The fragmentation of the security-development nexus: the UK government’s approach to security and development 2015-2022

ABSTRACT

The security-development nexus – the belief that security and development policy goals are closely connected and should be aligned – became a core feature of global peacebuilding policy in the 1990s. Over the last decade, however, the continued relevance of the nexus has been questioned. Drawing on analysis of key policy documents, ministerial speeches, aid flows, and key informant interviews, this article examines how the nexus has been articulated and practised in UK policy. We find that the security-development nexus has become less prominent and more fragmented. The ‘mechanistic’ approach to the nexus that existed until 2015, where broad causal links between poverty and (in)security were emphasised, has been replaced by a more diffuse and fractured approach. While this shift is an outcome of the unusually high degree of turbulence in UK politics since 2015, it also reflects international trends in security and development policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Security
• development
• UK
• conflict
• peace

Introduction

In May 2022, the UK government published a new aid strategy, which signalled a strengthened commitment to the UK’s growing focus on economic development and investment and the consolidation of a more long-standing shift towards ensuring development policy aligned with the UK’s ‘national interests’.¹ The strategy was widely critiqued for failing to prioritise poverty alleviation,² with Sarah Champion MP, the chair of the UK Parliament’s International Development Committee calling it ‘a double whammy against the global poor’.³

The strategy also signalled an important shift in the UK’s approach to security and development. While ‘strengthening global peace, security and governance’ was one of four strategic objectives in the 2015 aid strategy, this priority status appeared to have been lost in the 2022 document. Although security and development continued to be present in several key commitments, for most commentators, the strategy represented a ‘step back’ in the UK’s previous ambitions to be a global leader in providing aid to fragile and conflict contexts⁴ and had the potential to undercut the UK’s long-standing position as a country that was ‘especially active in approaching security and development as twin imperatives’.⁵

In this paper, we understand the ‘security-development nexus’ (SDN) as the belief that security and development are closely connected, and that security and development objectives should therefore be closely aligned and integrated. The SDN has been a long-standing pillar of international peacebuilding policy, gaining greater prominence with the rise of the liberal peacebuilding agenda in the 1990s. By the 2010s, a transformative vision of liberal peacebuilding was gradually replaced by a more limited, ‘post-interventionist’ approach, which cohered around the concept of resilience, and involved a shift from ‘Western responsibility for securing the other to enabling the other to secure itself’.⁶ This trend accelerated in the subsequent decade with the emergence of the stabilisation agenda.⁷ This approach was accompanied by increasingly ambitious efforts to integrate and exploit synergies between peacebuilding, humanitarian, and development goals through the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals agenda (2015) and the ‘triple nexus’.⁸

This article examines the efforts of the UK government to integrate security and development goals between 2015 and 2022, a period of high political turbulence. During this period, UK politics was dominated by Brexit (2016), the COVID pandemic (2020), and the crises in Afghanistan (2021) and Ukraine (2022), which drove abrupt shifts in the UK’s foreign policy and reduced the already limited political space for longer-term strategic thinking. In this article, we answer two key questions: First, how and why has the UK’s approach to the security-development nexus (SDN) changed during this volatile period and with what consequences for the UK’s approach to development and peacebuilding? Second, what can the UK’s recent experience tell us about the broader trajectory and relevance of the SDN in international policymaking?

Our study shows that while the UK has bound its development policy more tightly to security objectives and the pursuit of ‘national interests’,⁹ articulations of the SDN have become less prominent and more fragmented since 2015 both in ministerial speeches and in key policy documents. Although the impact of these changes in aid spending are not immediate, we do find emerging evidence of a shift from ‘soft’ to ‘hard’ security-development related activities.

These changes have been strongly shaped by the domestic politics, but they also dovetail with broader international trends. The UK, like other donors, has moved rapidly towards a narrower and more instrumental approach to aid. Other aspects of its trajectory are shared, at least in part, with other major western donors. These include a move from a ‘mechanistic’ framing of the SDN where broad causal links between poverty and (in)security underpinned policy, to a more diffuse, complex, and indirect characterisation of the nexus.

