in
reconstruction efforts, providing technical assistance in a myriad of ways.
The way this has been applied has drawn criticism even from within the
World Bank itself (Stiglitz 2003) for advocating policies which tended to
kill the patient, rather than cure him or her. The World Bank has moved in
recent years from the much-criticised Structural Adjustment Policies
(SAPs), which often reduced the social safety nets for the poor in
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 133

developing countries, in favour of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers

(though neither of these are specifically for post-conflict countries). IFIs
also act as important coordinators of effort through such mechanisms as
‘donor conferences’.
Most such organisations are western inspired and based, if nominally
international. There are comparable economic organisations in the
developing world, such as the Economic Council for West Africa, and
regional development banks (such as the ADB). There are also embryonic
political organisations, like the African Union, which is playing an
important role in Darfur in Sudan. But the really big financial resources
still come from western sources.

NGOs

On the ground, NGOs have played vital roles both in primary assistance,
such as the alleviation of hunger and medical assistance, in war and post-
war situations, but also monitoring roles (as with the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Red Crescent). There has
long been a tension between the human rights and civilian focus of such
groups and the military or security focus of peacekeepers and military
personnel more generally in the final stages of a conflict. ‘Soft’ and ‘hard’
NGOs and IGOs have on occasion found it difficult to cooperate, as in
Iraq before 2003 when there was some friction between human rights
NGOs and IGOs engaged in monitoring the (alleged) weapons of mass
destruction.

The press

The press presence is a phenomenon that has drawn much attention since
the first Gulf War of 1990–1, and conflicts in Somalia, Rwanda and
Bosnia in the early 1990s with the ‘CNN’ effect, the effect on western
public opinion of the presence of media reporters in the midst of disaster
areas (Hammond 2007: 12–13), being seen as a major pressuriser of
governments to be ‘seen to be doing something’. This is part of what
might be called the ‘framing’ of international conflicts, affecting the types
of intervention undertaken in significant ways (Hammond 2007). The
media are also seen as a major necessity in the creation of civil societies
by such bodies as the EU (Loewenberg and Bonde 2007).
134 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

Democratisation

After the ‘ceasefire’ the job has only just begun, a realisation that first
really dawned at the end of the First and Second World Wars. How do you
pick up the pieces left by violent conflict? The job of disarming the
German armies in those wars’ aftermaths was relatively simple as they
were disciplined organisations that obeyed orders and could be largely
trusted to comply with agreements. The disorganised militias of the
current period have a tendency to split into ever smaller factions. There
are also ‘drivers’ that often mean that holding on to their weapons is a
rational choice in a way that an army demobilising to return to a normal
civilian life of work and family would not contemplate.
The international organisations, especially the United Nations, were
arguably a bit slow in realising the importance of disarming insurgent
groups in attempts at post-conflict development. Partly this was because
in the early 1990s it was not fully appreciated how many wars would now
be ‘internal’. The first understanding of this came with the ‘Agenda for
Peace’ (UN 1992, 1995), but as late as 1997 organisations like the
Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (1997) put less
emphasis on ‘conventional’ disarmament than they did on that of nuclear,
chemical and biological weaponry, so it was not until the UN Brahimi
Report of 2000 (www.un.org/peace/reports/peace_operations/) that a clear
commitment to conventional disarmament got a real boost and a
consequent stressing in policy debates. The United Nations Institute for
Disarmament Research (UNIDIR: www.unidir.org/html/en/home.html)
has published annual reports on the progress of individual missions by the
UN in countries like Cambodia, Sierra Leone and many others. The
World Bank has been the leader in demobilisation and reintegration
projects but did not get involved in disarmament until about 2003
(Muggah 2005: 243–4).

Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration

The resulting policy trio, disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration

(often referred to by the acronym DDR), is directed at reducing the most
obvious proximate source of violence in a conflict. The main system-level
solution that is always touted to help the (re-)integration of former
combatants, which Ozerdem (2008) describes as ‘becoming civilian’, is to
create a working democracy. This includes reviewing the civil–military
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 135

relationship, a feature in many coup-prone countries (as with Fiji or

Pakistan), or with countries where dictators have an unhealthy relationship
with their armed forces), as for example in Zimbabwe, which is arguably
worse in the long run for local and regional prospects for peace and
prosperity alike. An important corollary to this is security sector reform
(SSR) where the army and police are reformed to make them more
reflective of democratic norms and practices, not mere protectors of the
elite and their own livelihoods. SSR has been defined as follows: ‘Security
sector reform aims to develop a secure environment based on
development, rule of law, good governance and local ownership of security
actors’ (GFN-SSR: www.ssrnetwork.net/about/what_is_ss.php).
First, these efforts can collectively be summed up as attempting
[t]o devise transitional arrangements for the short term. These must
provide the modicum of political stability necessary to conduct
elections to a constitutional assembly and the security for delegates
to assemble, conduct constitutional debates and craft political
institutions to maintain stability and foster democracy for the longer
term.
(Roeder and Rothchild 2005: 2)

Second, these efforts also attempt to build arrangements for the longer
term, in the form of rewriting constitutions, even devising new parameters
for the ‘state’. Most prominent among these have been the ‘Taif Accord’
in Lebanon of 1989 (www.al-bab.com/arab/docs/lebanon/taif.htm) and the
Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland of 1998 (www.nio.gov.uk/
the-agreement).
The importance of, and potential for, DDR and SSR in using the tools of
development to try and transform conflicts are therefore huge. Their aims
are both on the individual and the collective level. On the individual level
the aim is the transformation of rebel movements into peacetime security
forces or other economic groups and the demobilisation of huge numbers
of young people who have often known nothing but war and killing in
their short lives. This individual demobilisation has to provide extensive
educational, social and psychological help to young former combatants
(Peters 2007). The group from which they come then has to be
transformed into a political party that relies on the ballot box, not the gun,
for its legitimacy. Jeroen de Zeeuw (2008: 1) is succinct in his assessment
of the likely result of this: ‘Experiences from people directly involved in
the transformation of such movements show that the process is extremely
complex and time-consuming and has a high risk of failure’.
136 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

Nonetheless it has often been tried. One recent example is instructive.

In Sierra Leone the difficulties of transforming the Revolutionary
United Front (RUF), the rebel group led by Foday Sankoh, into a ‘less
violent political organization’ failed until the UN peace mission
effectively detained ‘a large proportion of the movement’s more
politically articulate elements’ (Richards and Vincent 2008: 91). RUF
foot soldiers have not, on the whole, been retrained, except within the new
regime’s armed forces and police. Richards and Vincent (2008) conclude:
‘Unless the problems of an expanding and increasingly impoverished
youth underclass are addressed, violent instability is likely to return to the
forests and diamond districts of rural Sierra Leone’ (Richards and
Vincent 2008: 100).
On the collective level DDR and SSR aim to provide the basis for a
lasting political settlement, through such processes as constitution
writing (Caplan 2005: 29), which has occurred in over 200 states since
the early 1970s, nearly always internationally brokered by IGOs like
the Commonwealth or think tanks like the United States Institute of
Peace (Widner 2005). It is a complicated procedural process that often
drags on for years during or, sometimes, after the conflict is mainly
‘over’, and aims ‘to develop a sense of inclusion and trust (social capital)’
in a process that will hopefully encourage peaceful dialogue not conflict
through providing frameworks of cooperation where different sections of
the population feel their interests are being acknowledged. This content of
representation (after Pitkin 1967) has been found by some researchers to
have ‘no major effects on post-ratification levels of violence in some parts
of the world, such as Europe, but do make a difference in Africa, the
Americas and the Pacific together’ (Widner 2005: 516). This would seem
to indicate that such efforts have some empirical evidence to back up their
claims.
As Roeder and Rothchild (2005) admit, the underlying rationale for these
actions is a belief that democracy is the essential tool that can calm the
fervid spirits of war. But what if the erstwhile combatants have been
divided by religious, ethnic or other problems that might lead them
democratically to want to divide from, not unite with, each other?
‘Majoritarian democracy can be a potential source of heightened
interethnic conflict’ (Roeder and Rothchild 2005: 5). So one solution
that has been widely touted is ‘power sharing’, as was widely tried in
the 1990s.
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 137

What is missing from the democracy and DDR analyses?

The following issues will be discussed:

● Having a peace to keep?
● ‘Spoiler violence’ in post-conflict reconstruction
● The challenge of small arms proliferation
● How can former combatants be ‘demobilised and ‘reintegrated’?
● The challenge of public health
● The challenge of the presence of outside actors.

Having a peace to keep?

The main ‘official’ issues identified in most DDR operations by the UN

have been with
1) problems associated with the establishment and maintenance of a
security environment early on, and 2) problems concerned with a lack
of coordination efforts among the regional and international
communities, the various groups involved in a peace mission, the
peace mission itself, and the post-conflict reconstruction effort.
(UNIDIR 1996–8: 211, quoted by Gamba 2006: 54)

DDR assumes the war is ‘over’ or at least in its final throes. But is there
not (again) an ‘artificial distinction between armed conflict and post-
conflict’? And are the international organisations putting an excessive
emphasis on DDR policies as ‘magic bullets’ (Muggah 2005)? There are
therefore a number of grounds on which the above democracy and DDR
orthodoxy can be challenged. Some of them are generic and some (even
many) more are based on the empirical observation of case studies.
We can also point to a more complex problem. As we have stressed, the
causes and results of wars are intimately linked (Blainey 1988). But what
if the DDR process itself actually makes people who are already very
upset even more so? Grievances from before a conflict are carried into it
and beyond it. Can the bringing of democratic institutions persuade
combatants to feel that they can now lay down their weapons and all these
hatreds will just evaporate? Keen’s analysis that ‘greed’ and ‘grievance’
are not sufficient to explain why conflict breaks out, with which we
broadly agree, means that a very deep-rooted analysis has to be made
about all actors’ responsibility for the fighting that has taken or is taking
place, not just the militias (Keen 2008). Maybe, as with Sierra Leone, the
138 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

Elders provoked violence by their insensitivity over a long period to the

demands of youth. Are they to be the new ‘Members of Parliament’? How
does a democratic process address a perceived lack of ‘respect’ agenda?
How does the DDR process address a cycle of abuse, maybe over many
generations? How do they know they will not be further ‘betrayed’ (Keen
2008: Chapter 3)?

‘Spoiler violence’ in post-conflict reconstruction

In addition, in the aftermath of a number of civil wars and conflict in

developing countries, it has been found that the main occupation of many
in the youthful population of the country has ceased to be ‘normal’, but
rather revolves around membership of various militias, groups that often
indulge in ‘freelance’ work on the side. In Afghanistan, for example,
former Taliban and other militia, or ‘non state’ armed forces’ members
took a long time to demobilise after the Bonn Accords of 2001
(http://ec.europa.eu/external_relations/afghanistan/intro/index.htm#bonn),
and often resumed their former activities under cover of nightfall, for
example (Giustozzi 2008). This was in spite of there being a new
Constitution in 2004 and elections. On a more positive note, although
youthful, badly ‘demobilised’ soldiers can become the thugs of the new
‘parties’ who intimidate their opponents, they can also form the nucleus
at pro-democratic party rallies.
One related obvious area (dealt with elsewhere in this volume) is in the
area of ‘post-conflict crime’ and what is referred to as ‘spoiler violence’
by disaffected paramilitary groups or even by ‘official groups’.
Sometimes it is driven by a deliberate attempt to undermine peace
accords, sometimes by more venal motivations, but the results are
identical. The point is that such violence seems attendant on most, if not
all, post-conflict situations. It has been defined as ‘violence that
deliberately attempts to undermine peacemaking processes and peace
accords’ (Mac Ginty 2006) and it clearly will have a major impact on
attempts at post-conflict reconstruction. However, as John Darby has put
it, ‘although substantial research attention has been paid to the origin
and dynamics of ethnic violence, to the first moves towards negotiations,
and to spoiler violence, the threat to post-accord reconstruction is
under-researched’ (Darby 2006: 6).
Spoiler violence can be generated by unofficial actors (militias, criminal
groups, etc.), who feel that the DDR process has failed them, as in Liberia
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 139

in the 1990s, or by the state itself provoking violence, as in Zimbabwe

with the taking of land from white farmers in clear violation of the 1979
Lancaster House Agreement, or the government of Rwanda in 1994 by
provoking the genocide. Often this is because a conflict in its final or
initial post-conflict stage is still one where groups contesting established
governmental power are jockeying for position for both a negotiated
outcome and on the ‘battlefield’ while the state is trying to do the same
(Höglund and Zartman 2006). The Taliban was not ‘defeated’ in 2003 and
has been trying to bomb its way back into Afghan political life; it
certainly does not consider the war ‘over’. Neither do the various parties
destabilising Iraq as of 2008, whether they be disaffected ex-soldiers and
officials of the Saddam Hussein regime, or ‘Al-Qaeda’ or other Islamic
insurgents. In other words, the parties and those attempting to ‘manage’
or ‘resolve’ the conflict do not operate on one sole path, but rather on
parallel paths. Conflicts are not resolved in nice neat linear ways, but
by a process of trial and error, more like a spiral than anything else
(Lederach 1997).
In places like Northern Ireland, where there exists a fully functioning state
apparatus of police, army and law courts, many previous paramilitaries
have found that crime and spoiler violence is a lucrative occupation, the
only one in many cases for which they have any training (Mac Ginty
2006). How much more so is this the case in countries that have no, or
little, formal educational structures in place to fit people for more
productive employment?
It must also be said that other forms of ‘spoiler violence’ are deeply
ideologically satisfying for groups that feel they have not been given
adequate recognition in the process of reintroducing structures of
government. In the chaos brought about by the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for
example, very little thought was given to what would be done about
demobilised members of the Iraqi armed forces (see Box 5.2). It was
certainly not considered that foreign insurgents would also join in the
aftermath of the ‘end’ of the war proclaimed in May 2003 by President
Bush, again for ideological reasons.
We shall return at the end of this chapter to what this might say about
future prospects for such massive ‘nation-building ‘projects backed
by military force and with a clearly defined economic and political
agenda.
140 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

