Foreign assistance and the market‐place of peacemaking: Lessons from El Salvador

Abstract

The overall success of the Salvadorean transition suggests two working hypotheses that might prove useful for the analysis of other countries. First, it suggests that political transition and democratization could be analysed as a political market‐place, where all kinds of resources are traded. With Chapultepec, no political actor won or lost: everyone went home with something. Exchanging resources of violence against other resources is arguably the pivotal type of ‘trade’ in peacebuilding. Second, it shows that resourceful external players can greatly facilitate peacebuilding and democratic transition by providing the extra resources (economic and political) needed to make trades possible.