As well as providing insights into the UK government’s evolving approach to the SDN, this study contributes to knowledge about the wider trajectory and consequences of the SDN. Our study broadly supports Chandler’s argument that the SDN represents a ‘retreat from strategic policymaking’ and provides an illustration of how the SDN is being stretched and distorted in the context of global turbulence.¹⁰ More generally, we argue that a more fragmented version of the SDN becomes more likely against the backdrop of growing global security threats (such as climate and global health threats), and in a context where there is diminishing focus and prioritisation to development issues.

It is important to note at the outset that this study largely examines the evolution of the SDN in UK policy from the perspective of development policy. Although our research does explore how the nexus has changed from a Ministry of Defence (MOD) perspective through our policy analysis and a small number of interviews, this viewpoint has not been examined in depth. This is justified on the grounds that the MOD has not to date been the lead actor in driving the direction of the SDN in UK policy and because there has been less substantial change in the MOD’s approach. Although the MOD has seen some growing commitment to using the UK’s military strengths to pursue a more integrated vision (for example, in the UK’s defence engagement strategy (MOD 2017), or through the ‘fusion doctrine’),¹¹ the impact of its growing defence engagement work remains limited in practice.¹² An ex-military senior officer interviewed for this study argued that most of the impacts of this work were short-term in nature and that there was limited evidence of an integrated approach on the ground.¹³ In this article, we analyse UK policy in the period between 2015 and 2022. We have chosen to focus on this period because it saw a significant change in the UK government’s approach to security and development and because the previous period has been extensively covered in previous studies.¹⁴

This article draws on analysis of ministerial speeches, key policy reports, select committee hearings, and aid statistics. We analysed seven key policy reports published on development and security by the UK government, and two key reports published on these topics by the UN during this period, using content and thematic analysis to identify both the extent to which issues of conflict and security were prioritised, and to understand how conflict, security and development issues were presented. We examined the wider narratives within which conflict and development issues were discussed, and which other policy areas (e.g. humanitarian action or open societies) conflict and security issues were attached to.¹⁵ We conducted interviews with government officials, UK-based NGO representatives, academics, and representatives of other donor governments. These interviews were used to shed light on the tensions that lie beneath some of the macro-level changes observed in strategy documents and analysis of aid flows.¹⁶

The article is structured as follows. The next section reviews existing literature on the SDN and relevant literature on policy fragmentation. Section 3 provides some contextual background to the UK government’s approach to security and development after 2015 and the wider international context. Section 4 presents a critical analysis of the UK’s approach after 2015, focusing first on discourse and second on how these rhetorical shifts have interacted with institutional and spending changes. Section 5 concludes.

The security-development nexus: an evolving relationship

Existing work on the SDN has shown how articulations of the nexus have been strongly informed by wider geopolitical trends.¹⁷ Previous research also emphasises that the links between security and development are unstable, contested, and rarely unidirectional, which often leads to tensions between policy actors tasked with mobilising the agenda.¹⁸

Recent academic concern with the SDN grew up alongside the rise of the liberal peacebuilding agenda following the end of the Cold War. This vision was captured in the UN’s Agenda for Peace from 1992 and in the concept of human security, first pioneered by the UNDP in 1994 and which subsequently became widely employed by development and security agencies.¹⁹ Human security involved a broadening of traditional notions of security, saw security as an inherent part of a broadened concept of development (UNDP 1994), and viewed security and development as causally linked so that the promotion of development would bolster security and vice versa.²⁰

Scholars like Duffield adopted a more critical reading of the SDN of this period, viewing the nexus’s ‘transformative agenda’ as an ‘impasse’ which sought to maintain rather than bridge economic divides between the populations of the global North and global South, and as fundamentally concerned with containment rather than transformation.²¹ This more defensive approach has grown more evident in the decade since Duffield’s article, as international policy in conflict-affected regions has become less concerned with economic and political transformation and more closely tied to the goals of stabilisation and building the resilience of conflict-affected populations.²² A focus on resilience and a more complex interpretation of the connections between security and development has also become more apparent in key international policy documents over recent years.²³