Box 5.2

The problems of reconstruction and DDR in Iraq,

2003–8

The official ‘end’ of the war in Iraq in May 2003 was followed by a
demobilisation of nearly all the Iraqi armed forces and a purging of practically all
of the former regime’s officials, with an interim Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA) that became an Iraqi government after elections in January 2005. The
country has since collapsed into civil war with an estimated 200,000 civilians
killed in intra-communal violence, an Al-Qaeda inspired insurgency, the actions
of the international interventionary forces and by general criminality. Very little
of the many billions of dollars disbursed in reconstruction funds has been used for
that purpose, but rather has been lost to corruption or to the sheer cost of security.
The CPA spent only a fraction of the $18.6 billion allocated for reconstruction by
the US Congress for that purpose for example in 2003–4 alone (Diamond 2006:
176). It has since emerged that all the preparation for the transition by the Future
of Iraq Project within the State Department has been essentially ignored and the
Pentagon has been allowed to dictate a failed post-war policy, the rule of law
flouted by the occupying forces (epitomised by atrocities by US troops in Abu
Ghraib prison) and the Shia and Sunni militias alike. The only relatively peaceful
area of Iraq since 2003 has been Kurdistan, which was effectively independently
governed from the mid-1990s anyway. A ‘surge’ in US forces in 2007 led to a
reduction in violence, but no one predicts a return to normalcy any time yet.
Tensions also exist with Iraq’s neighbours Iran (accused of aiding Shia violence
by the United States), Turkey (which has been attacking Kurdish irredentists in
the North) and Saudi Arabia (accused of encouraging extreme Sunni ideology, if
not of actually supporting Sunni insurgents). Iraq has become a battleground for
regional and global differences, thus complicating the reconstruction efforts
immeasurably.
Sources: Ismael and Ismael (2005), Dodge (2006), Allawi (2007), Dobbins et al. (2007),
Duffield (2007: Chapter 6)

The challenge of small arms proliferation

Many writers (Duffield 2001; Muggah 2005; Kaldor 2006 are just a few
examples) have noted that recent conflicts leave countries awash with
small arms. In Ireland, where great efforts have been made to ‘put
weapons beyond use’ this has not made them disappear for ever.
Globalisation has ensured that small arms get sucked into conflicts far
more easily than was the case in the Cold War, where at least the
Superpowers acted as some sort of gatekeepers for violence and where
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 141

Plate 12 No weapons sign at the entrance to a UN facility: disarmament,

demobilisation and reintegration are often among the thorniest of post-war
problems

states were propped up, not, as they now are, in a state of collapse. This is
not to minimise the horrible effects of superpower actions in many parts
of the world, with the obvious after-effects of such actions still very
visible in South East Asia, the Horn of Africa and elsewhere – we must be
careful not to fall into Cold War nostalgia.
But the evidence of the destabilisation of many people’s lives has
particularly been evident in Africa where ‘traditional violence’ has been
horribly incremented by the dissemination of huge quantities of small
arms, often of former Soviet Bloc and Chinese manufacture. This in turn
has destabilised whole societies and had devastating effects on the men,
women and children involved, as well as on the stability of the states
concerned (Mkutu 2008; Riungu n.d.). So yet again we have the paradox
of fewer actual ‘wars’ but increased insecurity encouraged by the
after-effects of ‘old wars’ that stimulate the lower level of violence that is
a feature of the ‘new’ ones.
142 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

In the case of Ireland, Colin McInnes (2000) has identified a number of

issues that have to be addressed when decommissioning weapons. They
can act as shorthand for other cases (McInnes 2000; Fitz-Gerald and
Mason 2005).
1 WHEN to decommission? Before or after the final political
agreement? Should this be a prerequisite for negotiation?
2 LINKAGE to other issues? In Ireland, those issues included release
of prisoners. Problems included ‘inequality’ of concessions.
3 HOW to decommission – who provides data on weapons held;
phasing of weapon surrender; to whom?
4 WHOSE weapons – those of ‘insurgent groups’; ‘Government’ or
‘occupying forces’?
5 WHAT weapons. Small arms, explosives . . . ? N.B. ‘the real
“weapon” is the skill and experience of those who made them’.
(McInnes 2000: 89)
In general, what we can say is that disarmament is therefore a phase that
overlaps demobilisation and reintegration. This is because the signing of a
peace agreement often leads to large numbers of young men using their
weapons in a freelance way – usually through preying on their own or
other communities. In Africa, where there are few if any effective border
controls (or indeed clear borders), armed gangs of former combatants
regularly cross into areas that have low policing on missions of loot and
rapine. This post-accord criminality is thus both a national and an
international feature of efforts at DDR (Muggah 2005; Mac Ginty 2006).

How can former combatants be ‘demobilised’ and

‘reintegrated’?
Solutions have included the absorption of former combatants into existing
police and military forces, even if DDR and SSR should clearly, and
ideally, lead to far greater reintegration at other levels of society. It should
therefore aim to ‘help them develop alternative income-generating
activities so they can provide for themselves and their families’, though
de Zeeuw comments that ‘[i]n many cases, the real socio-economic needs
of the rank and file of former rebel organizations . . . are not addressed’
(Zeeuw 2008: 12–13). The World Bank and major western governmental
agencies like DFID have in particular urged such ‘best practice’ on IGOs
trying to implement such schemes. Surveys of such practice (as with
Fitz-Gerald and Mason 2005) are as yet inconclusive with evidence
clearly tending to vary according to a number of factors. These can be
said to include the following:
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 143

● The commitment of donor countries to the process.

● The conditions on the ground. So (we might say) in [country x] and
[country y] there are reasons to be optimistic. In [country z] these
conditions do not prevail, so [the following conclusions can be drawn].
We clearly have to be careful about overgeneralisation.
● The commitment to, and the ability to supervise ‘security sector
reform’ (SSR).
SSR is a particularly difficult area that has been increasingly studied and
implemented in recent years, by both IGOs like the OSCE in Eastern
Europe and civilian forces operated in conjunction with the UN more
widely. Prominent among such organisations are the Global Facilitation
Network (GFN) for Security Sector Reform (http://ssrnetwork.net/) run
by the UK Government’s DFID (GFN-SSR 2007); the OECD (2007) and
UN-INSTRAW (International Research and Training Institute for the
Advancement of Women, a UN agency that is particularly interested in
the implications of SSR for gender relations).
GFN–SSR (2007) identifies four particular areas that need to be
addressed in SSR:
1 Core security actors (police, gendarmerie, civil defence, militias, etc.)
2 Management and oversight bodies
3 Justice and the rule of law
4 Non-statutory security forces (‘liberation armies’, private security
organisations etc.).
It has to be said that in some cases the record of the international
community in SSR has been very patchy. The Dayton Agreement of 1995
had important SSR elements in it, though Dayton has been severely
criticised for leaving three separate armies in existence (Fitz-Gerald and
Mason 2005: 13), a gap that has been addressed in Kosovo by setting up a
police training school.
Some of the worst examples in terms of levels of violence can be found in
the linked conflicts of Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo as
well as in the Sudan, though there are many other candidates (a good
source is the Geneva-based ‘Small Arms Survey’ organisation:
(www.smallarmssurvey.org/index.html). Angola was struggling to emerge
from a civil war which dated back to independence from Portugal in 1975
(for a good overview, see Cramer 2006: Chapter 4). The DRC has fallen
into total, and heavily armed, chaos since the arrival of huge numbers of
Rwandan genocidaires after the massacres of 1994 in Eastern Congo,
some of whom have been supported by local and international actors with
144 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

free supplies of cash and arms. The international community’s efforts,

through the United Nations Angola Verification Missions, UNAVEM I, II
and III in the 1990s (www.un.org/depts/DPKO/Missions/unavem1) to
disarm the combatants in Angola was a humiliating failure, blamed by
some on its inadequate budget and force levels (Gamba 2006: 61), but by
others on its fundamental misreading of the nature of the civil war in
which it was trying to intervene. Cramer (2006: 143) puts this down to the
impossibility of rounding up the huge numbers of guns that have always
flooded into Angola from the west since the seventeenth century and
‘international linkages, political and economic’ which are part of ‘500
years of violent conflict’ (Cramer 2006: 147). In effect, Cramer asserts that
the spread of capitalism, through globalisation, is the problem and liberally
minded IGOs can do little about this. We might also reiterate the point
made earlier, that war is a profitable enterprise and that combatants have to
be given very clear reasons why they would want to substitute that earning
potential for the economic uncertainties of peace (Nordstrom 2004).
For even if it could be argued that such generalisations ignore the very real
benefits that capitalism has bought for many previously poverty-struck
developing countries, we also have to admit that the record of capitalism as
a force for non-violent beneficial change is hard to show in much of Africa
(see Box 5.3 on the DRC), but that is demonstrably not the case in much of
Asia, for example. In a globalising world, the boundaries of where such
spoiler violence can be found are unpredictable in the extreme. The same
could be said of externally generated violence for more venal reasons in
the DRC where freelance groups, multinational companies and different
‘allied’ or ‘enemy’ governments use the opportunity of the chaos to line
their pockets with diamonds, coltan (a vital ingredient in mobile phones:
see Pugh and Cooper 2004) and other raw materials. Without a viable state
it seems clear that no war ever ‘ends’.

Box 5.3

Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration and

security sector reform in the Democratic Republic of
Congo

The civil war in the DRC erupted after the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 forced
many hundreds of thousands of Hutu extremists and refugees to flee to the DRC
from Rwanda. The genocidaires, or Interhamwe, took their arms with them and
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 145

set up enclaves from which they embarked on raids into neighbouring countries
and preyed on the local populations with the national army being in no state to
stop them. Other local militias formed and the area descended into anarchy, not
helped by predatory capitalist entrepreneurs making the most of the anarchy to
enrich themselves, as did the armies of Rwanda, Angola, Zimbabwe and Uganda,
whether invited or not by the government in the capital, which had very little
effective control over its eastern provinces. An ‘All-Inclusive Accord’ was signed
between most of these warring parties in 2002 and agreed terms of reference for
both SSR and DDR. UN Peacekeepers were deployed to the Eastern (Kivu and
adjoining) areas and a semblance of national control re-established. The situation,
however, remains very tentative, so although there have been serious attempts at
DDR by the UN and other organisations the situation in the East of the country is
still chaotic with local warlords regularly challenging the Blue Berets and DRC
official forces, often successfully. Over 4 million people are considered to have
been direct victims of the fighting and accompanying destruction. Perhaps 3,000
of the at least 20,000 militia in Kivu alone can be said to have been successfully
demobilised.
Sources: Pugh and Cooper (2004), Boshoff (2005)

The challenge of public health

Developing countries generally have a very low ability to provide even

basic levels of health care for their citizens, a problem exacerbated by
conflict, which drives out both the central government as well as IGO and
NGO provision. Therefore a clear potential beneficiary of the bringing of
stable government to an area or region, it is hoped, is that it will not only
reduce levels of crime and violence but also help in the stabilisation of the
institutions of the state, which generally include educational, medical, and
other social welfare facilities. The re-establishment of these institutions is
often overlooked in writings on reconstruction, but by far the greater
proportion of deaths and other suffering come from public health failures.
Of the over 4 million victims so far of the civil war in the DRC, ‘[r]ather
than battlefield deaths, most of these fatalities have been the result of
disease and malnutrition as the state has failed to provide public health
care or maintain sanitation and related infrastructure’ (Mac Ginty and
Williams 2005: 173). It is certain that in the calculation of ‘war-related
deaths’ we have to take into account those caught in the cross-fire of
different groups, as well as the increase in morbidity due to people being
displaced by the fighting, the spread of disease and the reduction of
spending on health care by governments fighting for survival against
insurgent groups (Muggah 2005: 240).
146 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

Plate 13 A UNICEF water tank in southern Lebanon: public health issues often
pose a greater danger than direct violence

In some cases, failures of the health care system in developing countries

can be the cause of men joining an insurgent group in the first place. One
story we were told by a researcher in Sierra Leone was that a young man
whose pregnant wife was refused treatment without a bribe at the
(supposedly free) local hospital, as a result of which she died, used the first
bullets from his new Kalashnikov to shoot up the maternity ward and its
head doctor (Ahorsu 2007). It must also be understood that with the
widespread use of rape as a weapon of war and the systematic abuse of
women in war zones, huge mental and physical health problems are caused
that can take decades to heal, if they ever can be (Nordstrom 1999).

