![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
Over the last two decades, billions in aid money has been spent in highly insecure regions of conflict affected states in the hope that aid would lead to less violence and more stability. A recent wave of academic work on the impact of aid on violence has now amassed convincing empirical evidence that this hope is futile. Aid injected in highly insecure regions, where violence is a reality and insurgents retain some capacities, will increase, not dampen violence. This essay first provides a summary of the findings of the recent empirical literature. It then demonstrates that two causal mechanisms – predation and sabotage – explain why aid in highly insecure settings will likely lead to less, not more, stability. The essay then exemplifies these two causal mechanisms, using original qualitative and quantitative data from Afghanistan. It ends with a discussion of the implications for donors engaged in countries affected by conflict.
Keywords:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
Notes
1 For a recent summary, see Zürcher, “What Do We (Not) Know.”
2 Sexton, “Aid as a Tool against Insurgency.”
3 Wood and Molfino, “Aiding Victims, Abetting Violence.”
4 Child, “Hearts and Minds Cannot Be Bought”; SIGAR, “Stabilization”; Brown and Grävingholt, Securitization of Foreign Aid.
5 Sexton, “Aid as a Tool against Insurgency.”
6 Berman et al., “Modest, Secure and Informed.”
7 Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov, Winning Hearts and Minds.
8 Böhnke and Zürcher, “Aid, Minds and Hearts”; Böhnke et al., Assessing the Impact of Development Cooperation.
9 Zürcher, “What Do We (Not) Know.”
10 SIGAR, “Stabilization.”
11 Combined spending by the Commanders Emergency Reponses Program (CERP) and USAID on stabilisation; numbers from SIGAR, “Stabilization,” 56 and 95.
12 SIGAR, “Stabilization,” vi.
13 Ibid., 136.
14 Iyengar, Shapiro, and Hegarty, Lessons Learned from Stabilization Initiatives, 8.
15 Berman et al., “Modest, Secure and Informed.”
16 for example Gurr, Peoples Versus States.
17 Azam, “Redistributive State”; Azam and Mesnard, “Civil War and the Social Contract”; Arcand, Adama, and Labonne, “Conflict, Ideology and Foreign Aid.”
18 Grossman, “General Equilibrium Model of Insurrections”; Collier, “Rebellion as a Quasi-Criminal Activity”; Collier and Hoeffler, “Aid, Policy and Growth”; Dasgupta, Gawande, and Kapur, “(When) Do Anti-Poverty Programs Reduce Violence”; Hoelscher, Miklian, and Chaitanya Vadlamannati, “Hearts and Mines.”
19 Weintraub, “Do All Good Things Go Together?”
20 Crost, Felter, and Johnston, “Conditional Cash Transfers.”
21 Wood and Sullivan, “Doing Harm by Doing Good.”
22 Sexton, “Aid as a Tool against Insurgency.”
23 Khanna and Zimmermann, “Fighting Maoist Violence.”
24 For example, Anderson, Do No Harm; Uvin, Aiding Violence; Bradbury and Kleinmann, Winning Hearts and Minds?; Goodhand, “Aiding Violence or Building Peace?”; De Waal, Famine Crimes; Polman, The Crisis Caravan; Luttwak, “Give War a Chance.”
25 Narang, “Assisting Uncertainty.”
26 Nunn and Qian, “US Food Aid and Civil Conflict.”
27 Wood and Sullivan, “Doing Harm by Doing Good.”
28 Wood and Molfino, “Aiding Victims, Abetting Violence.”
29 Data accessible here: http://asiafoundation.org/where-we-work/afghanistan/survey/data/
30 SIGAR, “Stabilization,” 170.
31 Ibid., 174.
32 Böhnke, Koehler, and Zürcher, “State Formation as It Happens.”
33 The information stems from the Risk Management Office of the German development cooperation in Afghanistan, which is responsible for providing security-related information to all members of German development cooperation in Afghanistan. The assessment is updated once a month. There are five categories: (a) full government control and presence; (b) partial government control and presence; (c) limited government control and presence; (d) no government control and presence; (e) no assessment available. These categories roughly follow Stathis Kalyvas’s categorisation of zones of control in civil wars (Kalyvas, Logic of Violence in Civil War). The five categories are colour coded and applied to a map. For the purposes of this paper, the five categories have been simplified and collapsed into two categories: government-controlled (= mostly government controlled, based on category (a)) and Taliban-controlled districts (= contested or under insurgent control, based on categories (b–e). I include ‘e’ (no assessment possible) under “Taliban-controlled districts”, because ‘no assessment possible’ is coded when the German development cooperation no longer has civilian field officers on the ground due to security concerns. This happened, for example, when the Taliban overran Kunduz in fall 2015, effectively taking control of the city.
Using the above-mentioned survey of the Afghan people (see note 1), we see that in contested or Taliban-controlled districts, perceived security was much lower than in government-controlled districts. In government-controlled districts, 7.6% rated the security of their household as somewhat insecure or nor secure at all. In Taliban controlled district, this number was 35.1%. (n = 3006; the differences are significant at the 0.001 level). These results are expected and should increase our confidence in our measurement for government- vs Taliban-controlled district.
I believe this measure improves in important ways over previously used measures. Some previous empirical studies employed the number of security incidents as a measure for local security, but there are concerns about reliability and validity. Security incident data typically stem from the military. This means that data collection takes place only where the military is present, and typically includes incidents in which military forces were involved, thus ignoring violence affecting civilians. Furthermore, it is unclear what higher or lower numbers of such incidents really mean. A very low number could mean that government forces have achieved control and guarantee security; it could also mean that a region is under insurgent control and government forces are too weak to challenge the insurgent. Conversely, a high number of incidents could mean that a locality is highly contested, resulting in many clashes. Or it could mean that counter-insurgency forces are highly effective and immediately react to insurgent activity, resulting in one-sided violence and more incidents. For all of these reasons, the number of security incidents is a poor measure for our purposes.
34 Government controlled: Balkh, Bangi, Dara-i-soof-i-bala, Dehdadi, Faizabad (Badakhshan), Farkhar, Kishim, Mazar-e-sharif, Taluqan, Warsaj. Taliban controlled: Ali Abad, Aybak, Dawlat Abad (Balkh), Dushi, Hazrati Imam Sahib, Khinjan, Pul-i-khumri, Qala-i-zal, Zari.
35 Arcand, Adama, and Labonne, “Conflict, Ideology and Foreign Aid.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Christoph Zürcher
Christoph Zürcher is a professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. His research interests include conflict and peacebuilding, international development cooperation in conflict zones, and impact evaluations. He has worked as a consultant for, among others, Global Affairs Canada, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the German Federal Ministry of Defense, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, and the World Bank. He received his PhD from the University of Bern, Switzerland. Previous teaching and research appointments include the University of Konstanz, Germany, the Institut d’études politiques d’Aix-en-Provence, and Freie Universität Berlin. His regional focus is on the Former Soviet Union, especially on Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia including Afghanistan. He is the editor of Potentials of Disorder: Explaining Violence in the Caucasus and in the Former Yugoslavia (Manchester University Press, 2003) and the author of The Post-Soviet Wars: Rebellion, Ethnic Conflict and Nationhood in the Post-Soviet Era (New York University Press, 2007) and Costly Democracy: Peacebuilding and Democratization after War (Stanford University Press, 2013).