Existing research has demonstrated further complexities associated with the nexus. Several studies have pushed back against the notion that conceptions of the SDN are simply foisted onto aid recipient countries by western governments, illustrating how governments in Africa,²⁴ Asia²⁵ and Latin America²⁶ have embraced and promoted this agenda and in the process adapted it to their own ends. Others have stressed that western policy regarding security and development has been articulated differently depending on the context in which it is applied. Research on EU security and peacebuilding policy, for example, has highlighted striking differences in the articulations of the nexus in relation to the EU’s ‘near neighbourhood’ (where ‘hard’ security concerns predominate) and the wider neighbourhood (where a softer version of security is evident).²⁷

One dominant reading of how the SDN has been deployed by western governments is that western development policy has generally undergone a process of securitisation, whereby a ‘purist’ development agenda focused on poverty reduction has been redirected towards donors’ own hard security interests.²⁸ As will be discussed below, this is a trend that has been observed in most leading western donor governments including the UK.²⁹ While the securitisation framing usefully draws attention to intragovernmental power struggles, we do not adopt it here on the grounds that it overstates the stability and coherence of security and development agendas. Instead, we seek to develop an account that is alert both to the subtle shifts in how the nexus is justified by politicians and to the growing fragmentation of agendas within the security and development fields.

A small number of studies have considered the broader consequences of the SDN. Chandler argued that rather than indicating that western governments were taking the challenges of conflict-affected regions in the global south more seriously, the growing popularity of the SDN in the 1990s represented a ‘retreat from strategic policymaking’ and indicated a growing concern with ‘self-image’.³⁰ This argument is supported by our case, particularly in the period since 2015, where we argue that the performative aspects of security and development discourse have grown more marked.

As well as engaging with the general literature on the SDN, this article builds on an extensive body of work on the UK government’s approach to security and development. Unlike authors like McConnon³¹ or Waddell³² who analyse changes in the UK’s approach with a primary focus on discourse, we follow the broader approach adopted by Wild and Elhawary³³ and Petrikova and Lazell³⁴ who analyse discourse alongside aid flows and impacts. While a multi-dimensional approach limits the space for in-depth consideration of each dimension, such an approach is important since studies that have a singular focus on discourse or practice are liable to underplay the considerable gaps between policy and practice. Our approach examines how shifting politics at the national and international levels shape articulations of the nexus and acknowledges that the norms and interests that shape the UK government’s policy in this area are highly changeable. We also argue that UK policy in this area draws together a diversity of policy actors who straddle a range of objectives and is therefore contested both within government and across the wider UK policymaking environment.³⁵

In this article, we examine a process of policy fragmentation, and we draw on existing work to understand this. The fragmentation described in this paper concerns both institutional fragmentation (where a growing number of policy actors are involved in implementation) and ideational fragmentation (where these actors will understand an issue in different way, leading to a more diffuse or complex policy narrative).³⁶ Cairney et al outline several key ‘universal’ drivers of policy fragmentation including attention, ambiguity, complexity, a lack of professional norms, and deficits in policy learning.³⁷ As will be discussed below, all of these factors contributed to the fragmentation of the SDN that occurred in UK policy after 2015, and some have relevance beyond the UK context.

The evolution of UK development and security policy 1997–2022

This section provides some background on UK aid policy to contextualise our subsequent analysis of key changes during the period since 2015. The analysis is divided into three periods: the New Labour years (1997–2010), the Coalition (2010–15), and the post-Coalition Conservative governments (2015–22).