The challenge of the presence of outside actors

The success or failure of the liberal peace has at its heart the dilemma of
who or what is to do the reconstructing. The assumption is that this will
be done by the ‘international community’ working together in the United
Nations and other IGOs, or subcontracting the work to NGOs (Richmond
and Carey 2005). This is what happened in the cases of Germany and
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 147

Japan in the 1940s (Williams 2005) and in those cases the local
populations generally accepted the legitimacy of the actions taken. The
same cannot necessarily be said of more contemporary examples.

The UN, IGOs and NGOs

The problem in many contemporary conflicts is that the international

community acting though IGOs like the UN are rarely the only players.
Their military muscle is generally weak or absent, and like NGOs they are
reliant on peacekeeping forces to be able to operate (for the experiences
of NGOs in East Timor and Sierra Leone, see Jackson 2005). In some
cases, NGOs and the United Nations are reliant on tacit or overt militia
(even insurgent) support and are therefore both subject to often
intolerable pressures to conform to what can be seen as ‘alien’ cultural
practices by the local populations. Hence in Afghanistan during the
period of rule by the Taliban, the UN and NGOs were in effect forced to
comply with extreme Sharia law principles banning the unveiling, or even
touching, of women. Even more seriously, in Iraq NGOs and the UN were
forcibly put on notice that their presence would not be tolerated
(Monshipouri 2005). In this (albeit extreme) case, the dissuasion was by
the expedient of a large bomb which destroyed most of the UN HQ in
Baghdad and killed its Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello in 2004.
In less violent cases the presence of ‘alternative’ reconstruction groupings
can directly challenge both the operations and the logic of liberal peace
‘official’ players. One example can be found in Lebanon where Hezbollah
has its own ‘reconstruction’ arm, Jihad Al-Bina, and the Gulf states
sponsor rival groupings, often to counter the ideological leanings of other
groups. Such groups can rapidly marginalise the UN and conventional
NGOs. The UN cannot, for example, distribute $12,000 in cash per
household as Jihad Al-Bina did after the July 2006 war in Lebanon
(Mac Ginty 2007: 458).

Concluding discussion and suggestions

What can be done to improve matters? One depressing conclusion might

be to say that all efforts at bringing about better outcomes in
reconstruction and its allied strategies of DDR and SSR will always fail
because of the necessarily violent nature of civil wars and endogenous
state building (Cramer 2006). A liberal peace interpretation might well be
148 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

to say that there is a need for better institutional responses (for example
Paris 2004; Gamba 2006). Chabal and Dalloz would point to an
embedded enthnocentricity in such statements, an unwillingness to accept
that we need to take cultural and historical context into account in
condemning local practices or trying to impose ‘a linear, when not a
singular, form of modernisation resulting in Westernisation’ (Chabal and
Daloz 2006: 9). A less extreme critical analytical position might be to say
that we need to listen to local populations more (Mac Ginty 2006). A
more ‘structural’ approach would point to the underlying economic
problems that assail many developing countries. As we saw with the
above discussion of Sierra Leone, DDR and SSR will work only if
employment can be found for the vast underclass that is now a feature of
so many developing countries. War, to put it bluntly, is profitable; peace is
not (Nordstrom 2004).
More widely, it is clear that the misuse of the term ‘reconstruction’ in the
early 2000s may well in the long run serve as the most hubristic of all
misuses of a term, simultaneously devaluing a major historical success by
misassociation and damaging hopes of any further use of the model in the
future, a much greater potential problem as it is a basic ingredient of the
policy toolbox of advocates of the ‘liberal peace’ (Williams 2007b). We
assert that the distinction that dates back to the American Civil War
between accusations of ‘carpetbagging’ and the more noble term ‘nation-
building’ used about Germany and Japan in 1945, still has some force in
the latest attempts at ‘reconstruction’ in Afghanistan and Iraq in the
2000s (Williams 2006: 139–45).
We therefore hope to have shown that the political arguments for
reconstruction both lie on unstable historical foundations and have been
further damaged by historical and recent experience, especially in
Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, economic arguments for intervention of
all kinds have also been more fundamentally challenged from two key
perspectives. Writers such as Cramer (2006) and Chabal and Daloz (1999,
2006) argue that the current debate on development in general and
reconstruction in particular tends to downplay the importance of culture
as a variable. This debate is arguably part of a much wider one, which
suggests that there is no longer a coherent field of ‘development studies’
with ‘competing schools of theory or paradigms’ but that it has become
subsumed within other disciplines (as with ‘area studies’) or hacked to
pieces by those (‘post-structuralists’, ‘postmodernists’, ‘post-Marxists’)
who have undermined all the ‘positivist’, for which read ‘rational’, bases
for the study of development (Hoogvelt 1997: xi). One lasting impact of
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 149

such epistemological uproar has been to make analysts (but not

necessarily policymakers and politicians) focus more on what is specific
to any reconstruction ‘event’ and less on what is generic, what might be
termed a ‘sociological turn’. We need to look at cases and their
specificities, as well as to find ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions.
It must also be remembered that some strategists such as Edward Luttwak
(1999) and Stephen Van Evera (1999) think that the best and surest path
to peace in most developing countries is to ‘give war a chance’, in other
words not to interfere in any way or form, but to let the naturally
dominant party emerge through war. This might be put differently by
asking: when does a conflict ‘end’? As we have stressed, the concept of
bringing about a ‘sustainable’ peace is at the heart of thinking about the
end of a conflict. But, as a growing number of writers have pointed out,
the ‘ending’ of a conflict is in itself a problematic issue, and so too
therefore is the concept of ‘post-conflict development’ and reconstruction.
Both these perspectives are joined by one key commonality – the belief
that war is the midwife of stable nation states, and it is the lack of such
stability in various parts of the world that provides us with most of our
problems. So we must look in every case at the underlying rationale for
development and what makes for a successful nation in itself as a prelude
to seeing what might go wrong with the process of ‘state-building’ or
even ‘nation-building’.
The botched ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq will stand as the key case study that
will inform all attempts at nation-building for the foreseeable future. It
has been pointed out by Stiglitz (2008) that the cost of the war to the
American taxpayer (with the attendant lost opportunity cost for American
education, health care and other policy areas) has been, after five years of
fighting, over $3 trillion. The cost to Iraqis, in terms of their development
and levels of life, has been arguably even worse since the first American
intervention in 1991. One calculation has Iraqi per capita income
dropping from $2,279 in 1984 to $627 in 1991 and $450 by 1995, and
levels like those of Madagascar and Rwanda immediately before the 2003
war (Ismael and Ismael 2005: 613). Toby Dodge has pointed to the
‘neo-conservative’ belief that the United States would inherit a
functioning Iraqi state, while it in fact collapsed with the invasion (Dodge
2006: 188). Charles Tripp goes further and suggests that the Iraqi state
had in effect collapsed far earlier than 2003 and the looting of ministries
was just the final act. But he also postulates that the Iraqi ‘shadow state’,
organised along local lines of patronage, has since 2003 been able to
organise a ‘headless’ insurgency that has tied Coalition troops down and
150 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

further degraded the lives of ordinary Iraqis to catastrophic levels. There

is, he postulates, no democracy to defend (Tripp, Le Monde 2008, quoted
in a lecture at St Andrews University, 22 February 2008).
So what might be done to address these dilemmas? One way is to look
back in the ‘toolbox’ and ask what we have used in the past. Should the
aim be to allow state-building in the developing world to progress
independently of outside interference, if Münkler’s point about the need
for ‘clinical’ conditions is to be met? One idea from the Cold War period
is that of ‘self-reliance’, a decoupling from globalisation and a deliberate
development of indigenous industry at the expense of manufactured
imports, as was suggested in the ‘New International Economic Order’ of
the 1970s in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
(UNCTAD). But how would self-reliance stop the determined ‘new’
warlord intent on extracting his Coltan or diamonds from a decrepit
African state (Pugh and Cooper 2004)? On the other hand, there is much
to be said for Galtung’s point that the terms of trade that this exchange
implies (southern commodities for manufactured products from the west),
means there is ‘an enduring acceptance of a long-term inferior position in
which it will be difficult to satisfy the basic needs of local people’
(Galtung, paraphrased by Jeong 1999: 36).
In Chapter 6 it is hoped to take on these challenges and suggest how
peace might conceivably be brought to developing countries by surveying
approaches that attempt to examine the root, and especially the economic
causes and consequences of conflict to try and resolve deep-rooted
processes both locally (from below) and from above through institutional
action.

Summary

● The concept and practice of ‘reconstruction’ over many years has left it with a
problematic image that cannot easily be repaired.
● Concepts and practices like state-building and nation-building give rise to
questions about the motivations and practices of those who try and
implement them.
● One-size-fits-all approaches to reconstruction are unlikely to lead to optimal
peacebuilding outcomes.
● Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) as well as security
sector reform (SSR) lie at the heart of most, if not all, attempts at
post-conflict reconstruction and are in themselves problematic.
 Post-conflict reconstruction and development • 151

● The international community needs to take more notice of the specific

cultural and other needs and constraints of any particular situation before
embarking on reconstruction attempts.

Discussion questions

1 Why has reconstruction had such an uneven reputation for

effectiveness in the past decade or so?
2 Should the international community or powerful states attempt to
‘reconstruct’ economies and polities after wars?
3 What is wrong, or right, with the proposition that democratising a
country will bring about a stable peace there?
4 What are the main features of the practices known as DDR and SSR?
5 How might the international community approach the question of
reconstruction better in the future?

Further reading

Some of the best recent discussions of the problems and potential of

reconstruction can be found in Barakat, S. (ed.) (2004) Reconstructing War-Torn
Societies: Afghanistan, London: Palgrave Macmillan, and Barakat, S. (ed.)
(2005b) After the Conflict: Reconstruction and development in the aftermath of
conflict, London: I.B. Tauris. The following is also very useful: Caplan, R. (2005)
International Governance of War-Torn Territories: Rule and reconstruction,
Oxford: Oxford University Press. The best defence of recent reconstruction
attempts in Afghanistan and Iraq are Dobbins, J., Jones, S.G., Crane, K. and Cole
DeGrasse, B. (2007) The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building, Santa Monica,
CA: Rand Corporation and Dobbins, J., McGinn, J.G., et al. (2003) America’s
Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, Santa Monica, CA: Rand
Corporation. The best short single criticism of this is Dodge, T. (2006) Iraq: the
contradictions of exogenous state-building in historical perspective, Third World
Quarterly 27(1): 187–200. The best introductions to DDR and SSR are Gomes
Porto, J. with Alden, C. and Parsons, I. (2007) From Soldiers to Citizens:
Demilitarisation of conflict and society, Aldershot: Ashgate, and Ozerdem, A.
(2008) Becoming Civilian: Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration,
London: I.B. Tauris, as well as Fitz-Gerald, A.M. and Mason, H. (eds) (2005)
From Conflict to Community: A combatant’s return to citizenship, Shrivenham:
Global Facilitation Network for Security Sector Reform.
152 • Post-conflict reconstruction and development

Useful websites

Details of current conflicts and wars can be found at Peace and Conflict Website,
University of Uppsala, www.pcr.uu.se. Some details of important peace accords
can be found at ‘Taif Accord’ in Lebanon (1989, www.al-bab.com/arab/docs/
lebanon/taif.htm) and the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland of 1998
(www.nio.gov.uk/the-agreement). Some key reconstruction agencies can be
found at the following sites: European Agency for Reconstruction
(www.ear.eu.int/home/); Department for International Development (UK)
www.dfid.gov.uk/. On the UN’s thinking on DDR, see the Brahimi Report of
2000 (www.un.org/peace/reports/peace_operations/) and the United Nations
Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR, www.unidir.org/html/en/
home.html). GFN-SSR can be found at www.ssrnetwork.net/.
 6 Development, aid
and violent conflict

Introduction: how are aid and conflict prevention linked concepts?

