Introduction

Abstract

The transition from war to peace is fraught with tension and the risk of a return to bloodshed. With so much at stake, it is crucial that the international community and local stakeholders make sense of the complex mosaic of challenges, to support a lasting, inclusive and prosperous peace. Recent missions, such as in Afghanistan, Somalia or Sudan, have highlighted the fact that there can be no one-size-fits-all approach to steering countries away from violence and towards stability.

This Adelphi offers a series of economic perspectives on conflict resolution, showing how the challenges of peacebuilding can be more effectively tackled. From the need to marry diplomatic peacemaking with development efforts, and activate the private sector in the service of peacebuilding aims, to the use of taxes and natural-resource revenues as a financial base for sustainable peace, this issue considers how economic factors can positively shape and drive peace processes. It examines the complex ways in which power and order may be manifested in conflict zones, where unpalatable compromises with local warlords can often be the first step towards a more lasting settlement. In distilling expertise from a range of disciplines, this Adelphi seeks to inform a more economically integrated and responsive approach to helping countries leave behind their troubled pasts and take a fuller role in constructing their futures.

‘For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.’

Attributed to H.L. Mencken

The record of international efforts to assist countries emerging from war in the post-Cold War era is, by any measure, distinctly uneven. A major reason for this, as several of the contributions to this volume make clear, lies in the recurring failure of those charged with peacebuilding and reconstruction activities – however benign and well-meaning their intentions – to treat societies emerging from violence and war on their own terms. In part, this failure is linked to an all-too-common lack of understanding and sensitivity towards the cultural and historical specificities of war-torn societies. At least as important, however, has been the failure of outsiders to recognise the dynamic and complex ways in which the conditions of war and violent conflict themselves affect and reshape societies, and, in doing so, how they generate distinctive political, economic and development challenges that do not lend themselves to ‘templated’ solutions or ‘business-as-usual’ approaches to economic recovery. While zones of protracted conflict are often described in terms of anarchy and lawlessness, individuals and communities are never merely ‘passive victims in the face of state failure and collapse’.1

Of necessity, many will strive to find ways of surviving and coping during conflict, sometimes displaying great ingenuity, entrepreneurial skill and initiative in the process. Others will develop a vested interest in the continuation of armed conflict, not just for the purposes of survival but also for the cover it usefully provides for predatory and criminal activity, a point developed more fully by James Cockayne in the present volume. The result of these adaptations, by a range of local and external actors, to the realities of war and conflict is a distinctive political economy based on violence that persists into the ‘post-war’ period. And precisely because it persists, it needs to be understood as ground reality by those engaged in peacebuilding and reconstruction. That reality is not, however, fixed or static. As an earlier and pioneering Adelphi Paper on the economic functions of violence in civil wars put it, war-to-peace transitions are rarely smooth or clear cut but involve instead ‘a realignment of political interests and a readjustment of economic strategies rather than a clean break from violence to consent, from theft to production, or from repression to democracy’.2 In such circumstances, peacebuilders would indeed ‘be naïve to assume that positive outcomes are the automatic result of good intentions'.3

What these considerations make clear is that progress in the peacebuilding field is not only a function of political commitment and staying power, appropriately matched by resources, on the part of outsiders. While those factors are often vital to success, they are not sufficient. Indeed, they will count for little if they are not accompanied by analytical and conceptual clarity about the challenges that need to be tackled. It is with respect to this latter requirement – that is, for a deeper understanding of war-torn societies and war-to-peace transitions – that this collection of essays seeks to contribute. However, acquiring such an understanding, as several of the contributors emphasise, does not necessarily make the policy challenges and choices confronting peacebuilders any easier. Indeed, in many cases improved understanding only serves to highlight the trade-offs that often exist between short-term objectives aimed at stabilising fragile and delicate ‘post-conflict’ environments and longer-term objectives relating to the promotion of justice, balanced economic growth and the building of institutions, all critical to ‘lasting peace and stability’. In terms of the overall focus of the present volume – that is, the economic dimension of peacebuilding – short-term demands for security and stability may well require some form of engagement with informal, often illiberal, power structures as a necessary step in a longer process designed to ‘wean an economy away from violence and crime, and towards peaceful, legitimate economic activity.’4 However difficult the policy judgements involved, diagnosing the peacebuilding environment and its challenges correctly is nonetheless critical – and this is more than just a trite academic point. All too often, the failure to grasp the underlying political economy of a conflict zone, relying instead on crude, value-laden and simplistic labelling of complex problems, has served to perpetuate and stimulate renewed violence. At the same time, a better analytical grasp of the peacebuilding environment is also a precondition – and this is a further aim of the book – for looking more positively at ‘economic issues as a problem solver and bridge builder’.5

Linking analysis and policy: the debate on ‘state failure’

The point here, one that also serves to bring out the overall intention behind the book, is well illustrated by the debate surrounding, and the international policy response to, ‘state failure’ and ‘state fragility’. It is a subject that is addressed in several of the essays below, notably by Robert Muggah, James Cockayne and Jennifer Hazen. The most explicit treatment of the subject, however, is by Ken Menkhaus who starts out with a depressing paradox: ‘despite [the] prominent place failed states have assumed in global security, few international security problems since the end of the Cold War have been so misunderstood as state failure’.6 In a passage that neatly and clearly brings home the importance of basing policy on sound and empirically sustainable analysis, he notes the dominant assumption that ‘the problem of state failure is low capacity’:

…were the leaders of a failed state given adequate means, this reasoning goes, they would naturally put those resources to use to strengthen their state. Leaders who fail to strengthen the capacity of their government are thus irrational, venal, or both. By reducing state failure to a matter of low capacity, this view lends itself to ‘off-the-shelf’ technical solutions that, not coincidentally, are ideally suited for conventional foreign aid programmes. More funding, better trained civil servants, a more professionalised and equipped police force, and a healthy dose of democratisation (where not politically inconvenient) have been the main elements of state-building strategies … Yet two decades of research on the dynamics of weak and failed states suggests that in some circumstances state failure is viewed by local elites as a desired outcome, not a problem to be solved. This reflects a political strategy of survivalism and an economic strategy of personal enrichment that has its own rationale.7

A key implication to flow from this is that policymakers need to give much greater analytic attention to the ‘interests of key actors in state failure’ and, by extension, to key actors and their economic interests in countries emerging from violent conflict.8 And as evidence from Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia shows, identification of key actors' interests has highlighted another counter-intuitive phenomenon: resistance to strong central government (and thus to the kind of state-building policies typically promoted by outsiders) does not preclude interest in and commitment to local governance systems, including systems of law and order. In such circumstances it may be both prudent and more realistic for outsiders to target aid, encourage entrepreneurial initiative and stimulate economic activity, including programmes aimed at employment generation and direct support for businesses, at the local level. Support for informal structures and local initiative is, crucially, also likely to benefit from greater legitimacy in the eyes of the local community. Although one should be cautious about idealising all locally driven initiatives and informal governance arrangements (many of which have proved to be violent and predatory), the wider point remains valid: without a proper understanding of how war and conflict transform socio-economic relationships and shape distinctive political economies of war and peace, the policies of outsiders risk producing perverse and unintended consequences. Specific policies and judgements about peacebuilding priorities must proceed from an understanding of those risks. This key point emerges clearly from James Cockayne's analysis of the new challenges facing peace-builders – both moral and practical in nature – that have crystallised as a result of the growing ‘convergence of crime, corruption and conflict’ in many of the world's conflict zones. Where that convergence occurs, he concludes, ‘peace-builders must … differentiate between violent groups based on whether they adopt a predatory, parasitic or symbiotic fund-raising strategy, before considering which tools and incentives may be available to wean such organisations away from violence, and the spoils it brings.’9

Learning lessons and identifying appropriate policies

Encouragingly, though there is still a long way to go, there are signs that donors and key institutions are beginning to take some of the aforementioned lessons on board, including the need to engage with the political economy of war-torn societies. In particular, there appears to be a general recognition, at the rhetorical level at any rate, that specific economic policies and initiatives must not be allowed to undermine the overall aims of political stabilisation and peace consolidation. Several contributors stress the importance of this realisation and spell out its policy implications, noting that what may be ideal or optimal in terms of economic development may well prove politically destabilising and conflict-generating, especially in the short term. As James Boyce notes in his chapter on the role of aid and the need to build fiscal capacity in post-conflict countries: ‘when the distributional impacts of expenditure and revenue policies are ignored in favour of a single-minded focus on economic growth and efficiency, a result can be the exacerbation of social tensions that jeopardise the peace’.10 Similarly, while stressing that ‘sound, robust institutions – at both national and local level – provide the backbone of resource-revenue management and peacebuilding’, Päivi Lujala, Siri Aas Rustad and Philippe Le Billon accept that in the short run it may sometimes ‘be necessary to postpone the application of the principles of “good governance” … as institution-building efforts may destabilise the peace negotiations'.11

These observations – and the volume as a whole – highlight the tensions and the competing logic that often exist in ‘post-conflict’ settings between the pursuit of economic priorities narrowly conceived, and the requirements of peacebuilding and political stability. Those tensions are real and cannot be wished away. Even so, an important premise of the book is that the economic challenges presented by societies emerging from war must also be seen, once they have been properly contexualised and understood, as positive opportunities. As such, carefully designed policies aimed at economic recovery and at the transformation of political economies of violence, are not only crucial in their own right but can also provide powerful incentives for cooperation and peaceable behaviour among erstwhile belligerents.

Notes

Ken Menkhaus, ‘State Failure and Ungoverned Space’, p. 181.

David Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars, Adelphi Paper 320 (Oxford: OUP/IISS, 1998), p. 32.

James K. Boyce, ‘Aid and Fiscal Capacity in Post-Conflict Countries', p. 101.

James Cockayne, ‘Crime and Corruption’, p. 209.

Achim Wennmann, ‘Peace Processes, Business and New Economic Futures', p. 17.

Menkhaus, ‘State Failure and Ungoverned Space’, p. 173.

Ibid., p. 176.

Ibid., p. 179.

Cockayne, ‘Crime and Corruption’, p. 190 and 191.

Boyce, ‘Aid and Fiscal Capacity-Building in ‘Post-Conflict’ Countries', p. 119.

Päivi Lujala, Siri Aas Rustad and Pilippe Le Billon, ‘Natural Resources and Conflict’, p. 135.