The Department of International Development (DFID) was established in 1997 in the early years of the New Labour government (1997–2010). Throughout this time, DFID maintained a clear focus on poverty-reduction, a commitment that was enshrined in law in the 2002 International Development Act. Following international trends, the connections between conflict, security and development became more rooted in DFID policy, although they were largely articulated in broad terms.³⁸ After 9/11, conflict became a ‘core development problem’ and was more closely tied to the concept of fragile states.³⁹ The growing appreciation of the conceptual and causal links between security and development was accompanied by a commitment to align the work of different departments (especially DFID, FCO and MOD).⁴⁰ The most important institutional initiatives of this period were the establishment of the Conflict Pool (a fund shared between DFID, FCO, and the MOD established in 2001), and the Stabilisation Unit (established in 2007).

The New Labour government embarked on a series of military-led interventions in Kosovo (1999), Sierra Leone (2000), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (2003). It was the approach adopted in some of these interventions (particularly through innovations such as the provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan) that generated the greatest concerns from critics about a securitisation of development objectives.⁴¹

During the coalition government period between 2010 and 2015, national security became more explicitly framed as a development issue.⁴² There were two key developments. First, the Coalition established the National Security Council in 2010 and the Conflict Pool was replaced in 2015 by the Conflict, Stability, and Security Fund (CSSF), which was to be overseen by the National Security Council. Second, the government published its foreign, defence, and development strategy – Building Stability Overseas (BSOS) in 2011. This agenda focused on stability rather than the more transformative vision of the New Labour years. While BSOS set out a clear agenda, it failed to constitute a coherent strategy.⁴³

Although the coalition government was repeatedly side-tracked by international events including the Arab Spring and wars in Syria and Libya, the period after 2015 was even more volatile, with the government’s strategic focus persistently undermined by large-scale crises, which sucked government time and attention, including the fallout of the Brexit referendum of 2016 (which dominated the political landscape until early 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic (which preoccupied government between early 2020 and early 2022), and two major international security challenges: the chaotic withdrawal of western troops from Afghanistan in 2021 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The post-coalition period began with a strong sense that integrating security and development would continue to be an area of enhanced focus, albeit one that was more tightly connected to national security interests. Following the Conservative election victory in 2015, the government announced an increase in spending allocations in fragile and conflict-affected states, with David Cameron making a commitment that 50% of DFID’s budget would be spent in fragile and conflict-affected states, and an expansion of the CSSF.⁴⁴ This shift was driven by perceived aid scepticism from the public and the media, with the strategy acknowledging that ‘aid spending has sometimes been controversial at home’.⁴⁵ Even after the Brexit vote in 2016, there were further signs that commitment to security and development was being carried forward, for example, in the 2018 the National Security Capability Review, where ‘development’ was treated as a standalone capability alongside cyber and serious and organised crime.⁴⁶ As will be discussed in greater depth below, any sustained focus was then quickly lost.

In 2015, the government published a National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review.⁴⁷ While this strategy included some positive commitments to tackling non-traditional security threats, the lasting impact of the report was to provide high-level policy backing for an approach focused more squarely on the UK’s own security and its ‘global reach and influence’, a set of priorities that laid the ground for the subsequent emergence of the ‘global Britain’ agenda, which was consolidated in the Integrated Review of 2021 (‘Global Britain in a Competitive Age’).⁴⁸

The international context

This section provides a brief overview of the wider international context in which UK policy evolved. This context is important since national development policies are strongly shaped by and developed in coordination with the approaches of multilateral institutions, as well as by other bilateral donors.