Before the end of the Cold War and the (re-)emergence of ideas of
conflict management and resolution and reconstruction, which were the
subject of Chapters 4 and 5, for a long time it had been believed that ‘aid’
would help developing countries to overcome their ‘development’ and
‘conflict’ problems in the broad senses of these terms. Even today some
standard texts on conflict have very little mention of aid in their indexes,
good as they may be in other respects. But since the end of the Cold War
that omission makes increasingly less sense. The characteristics of the
wars that we have identified have now put humanitarian agencies in the
front line, not only as distributors of conventional aid, such as foodstuffs,
but also as potential participants, along with conventional government
agencies and military forces, and paramilitary actors in rebuilding ‘failed
states’ (Ghani and Lockhart 2008). The actors that try to help alleviate the
suffering of those increasingly caught up in current wars are collectively
the ‘humanitarians’ in Hoffman and Weiss’s (2006) term. ‘External
assistance’ has become vitally important for both governments and IGOs,
and it has also become big business for firms who disburse or build
infrastructure for the disbursement of aid and other economic help
(Boyce and O’Donnell 2007). One important question that all who now
study the conflict–development nexus are now asking is whether they can
provide any kind of solution to the evident suffering of developing
countries’ populations, or whether they are indeed part of the problem.
154 • Development, aid and violent conflict

The most obvious victims of wars in developing countries are civilians,

but so are also those who attempt to help them. Hoffmann and Weiss
point out that not only are ‘the victims of war . . . the actors’ intended
targets’, but also ‘[h]umanitarian organizations have reacted to the new
wars but have not adapted’ (Hoffmann and Weiss 2006: xvi–xvii). Other
writers go further and see the aid agencies as part of both a new pattern of
global governance by the North whereby the populations of the South are
made to feel their ‘exclusion’ in new ways and to enforce the ideological
precepts of the liberal peace, in effect as agents of a new ‘imperialism’.
According to this view, underdevelopment has come to be seen as a
security threat, not just a humanitarian disgrace, and consequently all
those who try to correct this insecurity are in effect complicit in such a
logic (Duffield 2001, 2007; Easterly 2006). Equally problematic, these
and other observers see aid as actually fuelling wars, keeping them going.
Carolyn Nordstrom reports a conversation she had in Angola with a local
youth during the civil war – ‘Peace? Forget it, there’s too much money
being made here’ (Nordstrom 2004: 191) – as one example of such
feelings.

We have therefore chosen to extract the idea of ‘aid’ from our wider
discussion of conflict in developing countries, because we believe that,
as with issues of gender, health and other ‘personal’ issues, the
problematic of aid’s motivations and delivery gives us a powerful series of
perspectives on what is right or wrong with current approaches to conflict
and development. So aid provides another link to understanding the
dynamics of conflict. It is usually seen as being part of a wider attempt to
arm societies against negative influences – to develop their economies
and in particular to help them pursue liberal democratic peace strategies.
Before 1990, it was often a part of Cold War strategy in the war of the
two blocs. Since 1990, aid has been seen as using the ‘anticipated “peace
dividend” to repair the ravages of the superpower competition in many
war-torn and conflict-prone societies’ (Forman and Patrick 2000: 2) and
as an integral part of the liberal peace tool kit (Marriage 2008: 5–6).

The purpose and history of aid

The purpose of aid has been defined, first, as an

international social contract . . . a broad understanding amongst
developed countries that, in order for the world to be, or to be seen to
be, a moderately equitable place, or at least to alleviate some of the
 Development, aid and violent conflict • 155

worst suffering, there needs to be some form of international

assistance.
(Hunt 2004a)

Janet Hunt points out that, as well as this laudable aim, ‘[m]any donors
provide aid not only for humanitarian reasons, but to enhance their own
economic and political interests, through encouraging their own exports,
or shaping the economic policies or political persuasion of recipient
countries’ (Hunt 2004a: 67). It could be seen as yet another weapon in the
arsenal of ‘economic statecraft’, to use the famous phrase coined by
David Baldwin (1985).

So, aid has never been an unproblematic issue. Like all the other concepts
we have used in this book, arguments in favour of and against aid have
tended to be couched in evolving conceptual discussions, often more to
do with the politics and economics of the West than any objective analysis
of what is best for developing countries themselves. They were supposed
to be grateful for whatever they could get.

Aid in historical perspective

In one of its first formulations as a result of the Marshall Plan (the full
title of which was the European Recovery Program, initiated by the US
Foreign Assistance Act of 1948), ‘Marshall Aid’ was open to the same
criticisms as those levelled against ‘reconstruction’ more recently. It was
seen as politically motivated, with strings attached which tied the
recipient into an economic and political system that they did not
necessarily want, and it was often only a sticking plaster on a big wound.
Nonetheless, until the 1970s ‘aid’ was seen by non-Marxists as a largely
unproblematic extension of the idea of ‘charity’, helping out those less
fortunate than oneself. As a child, I was told that any food I did not eat
would be sent by parcel to help the ‘poor children of Africa’. But in the
1970s that critique got more intellectually acute; it was now asserted that
aid gave rise to ‘dependency’ and that was as a bad a thing in LDCs as it
was on the streets of London. Peter Bauer revived the idea that trade, not
aid, was the key to development. He saw the positive examples of
countries like Singapore and other newly industrialised countries (NICs)
forging ahead by opening up their economies and the progressive
sclerosis affecting the socialist developing countries and those who still
put their faith in handouts from the rich countries (Bauer 1991). This
view was, and is, unpopular in some quarters – the Guardian described
156 • Development, aid and violent conflict

him as ‘the shrillest Thatcherite spokesman against development aid for

the third world’ (Roth 2002).
Both superpowers used the idea of ‘aid’ in their own ways to buy
influence in the newly emerging developing world. The Soviet Union set
up ‘radial’ trade and development agreements (so called as they radiated
from the hub of the Soviet Union), of which one of the most notorious
was the provision of cultural, industrial and security assistance (including
nuclear arms) to Communist Cuba, in return for Cuba providing much of
the Soviet Union’s needs for sugar, tobacco and a security base in the
Caribbean. The United States provided huge amounts of Marshall Aid to
western Europe and followed that up with technical assistance, soft loans,
etc. as well as military ‘advice’. This activity was predicated on the
American success in rebuilding its own economy after the Great
Depression. It also fell away after the debacle in Vietnam in 1975 and the
rise of the new economic orthodoxy of free markets epitomised by
President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,
as will be explored further below (Ekbladh 2006; Sutton 2006).

The economics and politics of aid: the case for intervention

in developing countries

In the context of a book like this, a first set of questions about the case for
intervention has to take into account both the economic and the political.
These have tended to be put into separate disciplinary boxes, but such an
approach can be seen as one-sided and prone to leading us into many
misapprehensions and misconceptions.

The economic case for intervention

British Labour Party politician, Jack Straw, summed up why there is a

widespread belief that poverty and conflict overlap:
Look at where there are people living in poverty, on less than $3 a day
and where there is conflict. The overlap is an exact fit. And look at
where people live in prosperity and lack of conflict. Again the fit is
exact.
(Straw, BBC Radio 4, 10 February 2007)

Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty (2005), billed by Time

Magazine, in both 2004 and 2005, and proclaimed on his own website as
 Development, aid and violent conflict • 157

‘one of the hundred most influential people’ on the planet and ‘the world’s
best known economist’ (Sachs n.d.) echoed this in his 2007 BBC Reith
Lectures:
War can . . . erupt as a result of the collapse of an impoverished
society, one suffering the scourges of drought, hunger, lack of jobs,
and lack of hope. Ending poverty is therefore a basic matter of our
own security.
Darfur, Somalia, Afghanistan. These are all, at their core, wars of
extreme poverty. So too, quite obviously, were the recent wars of
Liberia, Sierra Leone, Haiti, and many others. The U.S. has just
established a new military command in Africa, declaring Africa to
pose new security threats to the U.S. But even as the U.S. spends more
than $600 billion on the military, and even as U.S. counterinsurgency
forces spread out across the impoverished stretches of the Sahel, the
U.S. will never achieve peace if it continues to spend less than one
hundredth of the [U.S.] military budget on Africa’s economic
development. An army can never pacify a hungry, disease ridden, and
impoverished population.
(Sachs 2007)
In much of the writing on development there is an implicit or explicit
reference to the economic causes of conflict that have made it necessary,
or to the potential healing power of economic action. Initially, all of these
explanations ask what is it that makes for, in David Landes’ (1998) term,
the ‘wealth and poverty of nations’? His essential point is incontestable –
states and regions are differently endowed with economic assets and
resources by virtue of nature’s distribution of wealth. Landes points to the
now somewhat discredited, but still valid, axiom that ‘geography,
especially climate, influence[es] human development’ (Landes 1998: 3).
It has been crudely suggested that hot climates can lead to less ardour in
the work place and the ‘productivity of labor in tropical countries was
reduced accordingly’, a form of nineteenth-century environmental
determinism that many would find distasteful. Disease, high morbidity,
especially among infants, and poor water supplies have added to this
obvious burden (Landes 1998: Chapter 1; see also Chapter 1 of this
volume for more discussion on the human side of underdevelopment).
Classical economists (of whom Landes is one) give us to believe that
states emerge from a natural process of a locally and internationally
optimal allocation of resources, including land, capital and labour. Hence
‘mature’ economies have tended to go through a process of development.
What is wrong with this? First, the ‘mature’ economies’ all flourished in
war and peace under a strong protective shield during their early
158 • Development, aid and violent conflict

development, whereas in contemporary times most of the least developed

countries (LDCs) have been urged to compete in international markets
without such a benefit. Second (and more importantly), societies do not
just get to choose their economic policies in a rational way. Some
societies, like Switzerland, have managed to survive and prosper in spite
of having virtually no economic advantages – mostly low grade and
mountainous land areas, endowed with poor natural resources, afflicted by
linguistic and religious difficulties and surrounded by powerful and
unfriendly neighbours, all factors that have on occasion engendered
serious civil strife. Yet there are others, like Nigeria and Russia, that are
endowed with enormous natural resource bases and educated populations
that seem to be in a state of perpetual strife. Some slightly ‘populist’
economists like Jared Diamond point to societies that implode through
ecological hubris and even ‘passivity’ faced with overwhelming
challenges. Size is on some occasions a benefit and on others a problem
(Diamond 2005).
Of course, globalisation might be said to have exacerbated both the
differences and the potential benefits and disadvantages of such initial
economic profiles. In the first wave of globalisation in the nineteenth
century, this became concretised in an imperial relationship often based
on economic exploitation. In its earlier manifestations, in the nineteenth
century, globalisation has been identified by historians as being
categorised as being ‘archaic, proto-modern and post-colonial’
(Hopkins 2002).
In the latest wave of globalisation since the Second World War, the
economic relationship has arguably not changed much, but has been
replaced by a ‘centre–periphery’ relationship often based on the ‘centre’
being well endowed with capital and technology and the periphery with a
wealth of primary resources and cheap labour. This is not a problem, or
indeed a surprise to classical economists, but of course it does create
tensions that often come out in apportioning blame for both
underdevelopment and the ensuing conflict. Scholars have asked
repeatedly whether globalisation therefore leads to the ‘convergence or
divergence’ of societies and economies (Hülsemeyer 2003)?

Is it all about ‘economic readjustment’?

One of the major recent wings of ‘liberal peace’ theory has been that
which talks about ‘greed and grievance’, a theme taken up at some length
 Development, aid and violent conflict • 159

in Chapter 1. The debate about whether the pursuit of market reform

helps or hinders development in LDCs was shown in that chapter to hinge
on whether the market alleviates one of the main causes of conflict, which
we identified as being poverty. The encouragement of trade plays a
significant role in liberal thinking about comparative advantage (Adam
Smith 1776), as well as in the idea that trade links encourage peace (Mill,
Bright etc.). As Jacoby has succinctly put it: ‘[l]iving freely is thus trading
freely’ (Jacoby 2007: 524). So what is, potentially at least, wrong with the
assumption that if we get the economics of an LDC emerging from war
right, we will then get the politics right too?
To put it in a nutshell, if the recipients (or ‘beneficiaries’) of market
reforms are of the clear opinion that they will not be better off as a result
of them, they will tend to lump together their sense of grievance, from
whatever source that comes, with the message that their main persecution
comes from a capitalist, globalised world system. If they are then told that
they must comply with a policy of ‘reconstruction’ they will then reject
the whole package. So, as with the causes, escalation and maintenance of
conflict (Pugh and Cooper 2004) outlined in Chapter 1, so with the
attempts to end it. We will explore the reasoning of why intervention

Plate 14 Repairing war-damaged housing in Bosnia: who should pay for this,
and what role should private enterprise play?
160 • Development, aid and violent conflict

might end up making conflict worse rather than better with a more
in-depth examination of the economic arguments below.
In contrast to the ‘Keynesian’ interventionist, import-substitution,
economic policies pursued by western states and the IGOs alike until
about 1980, a policy based on much more unfettered free-market
principles prevailed. This is often referred to as ‘Reaganomics’ (after
President Ronald Reagan, 1980–8), and was also espoused by UK Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher (who served between 1979 and 1990). This
policy had profound effects not only on domestic economic policies across
the west, but also in their impact on the thinking of international
institutions like the World Bank and the IMF in the 1980s and in the
promotion of export-led growth by LDCs. Forceful economic arguments
against direct aid were made by writers like Bauer (1991), who claimed it
led to a form of welfare dependency similar to that experienced by benefit-
dependent dwellers in western inner-city areas. But the main drivers were
political and came from Washington and London. The key effect was to
limit the granting of direct aid and to make all loans dependent on political
and economic ‘conditionality’. The result was a weakening of many
developing countries’ economies, so that the end of the Cold War and the
withdrawal of bilateral Soviet or American aid often led to their total
collapse rather than the hoped-for transition to democracy.