Securitisation of aid policy has been a consistent feature of major western bilateral aid donors since 2001, led by the US, but also prominent in the cases of France and Japan. The UK and the EU, by contrast ‘resisted parts of the securitization process’.⁴⁹ In the UK’s case, this resistance meant that it was able to retain focus ‘on the interests of poor people in developing countries, rather than narrowly defined self-interest’.⁵⁰ Just as the UK’s poverty-focus was eroded after 2016 in the narrower pursuit of national interest, so the EU’s approach has seen a shift away from ‘softer’ developmental approach to security towards a focus on ‘harder’ security issues concerned with terror and migration.⁵¹ The tendency to use development policy as a tool for pursuing national interests, while not new, became more prominent amongst donors in the mid to late 2010s, with the EU’s approach particularly influenced by concerns about migration after 2015.⁵² In part, this shift was driven by a growing perception that the international environment was becoming less benign and the world was entering ‘new competitive age’.⁵³ The UK’s move to merge its standalone development agency into an expanded foreign affairs department followed the path set out by other western bilateral donors including New Zealand (2009), Australia (2013) and Canada (2013).⁵⁴ The UK’s growing support for security assistance has been matched by allies such as the EU and NATO, European allies such as France in West Africa, and other powers including Turkey and Russia.⁵⁵ The expansion of the European Peace Facility was seen by some interviewees as an example of a broader trend where hard approaches to security were crowding out civilian peacebuilding.⁵⁶

Since 2010, international understandings of security have become more fragmented and rooted in notions of resilience and complexity, a trend that has been accelerated by the COVID pandemic and growing appreciation of the impacts of climate change. This shift is exemplified by the UNDP’s special report on human security,⁵⁷ which notes a trend towards ‘development with insecurity’, critiques ‘mechanistic’ approaches to SDN, and calls for more complex frameworks to respond to a more crowded security terrain, characterised by the interaction of a ‘new generation’ of transnational human security threats (digital technologies, inequalities across groups, violent conflict, and inadequacies in health care). Global interconnectedness has long been a central rationale for aid donors to incorporate security concerns, but it has seen renewed emphasis against the backdrop of climate change, the COVID pandemic, and hybrid warfare.⁵⁸

UK’s approach to security and development 2015–2022

We now move on to examine how the UK’s approach to security and development has changed since 2015. In the first part of this analysis, we will focus on the bigger picture, including shifts in official discourse on security as expressed through key policy documents and ministerial speeches. In the second part, our analysis will focus on shifts in aid flows before finally discussing institutional changes. These sections combine data from key informant interviews, content and thematic analysis of key policy documents and speeches, and statistical data on UK aid flows.

The UK’s approach to conflict after 2015 – a less prominent and more fractured agenda

Four key trends characterised the UK’s approach after 2015. First, after 2016 there was an absence of strategy and a proliferation of new areas of concern within UK development policy. Second, issues of conflict and security were de-prioritised within development policy. Third, the UK’s approach to security and development became more fractured and less clearly defined: there was a move from a ‘mechanistic’ to a more complex and fragmented view of the SDN. Fourth, the performative dimensions of UK’s development policy became more pronounced as aid and the UK’s status as a leader in the field of development and humanitarian response became instrumentalised in the service of the UK’s national interest and the ‘Global Britain’ agenda. In this section, we will address each of these points in turn.

Absence of strategy

Although the Conservative government elected in May 2015 began with a strong and relatively clear commitment to addressing conflict through development policy, the period following the Brexit referendum in July 2016 was characterised by a more fractured approach. This lack of focus stemmed from the underlying political turbulence of the period: there were two general elections (2017 and 2019), four changes of Prime Minister (from Cameron to May to Johnson to Truss to Sunak), and 8 changes in ministers responsible for international development.⁵⁹ The UK government was also heavily preoccupied by prolonged Brexit negotiations and the wider uncertainties about the UK’s international role this entailed. In 2020, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee called on the government to ‘address a lack of clear strategic vision, a lack of confidence, and a lack of coherent implementation that has undermined recent international policy by the UK’.⁶⁰ As one interviewee put it ‘It’s difficult to see a thread of progression across this whole period because it was so punctuated by political upheaval … other priorities and then crisis’.⁶¹ These disruptions ‘pulled people off in different directions’, severely delaying the development of a number of key strategies.⁶²

These issues were subsequently compounded by the all-encompassing nature of the COVID crisis and the merger of FCO and DFID later in 2020.⁶³ Since most ministers were only in post for a short time, there were relatively few strategic speeches addressing development policy during this period and both Raab and Truss had ‘torn up the previous developmental mandate’.⁶⁴ As ever, the UK’s approach was also shaped by events. The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan not only absorbed the attention of FCDO staff but also ‘posed some fundamental questions about how military and development investments by the UK and other governments have failed to contribute to longer-term stability’.⁶⁵ Similarly, the Indo-Pacific tilt set out in the Integrated Review was quickly challenged by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

An analysis of the speeches made by ministers of development between 2015 and 2022 reveals a tendency for ministers to introduce new areas of focus without any clear re-ordering of priorities or rationalisation. These included a new DFID ‘economic strategy’ under Priti Patel; gender, sexuality and disability (Penny Mordaunt); trade (Alok Sharma), public health and COVID response (Anne-Marie Trevelyan), corruption and sanctions (Dominic Raab), and finally a renewed focus on private sector investment and sexual violence and conflict under Liz Truss. To some extent rationalisation did occur when Dominic Raab set out aid spending priorities in 2021. But the seven priorities outlined by Raab were quickly subsumed by the four priorities set out in the 2022 Aid Strategy, under the leadership of Liz Truss, a document that had a ‘difficult genesis’ with many iterations.⁶⁶ Several interviewees highlighted that one consequence of this strategic deficit was that policy in relation to conflict was moving in different directions, with some positive commitments (such as progress on issues such as atrocity prevention) sitting alongside other shifts which were viewed as more regressive (such as the growing focus on military-led responses to instability).⁶⁷

De-prioritisation of security-development issues

Tackling conflict and peace became less central to development policy after 2015. Although the 2021 Integrated Review had established tackling conflict and instability as a high-level objective, major gaps remained between the stated goals of the review and government actions, where contradictions remained by the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ components of the UK’s security strategy.⁶⁸ Whereas ‘strengthening global peace, security and governance’ was listed as the first of four priorities set out in the 2015 Aid Strategy, by the time of the 2022 Aid strategy, conflict and security had lost this top-line status, with ‘helping countries escape cycles of conflict and violence’ subsumed under the wider goal of tackling humanitarian crises.⁶⁹ While several interviewees welcomed some continued reference to conflict prevention in the 2022 Aid Strategy, most were disappointed that high-level focus on this issue had been lost.⁷⁰ This loss of prominence was compounded by a downgrading of conflict expertise resulting from the 2020 merger of DFID and FCO.⁷¹ At a political level, leading politicians with a strong commitment to development and security issues such as Rory Stewart and Alistair Burt, were lost in the Brexit votes in 2019.⁷² Several interviewees felt that consultation with civil society on security and development issues had ‘petered out’ and that officials with long-standing conflict expertise had either left or been pulled away from their core focus in the new FCDO structure. These changes were seen as having undermined the UK’s role as a leader on conflict prevention.⁷³

A more fragmented agenda

As well as highlighting how conflict and security have dropped down the agenda, a comparison between the 2015 and 2022 Aid Strategies reveals a shift away from a ‘mechanistic’ understanding of the SDN towards a more fractured and less clearly defined version of the nexus. In 2015, the strategy contains several statements that make clear causal links between development and security. For example, it is stated that tackling ‘the causes of instability, insecurity and conflict … is fundamental to poverty reduction overseas and will also strengthen our own national security at home’.⁷⁴ At the same time, it is stated that ‘[t]ackling extreme poverty and helping the world’s most vulnerable … will build security, stability and opportunity that will benefit us all’.⁷⁵ References to conflict and security in the 2015 strategy are closely linked to a ‘bigger picture’ SDN where tackling conflict is positioned as central to the government’s primary goal of eliminating poverty and connected to concrete commitments to allocate more aid to fragile and conflict-affected states.