More recent thinking about the links between conflict,

development and the need to help struggling developing
economies
In 2007, the Reith lecture given by Jeffrey Sachs summed up what might
be called the most recent version of the ‘classical’ view on the links
between aid, development and conflict:
Why does Africa lag? Here is where the scientific evidence on
extreme poverty is vital. The overwhelming non-scientific assumption
held in our societies is that Africa suffers mainly from the corruption
and mismanagement of its leaders. With the viciousness and
despotism of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, it’s an understandable
view. Yet this seemingly self-evident view is wrong as a
generalization. Zimbabwe may get the headlines, but there are many
countries in Africa, like Tanzania and Mozambique just nearby, that
have talented and freely elected governments struggling against
poverty. But they too face great obstacles, and their people too
continue to suffer from extreme deprivation.
(Sachs 2007)
 Development, aid and violent conflict • 161

The logic that this has inspired is that deprivation must be tackled by
external intervention. One obvious way has been by various educational
programmes to provide all children in developing countries with access to
a laptop computer, to NGO activity to spread knowledge about the likely
vectors of the AIDs virus and to help the ‘sustainable development’ that
western agencies believe will enable LDCs to grow while respecting the
environment. In war-torn societies such intervention has most obviously
been by direct international assistance. Writers like Mary B. Anderson
believe that in certain circumstances, aid can indeed support
peacebuilding activities, but that carelessly applied aid will encourage
damaging resource transfers and in effect disempower local people from
taking control of their own destinies – summed up as ‘do no harm’,
perhaps a newer version of Bauer’s strictures on the dangers of welfare
dependency (Anderson 1999). Her ideas have certainly struck a chord
with those who believe that local solutions to local problems are more
likely to be workable and effective than ones imposed by outsiders. It
would also be true to say that the freemarketeers (like Bauer) have largely
won the day on aid, in that it is now appreciated that throwing money into
economies that are incapable of using it in productive ways is not very
sensible. But it is also appreciated that aid that goes into countries that are
deemed to have a track record of sound market-oriented policies is able to
deliver effective, sustained policy reforms. Of course this illustrates how
we can see aid as another support for the overarching ideology of the
liberal peace.
It also has been widely decided by western policymakers and IGOs that,
as we stated at the beginning of this chapter and earlier in the book, the
experiences of the 1990s (especially the abortive intervention in Somalia)
and the subsequent events after 9/11 show that development is now a
security issue. There was ‘a mounting perception and articulation that
underdevelopment was dangerous and that – by implication – raising the
level of development would increase security in the country and
ultimately globally’ (Schnabel and Carment 2004, Vol. 2).
Hence much aid in the 1990s and since started to be directed towards
DDR programmes with the aim of increasing ‘human security’, an ideal
of seeing development and security as closely interlinked, which is an
unexceptional statement but which needs much greater clarity to
operationalise. The concept is often explicitly linked to conflict
prevention, with the idea that if the population’s security needs can be
provided for, the rest of their economic and social existence will be
ensured. Aid and conflict prevention measures in general should therefore
162 • Development, aid and violent conflict

‘focus on long-term, structural challenges to build safe, just and stable

societies’ (Schnabel and Carment 2004, Vol. 2: 109–31). One criticism
that can be levelled against the concept is that it also seems to have an
inherent belief that basic ‘human needs’ can indeed be identified, a claim
that we have seen in relation to conflict resolution techniques and
proposals in Chapter 4. Other commentators on human security are not
sanguine as to its usefulness. Marriage comments that it could be seen as
so ‘infinitely elastic’ a concept as to be ‘analytically unhelpful. None the
less – or maybe because of this – its popularity in policy-making circles
has been more enduring’ (Marriage 2008: 4, 6; see also Duffield 2001).

The organisation of aid

Partly inspired by this new policy paradigm, since the end of the Cold
War a ‘humanitarian network’ has emerged to deal with both the results
of conflicts and aid and reconstruction efforts alike. Since the start of the
‘War on Terror’ in 2001, conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere also
show that the delivery of aid for purely humanitarian reasons has become
in effect even more subordinate to geopolitics than it was during the Cold
War. One example is President Bush’s statement in 2003 ‘Can we have the
first bombs we drop be [ones that contain] food?’ (sic, Keen 2008: 117).
Marriage (2008: 2) comments that ‘there is abundant evidence that the
motivations of donors are mixed and that aid and other interventions are
often tempered with blindness or misunderstanding’. What, for example,
has been the net result of the huge amount of aid that has been, and
continues to be, pumped into the Palestinian territories for the local
population? How can it be effective when the macro-political situation
(the failed Oslo Accords, the Intifada, and the brutal simmering war
between Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah) means that the aid funds which
were intended to bolster the peace process are often of limited effect.
Chris Wake paraphrases President Bill Clinton on this case – ‘no peace
deal can be sustainable if it does not genuinely respond to the needs of
everyday people’ (Wake 2008: 109).
The actors in the delivery of aid are also those present in the full-blown
reconstruction efforts discussed in Chapter 5. Donors and deliverers of aid
can be bilateral or multilateral, most usually charitable and sometimes
denominational. Humanitarian aid can be delivered by both NGO and IGO
organisations as well as, most notably, by the International Committee of
the Red Cross, which also aims to provide assistance and protection of
civilians through the long-established Geneva Conventions. The UN
 Development, aid and violent conflict • 163

coordinates its activities through the United Nations Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA: http://ochaonline.un.org/).
Hoffman and Weiss (2006) refer to this as a ‘humanitarian network’,
which encompasses a constellation of national, IGO, NGO and private
contractors that surround a ‘country in crisis, with its own Government,
local NGOs and victims/recipients of aid’ (Hoffman and Weiss 2006:
122).
The operation of this network obviously varies from case to case. In some
areas there will be a great deal of NGO activity, in others very little, as
when there is a very poor security situation. To take a particular case
study, that of Sierra Leone, here all the above actors were (and are)
present in a conflict which is both regional, in that it affects the whole of
West Africa, but also with specific elements due to the nature of the
country and area. The (maybe only provisional) ending of the civil war
was particularly engineered by the UK’s armed forces and the post-war
situation by the UK’s development agencies and aid disbursers, although
the United States has funded and mainly runs the UN Special Court for
Sierra Leone, seen as a major part of the post-war reconciliation process
(see Chapter 4). NGOs in Sierra Leone and in the proximate attempts
being made in Liberia have made great strides in bringing ‘human
security’ to the populations of these two states. No one would dispute the
need to get rid of the appalling regimes of Charles Taylor in Liberia and
Foday Sankoh in Sierra Leone (Atkinson 2008). But surely it would be
prudent to say that the installation of democratic governments in these
two places as a result of the expenditure of huge amounts of money by
western states has not really addressed the underlying problems of these
countries, which are not so much about democracy but about economic
and social hardship and inequality.
One sure conclusion that has to be drawn from the present stage of
capitalist development is that where there is no viable state structure the
vacuum will tend to be filled by external and internal groups, usually
armed to the teeth, and by the immense monetary capabilities of
transnational corporations, who will do practically anything to ensure
access to their raw material needs. The most obvious example of this is
the trade in ‘blood’ or ‘conflict diamonds’, a subject that has spawned
Hollywood films but has yet to produce any obviously effective codes of
conduct for the extraction and end use of such products, ones which not
only grace the necks and hands of some of the most beautiful women in
the West, but also lead to the hacking off of equally beautiful necks and
hands of women in Africa (see Box 6.1).
164 • Development, aid and violent conflict

Box 6.1

Blood diamonds and Sierra Leone

The state of Sierra Leone, well endowed with natural resources, including
diamonds, but with a succession of weak and corrupt governments, imploded with
the end of the Cold War and the emergence of warlords like Foday Sankoh (and
Charles Taylor in nearby Liberia) who used terror to extract and monopolise the
exploitation of ‘blood’ diamonds. The international community recognised that
markets in the west made such terror profitable and instigated the ‘Kimberley
Process’ to identify and control such processes. This can be seen as being a useful
and ‘positive start . . . but only a start’. The key variable has to be seen as the need
for a regional, or even global, and not purely national, solution to the
dissemination of such materials. The links between the illegal and violent export
of such goods has even been explicitly linked into the funding of globally focused
groups like Al-Qaeda (Grant and Taylor 2004: 399). Maybe this will be what
finally leads to their control, not the suffering of the Sierra Leonean and West
African population in general. Sankoh was overthrown, but an uneasy truce is all
that can be said to be holding.
Sources: Grant and Taylor (2004), Richards and Vincent (2008)

Below we will consider another, more radical, interpretation, that in fact

the international community is responsible for the acceptance of a global
and regional political economy that both encourages and supports local
warlords in their freelance capitalism. Humanitarian action in that case
could be only a slight panacea for a much deeper problem of governance
on a global scale.

The problems of aid dispersal

From the 1960s to the 1990s states and international organisations like the
World Food Programme (www.wfp.org/english/), the World Bank and the
IMF, became the key distributors of aid, increasingly backed up and after
1990 increasingly supported by NGOs like OXFAM. This distinction
between Official Development Assistance (ODA) was intended to go up
to 1 per cent of gross national product (GNP) by a UN target established
in the 1980s. However, OECD countries’ contributions had, by the end of
the 1980s, increased to only about 0.36 per cent of GNP, though with the
honourable exceptions of states, especially in Scandinavia, that have
managed to donate up to 0.7 per cent. These sums were often dependent
 Development, aid and violent conflict • 165

on economic changes, such as the application of structural adjustment

programmes, and political conditionalities, such as crack-downs on
corruption and the implementation of election monitoring. Furthermore,
in many cases promises of aid were only partially delivered (Forman
and Patrick 2000). Marc Williams’ comment of 1994 that ‘no clear
standards exist by which to measure aid effectiveness and to determine
under what conditions aid is likely to promote growth’ (M. Williams
1994: 22–3) is still true today. In spite of this, it is often believed that aid
will alleviate poverty and help to solve the conundrum outlined above by
Jeffrey Sachs.
Why is this? First, aid cannot be delivered without security and without
corruption. This applies as much to the providers of aid, like the United
Nations, as to the receivers. It has been suggested that in effect an ‘aid
economy’ grows up in parallel to a ‘war economy’, ‘where the focus is not
so much on benefiting from violence as it is on taking advantage of efforts
to relieve suffering’ (Hoffman and Weiss 2006: 107). In some conflicts,
such as Bosnia and Afghanistan, maybe in most, aid can fall into the hands
of warlords who exploit their position on the ground in an insecure
environment to extort ‘protection money’ from aid agencies (Goodhand
2004). Second, in purely economic terms, an obvious unintended result of
providing (for example) many tons of free foodstuffs to alleviate a famine
situation is to make local production of such foodstuffs uneconomic.
Third, aid agencies tend to create distortions in local employment patterns,
as they can offer better salaries to drivers and translators as well as a more
general workforce than the local economy can. In some cases, like the
Palestinian Authority (PA), virtually the whole economy has become
dependent on outside assistance for public sector salaries and, in that case,
two-thirds of all government expenditures (Boyce and O’Donnell 2007:
200). Here aid is a positive incentive to corruption, which has arguably had
unforeseen political results, including the rise of Hamas as an alternative
to the PA in one section of Palestine (the Gaza Strip) and the consequent
breaking up of that proto-state (see Box 5.2).
Hoffman and Weiss (2006) argue that recent thinking among western
governments about the role of the private and public sectors (outlined
above as a post-Keynesian consensus) has even led to aid being
‘privatised’ to some extent, to the point where for-profit organisations have
been deployed in an effort to eradicate some of the ‘inefficiencies’ of the
UN and public sector organisations. This has led to some ‘murky’ deals
being struck to deliver security in many developing country conflict zones.
They can certainly respond more successfully and quickly, where the UN
166 • Development, aid and violent conflict