By 2022, references in the Aid Strategy to security remain at roughly the same level, however, a concern with security has been attached to a growing number of issues – including cybersecurity, biosecurity, energy security, health security, the security of women and girls and protecting against transnational threats. The 2022 aid strategy lacked any overarching statement about why tackling conflict is important or central to the wider development agenda. While the contours of the SDN were set out clearly in the 2015 aid strategy and were strongly connected to the elimination of poverty, in the 2022 strategy, security appears more rootless within development policy. This rootlessness is also apparent in the broader priorities to which security and conflict issues have been attached. A focus on conflict was framed within ‘open societies and conflict resolution’ by Dominic Raab in his seven priorities of 2021, whereas by 2022, it was nested within UK’s humanitarian work. Fragmentation reflected the UK’s post-Brexit approach to foreign affairs, where seeking ad hoc security alliances moved from a ‘sideline’ to a ‘governing ideal’ under Johnson,⁷⁶ and where the UK had become more reliant on bilateral alliances with states such as Saudi Arabia.

The performative dimensions of aid

The performative dimensions of aid became more pronounced after Brexit. Since around 2018, the ‘Global Britain’ agenda sought to define the UK’s foreign policy following the departure from the EU as ‘an outward looking sovereign nation’, by forging new trading relationships with countries beyond Europe (especially emerging powers like India), by asserting British values, and by ‘turbo-charging’ Britain’s existing strengths in the diplomatic, military, economic, humanitarian, and cultural spheres. For several interviewees, this performative dimension reflects the growth of ‘culture wars’-style dividing lines in UK politics during and after the Brexit referendum. After Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019, the UK’s development policy was increasingly used as a vehicle to signal the government’s right-wing credentials.⁷⁷ Boris Johnson made clear that a key driver behind the FCDO merger was regaining the capacity to redirect the aid budget more squarely in pursuit of the UK’s security interests. In a speech to parliament announcing the merger he said: ‘We give as much aid to Zambia as we do to Ukraine, although the latter is vital for European security’.⁷⁸ Such statements are a far cry from the 2005 strategy, where DFID was at pains to explain that promoting security ‘does not mean subordinating poverty reduction to short-term political interests or to work on anti-terrorism’.⁷⁹

Together, these four changes have driven a major shift in how the SDN is conceptualised in UK policy. As one UK official interviewed for this research commented, from the early 2000s, DFID had worked hard to ‘situate security as an issue relating to how conflict or instability affected individuals in that locality’, while since 2021, the emphasis has been squarely on ‘security in the sense of national security’.⁸⁰ While a shift from ‘their’ to ‘our’ security in development policy has grown progressively stronger, the agenda has also grown increasingly fragmented and more bound up with the performative ‘Global Britain’ agenda, resulting in a confused situation. As one interviewee stated bluntly: ‘it’s a mess’.⁸¹

To understand why this fragmentation has occurred, it is useful to return to Cairney et al’s universal drivers of policy fragmentation. A crucial driver during this period has been a lack of attention. A succession of large-scale crises stemming from Brexit and the COVID pandemic during this period made it difficult for government to develop a sustained and long-term strategy to integrate security and development problems. Certain characteristics of the SDN make it inherently susceptible to fragmentation – it faces issues of ambiguity (it can be understood in different ways by different actors) and complexity (the involvement of many actors responding to different pressures). We have also seen how the FCDO merger led to an erosion of policy learning and professional norms due to the downgrading of DFID’s conflict expertise. Above all, however, fragmentation of the SDN was the result of a nosedive in the government’s commitment to development over this period. In a context where aid spending was under threat and aid was increasingly used to serve narrow instrumental purposes, defending a bigger picture narrative about the SDN, which connects conflict and poverty reduction, has become much more difficult.

Changes in aid spending and modalities

To what extent has the UK’s dwindling rhetorical and strategic commitment to issues of conflict, peace and security impacted aid flows and programmes on the ground? We can examine these changes by assessing whether there is evidence of (1) a fall in aid to Fragile and Conflict-Affected States (FCAS) and (2) a falling proportion of aid spent on security/conflict-related sectors. Such an assessment has limitations since there is typically a lag between policy pronouncements and shifts in allocations. Many of the policy shifts described in the previous section may take several years to feed through fully in terms of changes to allocations.