Box 6.2

External assistance and aid to the Palestinian

Authority

Part of the peace process that has been under way since the Oslo Accords of 1993
(see Chapter 4) has involved the emergence of an internationally sponsored
Palestinian Authority, that it is hoped will one day emerge as part of a ‘two-state’
solution for Israel and Palestine. The economic assistance given to the PA has
been multifaceted and from many sources, including the UN, the EU and a
number of individual governments as well as many NGOs. It has been estimated
at $8 billion between 1994 and 2004. In 2005 $3 billion more was promised for
the following three years and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was
appointed in 2007 to improve the financial and economic performance of
Palestine. GDP per capita has certainly risen since 1993 under the impact of such
aid, but is still low by the standards of the Middle East ($1,493 in 2002). This has
since dropped to $934 in 2004 under the impact of a renewed Intifada, and recent
figures will be much lower still as the peace process has stalled. The key problem
is one of a huge dependency on Israel for both access to export markets and
imports, a corollary of huge dislike towards Israel, and massive corruption, an
issue exploited by Hamas in its attacks on the PLO leadership in Gaza. The lack
of any discernible improvement of the lot of ordinary people has increasingly
pushed them, mainly out of desperation, into violent support for Hamas and other
uncompromising political groups, which are often backed by outside powers like
Syria and Iran. The area is a good example of the ‘geopolitics of aid’ discussed by
Keen (2008) and the need for a regional political and economic approach as
discussed by Pugh and Cooper (2004).
Sources: Pugh and Cooper (2004), Boyce and O’Donnell (2007: Chapter 7), Keen (2008)

might have to wait for years in a search for a consensus on a mandate (as is
now happening in Darfur for example where the Security Council cannot
agree on what form of intervention to authorise), but of course they risk
suffering from a lack of legitimacy as they are seen for what they are,
profit-making enterprises (Hoffman and Weiss 2006: 152–3).
There is also a clear problem of ‘turf wars’ developing between IGOs,
NGOs and governments. In what David Keen (2008) aptly describes as
‘complex emergencies’, having so many players on the field is bound to
lead to them duplicating each other, competing for scarce resources, in
effect themselves becoming part of the system that is a civil war. One
solution that has been suggested that maybe helps address this problem
harks back to an older model. Rather than country-based policies, we
 Development, aid and violent conflict • 167

arguably need regional policies, as with the Marshall Plan for Europe, or
indeed the UNRRA, the first UN organisation that dispersed aid and
helped displaced people on a global scale in the period 1943–6 (see
Williams 2006: 113–22). After all, the ‘new’ wars do not respect national
boundaries any more than ‘old’ ones did, and the economic issues of the
regions affected have much in common (as in Western Africa) (Pugh and
Cooper 2004: 80 and passim).
A final initial point for consideration might also be that it has to be asked
if the weakest are not in effect the least protected? Tales of rape and child
abuse have surfaced in a number of UN-run or sponsored camps in recent
years, as far apart as Bosnia and Sierra Leone. The problem has been
recognised as acute by refugee advocacy groups like Refugees
International (www.refugeesinternational.org/content/article/detail/
10276/). In addition ‘non-standard’ refugees tend to get the least attention
from aid disbursement agencies partly because of their lifestyle, but also
partly because of their evident poverty and lack of ‘clout’. Keen’s
research in an earlier Sudanese conflict (in 1984–5) led him to believe
that pastoralists (who are a very common population group in much of
Africa) and rural dwellers generally get the worst deal in terms of
distribution and help, as do more generally disfavoured sections of any
society. The telling parallel he believes is that of the relief so badly
delivered to New Orleans in 2005 (where most people who were
neglected were black), or to Thailand and Sri Lanka after the tsunami
disaster of 2004 where aid was much better delivered to town dwellers
and those living in obviously popular tourist zones (Keen 2008: 121–5).

The problems of protecting aid workers

Another result of the ‘new wars’ and also of the ‘War on Terror’ has been
the breakdown of the idea that ‘host’ governments can or should protect
aid workers to anywhere the same extent that used to be considered
normal. A new phenomenon has emerged, that of the ‘armed
humanitarian’, who is seen by some hostile locals as delivering not only
aid but also a message of alien ‘democracy’ and western mores. For a
conservative Afghan elder, bringing education to the women of his area,
as UNICEF has done for example, is not a ‘neutral’ act; it is one that
threatens his legitimacy as a lawmaker, and the very culture of his society.
More generally we have seen a blurring of the distinction between civil
and military actors, even if we must not forget that such distinctions have
always to some extent existed. The most obvious example of this blurring
168 • Development, aid and violent conflict

Plate 15 Armoured UN vehicles: Aid workers have come under increasing threat
as humanitarianism has become securitised

is the use of private security companies to defend aid workers, and in

many cases to replace regular military forces altogether, as in Iraq
(Kinsey 2009). In the case of Afghanistan, provisional reconstruction
teams (PRTs) have often mixed civilian and other non-military personnel
with soldiers (for more on this see www.rusi.org/publication/whitehall/
ref:I44C63D079FF53/).
As a result journalists, UN staff and other ‘neutrals’ have found that they
are now, like it or not, seen as legitimate targets by warlords. In
Afghanistan and Iraq this has particularly been the case, and the UN
briefly withdrew its entire staff, humanitarian and otherwise, after the car
bomb that killed over forty UN staff in 2003. They can now effectively
operate only from bases inside the security ‘green zone’ in Baghdad.
Médecins sans Frontières withdrew from Afghanistan in 2004 for security
reasons. Almost one in five humanitarian staff surveyed in 2005 had been
a victim of a ‘security incident’ (Buchanan and Muggah 2005). Many
have been killed or kidnapped. Some have suggested that reducing the
dissemination of small arms could help solve the problem (Howard 2008:
44), which seems unlikely given the difficulties that such an enterprise
would pose in, say, Afghanistan, where possession of a weapon is seen as
a basic sign of social status.
 Development, aid and violent conflict • 169

Aid and ‘social subjugation’

In more recent times, the discussion on ‘failed states’ has enlarged the
debate on aid to include a critique of what the underlying motivations of
the west are in granting aid to states like Mozambique and Afghanistan.
One key writer in this mould has been Mark Duffield, whose view is that
the discourses and practices of war and development have in effect
become merged. He sees the old fear of insecurity as a feature of
interstate conflicts having been replaced by a fear of wars within states;
‘the threat of an excluded South fomenting international stability through
conflict, criminal activity and terrorism is now part of a new security
framework. Within this framework underdevelopment has become
dangerous’ (Duffield 2001: 2).
Duffield (2001) further asserts that the distribution of aid reinforces the
position of the dominant local groups who can effectively veto or allow
this distribution. In Sudan, he points out that even before the post-2000
fighting in the west (Darfur) there were 1.8 million displaced persons in
the vicinity of the capital Khartoum and a further 2.2 million in a
‘transition zone’ between the Northern and Southern areas of the country.
This was because the war until that date (and from about 1983) was
between the Northern, latterly ‘Islamicist’ government and the Southern
Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) ‘Christian’ or ‘animist’
movement, until an agreement ended that war. The UN has supposed
responsibility for the welfare of these people, a role that it is hard pressed
to execute given the huge scale of the problem. The majority of the staff
have to be vetted and approved by the government in Khartoum, hardly
the most neutral agency (Duffield 2001: 202–5).
A case study that Duffield highlights in this context is of the huge
numbers of Southern Sudanese Dinka people who have been displaced as
part of the overall process. For him the key to understanding the way
these people are exploited is to see them as making up ‘an integral and
self-supporting labour component of the agrarian and urban economy of
Northern Sudan’ (Duffield 2001: 209). Hence for Duffield ‘aid agency
models . . . are effectively blind to these structures of dominance and
exploitation’ (Duffield 2001: 230). Western governments, he asserts, are
blind to ethnic differences and therefore to the agendas in fact being
pursued by the Northern government to integrate unwilling peoples into
their power structures. The same might be said about the brutality being
shown to the peoples of Darfur since 2003 (though this is beyond
Duffield’s scope) (see Box 5.3). Duffield’s blunt conclusion is that ‘[a]id
170 • Development, aid and violent conflict

Box 6.3

Delivering aid in Darfur

The civil war that erupted in the western province of Sudan known as Darfur in
2003 started with the emergence of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM),
who demanded a similar deal for the area to that achieved (after a long civil war)
by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in the south of the country. The war was
the latest round in a long-standing dispute based on ethnic differences and, in
particular, on the very low level of economic development of the area. The
Government of Sudan (GOS) responded by using helicopter gunships and the
Janjaweed (mounted Arab horsemen) militia that has killed at least
160,000–200,000 people in the subsequent five years. A plethora of UN agencies
led by OCHA (World Food Programme, UNHCR, etc.) has attempted to bring help
to the resulting 1.8 million people displaced internally and 200,000 who have fled
to Chad. Human Rights Watch estimates that a further 160,000 are being denied
aid by the direct actions of the GOS. The EU is also present as the European
Community Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO), as is the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID) organisation that puts its aid figures at $757
million for 2003 and $509 million for 2005 alone. UNHCR and the ICRC, as well
as organisations like the Norwegian Refugee Council, have reported many
eyewitness accounts of GOS atrocities. China has been blamed for flouting UN
Security Council resolutions and providing the GOS with military assistance and
other support, criticisms in many cases backed by high-profile celebrities like
George Clooney and Steven Spielberg. ICRC, among other, aid workers have been
killed (as in Sirba on 13 February 2008). The EU and African Union are trying to
put a peacekeeping force in place, but the maximum that is allowed by the GOS is
10,000, for an area the size of France. The force lacks sufficient helicopters. Jan
Eliason, the UN official trying to coordinate aid and assistance, told the Council in
March 2008 that ‘the situation was getting out of hand’.
Sources: www.usaid.gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/sudan/darfur.html,
http://ec.europa.eu/echo/field/sudan/darfur/index_en.htm and
www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=76715

policy currently reinforces an ethnically structured system of

exploitation’, by refusing to see local complexity and thereby supporting
illiberal regimes in their policies of exploitation (Duffield 2001: 248–54).

Concluding discussion: does aid make conflict worse?

Many of the assumptions about peacebuilding take it as axiomatic that
the development of each country takes a similar course, much in line with
 Development, aid and violent conflict • 171

the classical view of development outlined in this and previous chapters.

Hence, reconstruction that we looked at in Chapter 5 is to install, or
reinstall, proper systems of governance and economic development. Even
those who believe that such peacebuilding methods are beneficial are
aware of the difficulties involved. Roland Paris warns against believing
that ‘war-shattered states can be hurriedly rehabilitated’ (Paris 2004: ix).
We might even worry that aid can actually transform power structures and
facilitate the emergence of warlord politics. This has been seen as the
unhappy experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s and even since the
ousting of the Taliban and the emergence of the UN-backed Karzai
government since 2001 (Goodhand 2004).
As we have seen above, others go much further and blame aid
disbursement for the evolution of predatory capitalism itself and for the
complicity of the international community in its worse excesses. Though
Duffield’s views are certainly at the extreme end of the spectrum of
criticism of current aid policies pursued by western governments, IGOs
and NGOs alike, his main critique is of the underlying logic of a ‘liberal
peace’ paradigm that only sees what it wants to see, supposedly
governments fairly distributing aid to needy people without fear or
ideological favour. This he sees as naive and ultimately self-defeating. In
recent work he has also accused IGOs and development agencies more
broadly of a crude ‘re-packaging of these aims over the past half-century’
that has done nothing to improve the underlying logic or the delivery of
aid on the ground (Duffield 2007: 12). The underlying logic for him has
been to provide a ‘surplus population created through accumulation by
dispossession [that] represents life belonging to capitalism’ (Duffield
2007: 12). In this logic, what is happening in Darfur, for example, is in
the interests of capitalist development but not of the local population.
The critique bears a certain resemblance to those of other writers like
Cramer (2006) and Keen (2008), who perceive a variety of errors that
derive from the West seeing the problems of development as being those
of the aftermath of wars, rather than as due to the problems of a system of
internal exploitation of one group by another in most countries that are
examined. In effect, slavery has been replaced by a different form of
rapacious global capitalism. No solution will, or can, therefore be found
without realising that we need to identify the issues within the political
economies of countries like Sudan before there can be any hope of
addressing the long-term problems of both development and the conflicts
that emerge from this, as the main underlying problems are ones of
governance in developing countries. Neither, as both Cramer (2006) and
172 • Development, aid and violent conflict

Keen (2008) make very clear, can we get far in understanding these
conflicts without an appreciation of the importance of violence in
development. It is, in Keen’s words, a difficult issue of walking the
‘tight-rope between explaining and excusing’ (Keen 2008: 5). Violence
was a great part in the development of western politics and economies; it
is a part of those now undergoing a process of development. Maybe
therefore aid can only ever be a sticking plaster on a necessary process of
self-harm?
Furthermore, these writers all see the issues involved in development as
part of a much wider nexus of liberal governance that perpetuates the
North–South dependencies of the colonial period, except that now the
main agents of dominance are not governments but western multinational
organisations and IGOs that in effect do their bidding, ‘the suppliers,
facilitators and cultural sustainers of inhumanity’ (Duffield 2007, quoting
Slim 1998). The emergence of the New Wars has both facilitated and
been facilitated by the borderless nature of post-Cold War capitalism, to
create what Duffield calls ‘network war’ (Duffield 2001: 260) or Keen
calls ‘abusive war systems’ (Keen 2008: 9). Aid is for them therefore an
essential part of this ‘network’ or ‘system’ and must be reformed along
with them if it is to help resolve or abate conflict.
The vital question therefore has to be whether aid is only a palliative for
much wider problems created by a post-Cold War capitalism that now
finds itself unimpeded by Great Power interests and is helped by the slow
but sure disintegration of local state structures into a system of local
clientelisms that do not respect the borders of national loyalties, but only
the allure of money. The ‘new’ wars have created a new entrepreneurial
class that serves powerful outside capitalist interests (for example in the
extraction of diamonds in West Africa) and is unimpeded by local state
authority. In such a situation aid distribution and the organisation of
refugee assistance just adds more grist to local warlord interests. It might
help assuage the consciences of western governments and their
populations who want to ‘do something’ to help the starving peoples of
the South, but in effect it does the opposite. The botched intervention in
Somalia in the early 1990s may be said to be a paradigmatic example of
that problem.
May we therefore go back to the question that is asked from opposite
perspective by the conservative views of Edward Luttwak and his urging
to ‘give war a chance’ (Luttwak 1999), and the much more radical views
of Cramer and Duffield, or the more moderate views of Keen, Hoffman
and Weiss? Is aid making the conflicts of Africa and elsewhere worse?
 Development, aid and violent conflict • 173

Would it not maybe be better not to distribute aid at all? Is the problem
not the one it has always been – outside interference?
Conversely to follow such advice absolutely would be a counsel of
despair, as countless more people would die as a result. In spite of their
shortcomings, the international community has defined ‘Millennium
Development Goals’. The Group of Eight (G8) rich countries have made
fulsome pledges to reduce poverty. Maybe most important of all, there is
a growing awareness among ordinary people in the west that the problems
of the developing countries are their problems too and they are willing to
support political decisions to help their less fortunate sisters and brothers.
More controversially, new donors are emerging, and especially in the
Middle East and China, who now hold many dollar surpluses as a result
of globalised trade patterns and other factors. But that is for another book
to explore. We have to hope that the debate outlined in this chapter will
throw up some better ideas for the aid debaters of the future.

Summary

● Aid – its delivery and logic – has become a key element in understanding
contemporary conflicts, and their potential transformation, in the developing
world.
● The discussion of aid elicits very different reactions from analysts of
development, often depending on the cases they have studied, but also as a
result of their intellectual and policy approach.
● Aid is not ‘neutral’, either in its political logic or distribution.
● The period since the end of the Cold War has seen aid becoming ‘securitised’.
● The delivery of aid often requires making difficult moral and political
compromises.

Discussion questions

1 Can a consideration of the motives for and the delivery of aid help us
in an understanding of the dynamics of contemporary conflicts and
wars in the developing world?
2 What moral and practical problems are there in the delivery of aid?
3 Does aid help in peacebuilding?
4 Why have aid workers now often become targets in developing country
conflicts?
5 Should we ‘give war a chance’?
174 • Development, aid and violent conflict

Further reading

Boyce, J.K. and O’Donnell, M. (2007) Peace and the Public Purse: Economic
policies for postwar statebuilding, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner. For a general
critique of aid see Duffield, M. (2001) Global Governance and the New Wars:
The merging of development and security, London: Zed Books; Duffield, M.
(2007) Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the world of
peoples, Cambridge: Polity; Keen, D. (2008) Complex Emergencies, Cambridge:
Polity; Easterly, W. (2006) The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to
aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good, London: Penguin.
For a critique of why the international community has gone wrong in its
economic and aid policies towards Africa in particular, see Chabal, P. and Daloz,
J.-P. (1999) Africa Works: Disorder as a political instrument, Oxford: James
Currey; Chabal, P. and Daloz, J.-P. (2006) Culture Troubles: Politics and the
interpretation of meaning, London: Hurst; Cramer, C. (2006) Civil War is Not a
Stupid Thing: Accounting for violence in developing countries, London: Hurst;
Calderisi, R. (2006) The Trouble with Africa: Why foreign aid isn’t working,
London: Macmillan.

Useful websites

A good summary of the current disasters and responses to them can be found at:
‘Relief Web’: www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/doc114?OpenForm. Human security
is best discussed at www.humansecuritybrief.info. The United Nations Office for
the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) can be found at http://
ochaonline.un.org/. The World Food Programme is at www.wfp.org/english/.
Some useful websites on the crises in Darfur in Sudan: www.usaid.gov/locations/
sub-saharan_africa/sudan/darfur.html, http://ec.europa.eu/echo/field/sudan/
darfur/index_en.htm, www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=76715.
 Conclusion

This book and the reflections on conflict and development contained

therein are intended to give those who are relatively new to the fields of
both conflict and development a better idea about the debates that we
consider to be the most important in understanding the relationship
between them. We are also aware that we cannot and will not have
satisfied all those who read it, as the debates we have summarised are
neither the only conceivable ones we could have considered nor by any
means those that some would have chosen to emphasise. We are also
aware that there are many different approaches that we could have taken,
from purely relating what the international development organisations
have been doing in conflict zones in an uncritical manner, through to a
hard-line ‘critical’ approach that would take as its point of departure the
premise that all western governments and international organizations are
primarily concerned with continuing their former imperialist ventures in a
postcolonial environment. To be sure, we have to state quite honestly that
we rather veer towards the latter position than towards the former, a
tendency that is shown by our privileging of certain discourses rather than
others. But we would also admit that without IGOs there can be no
delivery of better policies, without western governments there cannot on
the whole be resources and organisational abilities made available to
deliver those policies, and without some form of self-interest being
manifest there will be no incentive to think about what these policies
might be. Globalisation has indeed produced the curious antipathies,
synergies and disjunctures in thinking and action about development
noted here by Mark Duffield, David Keen and many others. We all need to
understand what those relationships are if we are to improve our game in
both the analysis of conflict and the processes of development.

So the approach we have taken in this book has been one premised on the
idea that there are serious problems with the way that the twin issues of
176 • Conclusion

development and the conflict which is so often attendant on that long and
painful process are thought about. We fully accept that there has been a
huge amount of good will and effort put in over many decades by
development economists, workers in international organisations, and even
politicians, at every level of the global system to try and ameliorate the
conditions of underdevelopment and war in which so many of the people
on this planet exist. But we have to admit to some dismay that the main
results of all this thinking and action have not been of huge benefit in
many cases to those who are its main targets. Neither do we exempt our
own profession of conflict analysis from these worries. Those who study
conflict have, until quite recently, tended to ignore the problems of
development. They have also tended to be stuck in the study of very
small-scale examples and to take a ‘tourist’ interest in what is often abject
horror and suffering. Very few analysts of conflict are, for example,
prepared to spend more than a few months studying a conflict, visiting the
area and developing a thorough understanding of its dynamisms over
many years. Understanding requires empathy, and empathy requires a lot
of contact with the real world of conflict. So if this book has a primary
purpose, it is to get a wider debate going between these different
constituencies so that the delivery of aid, the arrangements of post-war
conflict situations and thinking about related issues might be improved
upon in future.
A Conclusion should not be the place to revisit in detail the conclusions at
the end of each chapter, but rather to draw out some of the overarching
concerns that could be useful in directing future research and action.
What might be some of these overarching concerns?
The first is that we are very adamant in our feeling that we need to
appraise more rigorously the pitfalls and huge advantages presented by a
use of historical examples in the study of conflict and development. On
the positive side, we believe that without establishing clear genealogies of
how and why certain terms are privileged in the theoretical and policy
discourse, we will never understand why these terms are seen in such
different ways by their imposers and recipients. But we also believe that
this has to take into account how local understandings of historical
discourses play out in a conflict (Chabal and Daloz 2006) not just our
western readings of them. The obvious example that we have talked
about at some length is that of ‘reconstruction’ (Chapter 4). The war in
Iraq (2003 to the present day) shows us that the term can easily be linked
into both the histories of the Iraqi people and also into that of those doing
the ‘reconstructing’. This can in turn evoke positive or negative historical
 Conclusion • 177

connotations in both principal parties of the relationship. The alternative

models that can be then generated can either exacerbate an existing
conflict within a country or help it come to some kind of successful
conclusion. There is already some suggestion that the people of the
Middle East are now conceiving and practising more indigenous forms of
‘reconstruction’ through grassroots organisations, such as Hamas or
Hezbollah, which have local credibility, but which evoke hostile reactions
from many governments and IGOs. But if the IGOs’ and governments’
activities give the impression of ‘colonialism’ to the recipients, can they
work? Equally in trying to ‘resolve’ a conflict or ‘mapping’ it, there is no
use in the outside world imposing its interpretation of how history should
be interpreted. Again in line with Chabal and Daloz (2006), we believe
the ‘interpretation of meaning’ has to be local.
On a negative note, we have also tried to show where an understanding of
history can actually exacerbate a conflict. In many areas of the world
unscrupulous elites have stressed ‘their’ version of history to denigrate or
even to incite their enemies to a hatred they did not previously feel. In the
Middle East, for example, we can see that historical misunderstandings
have become an embedded part of the discourse of conflict on all sides.

Plate 16 Ruined tower blocks in Beirut: Hezbollah are organising local

reconstruction efforts
178 • Conclusion

But there is certainly a need for more investigation of how this might
apply in many African countries, where the historical and anthropological
literature needs to be far better understood by those who study conflicts in
those areas. We are far from understanding how history ‘plays’ in many
conflicts in developing countries, either as a force for peacebuilding or as
one for peace-destroying. One thing is clear, however: the conflicts or
humanitarian emergencies that we might read about in our newspapers
did not begin with the last incident. Instead, we need to transcend the
tendency towards ahistoricism and realise that current conflicts are often
merely the latest instalment in a complex history of conflict, identity
changes, population flows, border redrawings and other long-term social,
economic and cultural dynamics.
The next major concluding thought is that we are driven to believe that
bottom–up activities for peacebuilding are more likely to have long-term
effects than top–down approaches. The dangers of giving people the
impression that they are having something passed down to them, rather
than doing something for themselves, is bound to lead to a sense of
disempowerment and alienation. If this is then reinforced by the feeling
among a local population that the incoming ideas and power are not really

Plate 17 Stop sign in Jordan: care must be taken in the transfer of western
ideas and practices to non-western contexts
 Conclusion • 179

there ‘for them’, then the development or peace that is hoped for will not
do much to help solve the conflict in question. The presence of
peacekeepers is, for example, often seen as necessary, but cannot be of
much use to help a process of peace and development if those
peacekeepers distort the local economy, suck out the best labour power,
and generally lord it over the local population without contributing much
to their security or well-being. The key point is that an appropriate
balance between indigenous and external norms and capabilities needs to
be struck. Of course, this is easier said than done and the nature of the
balance will differ from context to context. But a good starting point for
potential interveners is to move beyond a position of assuming that they
have all of the answers. Instead, rather than viewing local populations as
victims, recipients, dependants or troublemakers, it is important that they
are viewed as change-agents with substantial capabilities.
Third, we would not be the only, but we would like to be the latest, couple
of thinkers to doubt the all-embracing truth of the ‘liberal peace’ thesis. It
may well be true, even empirically, that ‘democracies do not go to war
with one another’. But the point is surely that in the case of all developing
countries struggling with, or attempting to emerge from, conflict the basic
principle does not pertain. Democracies in Europe took many hundreds of
years to hone their conflict-resolution skills, ones that still desert them
quite regularly even so. The countries of Africa and elsewhere have not in
many cases ever achieved full ‘state-ness’, never mind democracy. Maybe
they cannot do so without a long-drawn-out process of violence, as some
claim from a variety of standpoints. But even if they can, surely they
should be allowed to do so without undue outside interference.
As a corollary to this point we believe that many of the examples we have
explored here show that the uncritical use of neo-liberal economic
policies has done much to exacerbate the bad odour in which many
‘good’ western principles are held in the developing world. Democracy is
per se a system that most aspire to, but the relentless way in which the
World Bank and other organisations have insisted on ‘conditionality’, ‘big
bang’ changes and structural adjustment has done much to damage the
view of those at the local level. This has been observed of course by
World Bank officials themselves, with Stiglitz the most prominent among
them. Others, like Amartya Sen, have noted that poverty is the greatest
enemy of democratic change and have lambasted the IGOs for their
narrow emphasis on empowering the elite in developing countries.
Conflict theory may have something to say here in a general way to the
development economists and governance experts. Conflict resolution
180 • Conclusion

theorists (as was stressed in the Introduction), long derided as ‘cranks’ for
advocating the empowerment of the grassroots of societies, are now seen
as having seen the coming of elements of a ‘post-state’ world (through
globalisation) well before the realist/statists did. What once was
considered equally crankish in the area of the environment or even in the
study of unconventional warfare, is now seen as pretty mainstream.
Where only states were taken as the units of analysis in both conflict and
strategic analysis, as well as in economics, sub-state actors, structures
and individuals are now routinely evoked in suggesting both why
problems occur and how to deal with them. IGOs will have to adopt this
understanding to a far greater extent if they are to deal with today’s and
tomorrow’s problems in the developing world. We may even have to break
open that ultimate realist shibboleth of ‘sovereignty’ and contemplate
reparcelling the states of Africa and elsewhere, or, alternatively, look to
much more regional power sharing and identity-based policies. Kikuyu,
Hutu, Tutsi or Xhosa people across Africa have to feel they can be given
their recognition and dignity without only being referred to as ‘Kenyan’,
‘Rwandan’ or ‘South African’. This is in much the same way as we have
let the local populations of their respective areas sort out their identities in
Ireland, Former Yugoslavia or the Former Soviet Union without losing all
of the benefits that those ‘unitary’ bodies once provided. How we keep
what is best about old structures, while allowing the emergence of new
ones, is not a problem in the developing countries alone.
Fourth, we should be aware that the context in which development and
conflict occurs is changing rapidly. This change stems from many
sources: an increasing global population and the consequent pressure on
resources; the changing nature of power relations as China, India, Russia,
Brazil and others stake their claim to be regional and world players;
the declining importance of sovereignty in a globalising world; the
ever-present and growing dissatisfaction with the United Nations and
other multilateral institutions; the growing significance of China, and
some Gulf and Arab states as key players in development and
humanitarian interventions. The key point is that many of the lenses that
we have used to analyse conflict and development over the past decades
will need to be radically reassessed to take account of the changing nature
of conflict and development processes. What we think we know now, may
not necessarily be fit for analytical or practical purposes in the future.
Last, but not least, we hope we have demonstrated that the problems of
conflict and development are problems that affect all of us, wherever we
live, and that there is a unity of the human spirit and of human suffering
 Conclusion • 181

that makes us all morally responsible for each other’s welfare. This is also
true when we are attempting to impose democracy promotion and state
building in conflict or non-conflict situations. We have endeavoured
throughout this book to see development as both top–down, the work
of institutions (Chapter 2), and as one that affects ordinary people
(Chapter 3 and elsewhere). That does not mean that we should be
prescriptive about the moral universe others live in, but it does mean that
we have to take responsibility for the negative effects of our actions in the
west when we think about the impact they will have in developing
countries. We need a new ethic of development as we need a new ethic of
international relations. That will have to be for the authors of another
book in this series to think about.
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 Index

Aceh (Indonesia) 40 China 6, 33, 41, 58, 60, 68, 81–2, 94,
Afghanistan 19–20, 35, 36, 43, 51, 63, 113, 119
75, 99, 101, 122, 126, 148 civil society 20, 52, 69, 80–4, 133
African Development Bank 132 civil war 2, 7, 11, 13, 17, 18, 30–2, 34,
African Union 46, 47, 63, 133 36, 39–40, 59, 67, 85, 95, 96, 101,
Agenda for Peace 2, 134 106, 123, 166
aid (see also development clientelism 54
assistance): conditionality 18; and Clinton, W., President 162
conflict 170–3; defined 154; Cold War 2, 10, 11, 96, 113, 124, 142,
effectiveness 165; history of 153
154–6; organisation of 162–7; Collier, P. 30, 31, 32, 97
social effects of 168–9; workers Colombia 18, 27–8, 35, 41, 51–2
167–8 Commonwealth 123, 132
AIDS (HIV) 161 conflict: affective dimension 4, 8;
Algeria 110 causes of 2, 6, 15, 16, 17, 24–5,
Al-Qaeda 52 26–30, 39, 159; contingency 93;
Amnesty International 6 critical perspectives 18; framing
Angola 36, 143–4 106; history and 109–13, 177–8;
anthropology 8, 26, 34–5 maintenance 26, 34–6;
Asian Development Bank 14, 47 management 20, 26, 31, 102–3,
107, 139; mapping 105–7;
Belgium 52 prevention 2, 6, 30, 161; political
Bosnia-Herzegovina 53, 56, 133 economy of 20; relationship with
Bretton Woods 9, 10 development 1, 4, 5, 5–6, 8, 17, 18,
Burundi 94 20, 21, 27, 28, 32–3, 42, 46, 62, 64,
Bush, G.W., President 24, 56 69, 98, 113, 119, 153, 160–1, 165,
180; research agendas 3–4, 8, 17,
Cambodia 82 18; resolution 20, 21, 93, 103–5,
Carnegie Commission on Preventing 107, 139, 179–80; settlement
Deadly Conflict 97 100–2, 107; theories and studies of
Carter, J., President 4, 5 1–2, 8, 15–20, 26, 32, 50, 169;
centre–periphery 158 transfer effects 104; transformation
Chiapas (Mexico) 25 8, 20, 21, 104, 105, 107, 109
Chicago School 11 constitutions 109, 134, 136
Chile 13, 109 corruption 11, 36–9, 54, 165
 Index • 207

crime 31, 41, 138, 142 European Union 46, 53, 61, 63, 118,
culture 7, 50–1, 52, 55, 79, 85, 86, 89, 124, 132, 134, 170
98, 104, 108, 176–7
Fiji 134
debt and debt relief 49 First World War 9, 16, 56, 110
democracy and democratisation 38, Former Yugoslavia 95, 109, 110, 116,
47, 51, 58, 59, 67, 79–80, 84, 98, 118, 119, 131
102, 118, 122, 128, 134, 136, France 55–6
137–8, 140, 143–5, 150, 179–81 free markets 6, 11, 13, 24, 25, 31, 39,
Democratic Republic of Congo 36, 94, 52, 65
102, 116, 143–5 Freud, Sigmund 108
Department for International Fukuyama, F. 24
Development (DFID) 42, 132
dependency theory 10, 11 Gacaca courts 115
development: assistance 14, 20, 22, 38, Galbraith, J.K. 10
164; critical perspectives 5, 10; game theory 16
planning 9–10; relationship with gender 51, 73, 84–8
conflict 1, 4, 5, 5–6, 8, 17, 18, 20, Germany 122, 125, 148
21, 27, 28, 32–3, 42, 46, 62, 64, 69, globalisation 11, 47, 52, 66, 90, 129,
98, 113, 119, 153, 160–1, 165, 180; 142, 158, 175
socialist 10–11; securitisation of governance (and ‘good’ governance)
19, 43, 63–4, 65; sustainable 161; 4, 12, 18, 49, 52, 53, 54–5, 59, 64
theories and studies of 1, 2, 8, greed thesis 25, 30–2, 158
9–15, 50, 148–9; Guatemala 80
underdevelopment 2, 18, 46, 66,
69; uneven 2, 6, 66 Haiti 42, 60
diamonds 163–4 Hobbes, Thomas 125
disarmament 17, 78, 134 Humanitarianism 12, 19, 39, 61, 62,
demobilisation and reintegration 64, 65, 97, 153, 154, 162, 166
(DDR) 22, 119, 134–8 human rights 4, 6, 51, 79, 133
‘do no harm’ policies 161 human security 2, 68
drugs 27–8, 34, 35, 36
identity 6, 17, 28, 29, 31, 40
Economic Community of West India 29, 41
African States 63, 133 Indonesia 94
economics of conflict and violence INGOs 17, 55, 64–5, 83, 85
27–8, 30–6, 38, 39, 106, 129, 150, interim administration 59
156–60 international administration 126
Ecuador 52 International Committee of the
Einstein, A. 59 Red Cross and Red Crescent 64,
El Salvador 80 162
English Civil War 130 International Criminal Court 116
environment 5, 6, 32–3, 41, 69, 158 International Monetary Fund 11, 61,
Eritrea 94, 104, 131 65–8, 124, 132, 160, 164
ethnic conflict/ethno-national conflict international relations (theories of) 16,
98, 106, 139 99, 100–1, 105, 127, 181
ethnicity 28, 31 International Whaling Commission
Ethiopia 94, 104, 131 57–8
208 • Index

Iraq 19, 26, 36, 41, 43, 50, 55, 60, 63, Northern Ireland 18, 34, 88, 135, 139,
75, 83, 96, 99, 101, 122, 126, 134, 165
139, 140, 149–50 ‘no war, no peace’ 42
Ireland (see also Northern Ireland)
109, 110, 118 oil 40–1, 42, 60
Islamic Jihad 26 Organisation for Economic
Israel 3–4, 27 Cooperation and Development 164
Israel–Palestine 18, 27, 59, 73, 77, Organisation for Security and
100, 110, 111–14, 162, 165–6 Co-operation in Europe 124, 143
Oslo Process 77, 95, 103, 162
Japan 57–8, 113, 119, 122, 125, OXFAM 164
148
Pakistan 58, 82
Kenya 94, 110 participation 20, 72, 73–80
Keynes, J.M. 9, 160, 165 peace: peace agreement (or accord) 18,
Kosovo 51, 59, 76, 80 20, 67, 142; peacebuilding 18, 20,
63, 76, 93, 97, 105, 119, 123, 130,
Lebanon 18, 38, 76, 88, 134, 147 178; peace fixing 20; peace
liberal peace 18, 47, 48–56, 64, 68, 90, implementation 20; peacemaking
97, 98, 118, 147–8, 154, 161, 171, 20, 78, 105; peace negotiations 17,
179 67, 76–8, 82, 85; peace processes
Liberia 31, 63, 94, 102, 138 17, 78, 85, 86, 97–8; peace studies
Lord’s Resistance Army 26 15, 16; sustainable 94, 121, 131
Pinochet, General 13
Maldives 42 post-war reconstruction 6, 19, 22, 25,
Marcos, Subcomandante 25 31, 43, 46, 79, Chapter 5
Marshall Plan 124–5, 131 poverty 13, 25, 32
Médecins sans Frontières 168 poverty reduction strategy papers 49,
media 133 133
micro-credit 87–8 private sector security 165, 168
Millennium Development Goals 14, provincial reconstruction teams 19, 63
15, 62, 69 public health 22, 145–6
Mindanao (Philippines) 40 public sector 11, 14, 54
Mozambique 95
Rand 127–8
nationalism 106 Rawls, J. 24
nation-building 122–8, 139 Reagan, R., President 5, 156, 160,
NATO 21, 46, 53, 63 168
Nepal 67 reconciliation 6, 17, 18, 93, 108–16
neo-liberalism 11, 12, 13–14, 18, 24, refugees 75
50, 51 resources 6, 20, 26, 31, 39–42, 48, 57,
neo-medievalism 129 58, 129, 157, 166
new wars 105–7, 129, 166, 171 Responsibility to Protect (R2P) 126
NGOs 17, 47, 55, 64, 146–7, 161, 163, retributive justice 108
166, 171 Richardson, L.F. 16
Niger Delta 40, 41 Rwanda 94, 95, 109, 114–17
Nigeria 41
9/11 4, 20, 22, 43 Saudi Arabia 60
 Index • 209

Scotland 110 trade 25, 30, 32, 34–5, 51, 65, 66, 154,
Second World War 9, 110, 128 156, 159, 171
security 2, 19, 20, 43, 63, 65, 113, 169 Treaty of Versailles 9, 56
security sector reform (SSR) 22, 92, truth 108–9
134, 142–5 Truth and Reconciliation Tribunals
self-determination 106 (TRCs) 108, 114–15
self-reliance 150 trust 113, 136
Sen, A. 29, 179 Tutu, Desmond 4
Senegal 38
Sierra Leone 31, 36, 56, 63, 75, 91, Uganda 26, 42, 94
109, 117, 132, 134, 136, 137 United Kingdom 11, 19, 21, 52, 74,
small arms proliferation 140–2, 168 75
soft power 95, 102 United Nations 20, 46, 47, 61–4, 96,
Somalia 51, 62, 94, 171 97, 147, 168; Office for the
South Africa 96, 109, 114–15, 123 Coordination of Humanitarian
South Korea 58, 113, 119 Affairs 163; peacekeeping 61–2,
sovereignty 92, 125–6, 129 102, 134; disarmament
Soviet Union 10, 11, 94, 118 (UNIDIR)134; UNTAC
Spain 94 (Cambodia) 124; trade and
Sri Lanka 18, 38, 77, 82, 88 development(UNCTAD) 150;
stabilization 20, 43, 79 United Nations Special Court for
state 12–13, 47, 57–9; as a barrier to Sierra Leone 163; UNMIK
development 11–14, 144–5, 149, (Kosovo) 124; UNTAET
159, 179; as a motor of (Timor-Leste) 124
development 10–11, 33, 132, United States 4, 9, 11, 14, 19, 41, 46,
157–8; building 54, 59, 62, 122, 47, 48, 51, 55–6, 63, 75, 117, 123,
123, 129–33; collapse of 36, 55; 127–8, 142, 160
failed 58–9, 92, 153, 169;
patronage 13, 37, 38, 54, 58 Vietnam 110, 156
structural adjustment policies (SAPs) violence: direct 7, 97, 134, 136, 179;
132, 179 intergenerational 119; sexual 107,
Sudan 40, 77, 94, 116, 126, 143, 166, 146, 167; spoiler 138–9, 144;
169–70 structural 7, 16
Switzerland 158
war crimes tribunals 108, 116–18
Taiwan 58 warlords 167
Taliban 19 war on terror 19, 96, 103, 162, 166
Tanzania 32–3 western values and perspectives 3, 5,
terrorism 19, 60, 73 37, 47, 50, 51, 54, 55, 79, 80, 83,
Thatcher, M., Prime Minister 11, 156, 85, 89
160 Wilson, W., President 56
Thirty Years’ War 130 World Bank 9, 11, 28, 61, 65–8, 132,
Tibet 6, 81–2 160, 179
Timor-Leste 56, 67–8, 147 World Food Programme 164
‘Track One’ and ‘Track Two’
(problem solving) 95, 99–104, 107 Zimbabwe 80, 94, 123, 134, 139