In 2021, the UK abandoned the 0.7% GNI aid target, which led to cuts of around £3 billion or a 21% fall in the aid budget (from £14.5 billion in 2020 to £11.5 billion in 2021). This was accompanied by an increase in the defence budget (by £2 billion or 5% between 2020/1 and 2021/2).⁸² Our analysis shows that there has been a slight decline in the proportion of UK ODA allocated to fragile states between 2016 and 2021. In 2016, aid to fragile states was 27% of the total bilateral aid, but by 2021 this had fallen to 16%.⁸³ There is clear evidence of a shift in terms of the proportion of aid spent on security-related sectors. An analysis of the OECD’s States of Fragility data shows that share of UK commitments to development and peacebuilding support have decreased from 69% to 52% (development) and 17% to 13% (peacebuilding) between 2010 and 2020, while humanitarian aid has increased from 14% to 35%.⁸⁴

There has been a sharp fall in the proportion of aid allocated to activities categorised by the OECD as ‘conflict, peace and security’. This fell 22% from $476 million in 2016 to $367 million in 2020.⁸⁵ Within this category, the composition of spending moved away from a softer ‘human security’-informed approach towards harder security-oriented spending. The two leading sub-sectors were ‘civilian peace-building, conflict prevention and resolution’, which fell 58% from $483 million to $199 million between 2016 and 2020 and ‘security system management and reform’, which increased 49% from $73 million to $109 million.⁸⁶

There have also been important shifts in how ODA is spent. The proportion of ODA spent by non-DFID/FCDO departments grew from 14% of the total ODA spending in 2017 to 24% in 2021.⁸⁷ Spending of ODA by the UK Home Office increased 74% between 2020 and 2021, most of which has been spent on migration support.⁸⁸ Several interviewees argued that support for peacebuilding NGOs and CSOs had declined since 2015, with changes in procurement rules making it more difficult for government to fund smaller organisations.⁸⁹

Institutional change

The merger of DFID and the FCO into a combined FCDO was characterised by several interviewees as a ‘hostile takeover’.⁹⁰ While many commentators identified possible upsides to the merger including a more ‘integrated approach to government work on conflict and instability’, in practice the merger saw the downgrading of DFID expertise.⁹¹ Of the nine new DGs in the new FCDO, only one was a former DFID staffer. Many former DFID conflict advisors left, which undermined long-standing efforts to develop policy in these areas and made it harder for peacebuilding specialist NGOs to engage with FCDO.⁹² Some officials argued that the new FCDO was afflicted by a culture clash around understandings of conflict, with DFID staff still seeing conflict as a key impediment to development, while most former-FCO staff still saw conflict as a ‘largely foreign term’.⁹³

While FCDO has struggled with the merger, the Ministry of Defence has become more active in the space of human security, expanding its doctrine around human rights and civilian protection, and training activity in conflict settings, and increasingly seeing ‘stabilisation as within its purview’.⁹⁴ One interviewee argued that MoD had developed a ‘parallel framing’ of human security which was emerging ‘at the expense of a broader more civil definition of human security’, although another highlighted the limits of this in practice.⁹⁵

A degree of continuity in approach since 2015 has been provided by the CSSF. Most interviewees did not observe any major changes in the approach of CSSF since 2015.⁹⁶ Two UK officials argued that its approach on the ground remains quite flexible and that its effectiveness comes down to individuals.⁹⁷ Others saw CSSF as always more oriented towards conflict management rather than conflict prevention, providing limited support for ‘DFID type’ peacebuilding activities.⁹⁸ A new Office for Conflict, Stabilisation and Mediation (OCSM) was announced in 2022, which promised to ‘place greater emphasis on addressing the drivers of conflict, atrocity prevention, strengthening fragile countries’ resilience to external interference and delivering greater support to peace process (sic)’.⁹⁹ Several respondents argued that the new conflict centre has not been given any priority by the government and its role remains unclear.¹⁰⁰

Conclusions

Since 2015, the SDN was de-prioritised within UK policy. Articulations of the nexus became more fragmented and less closely tied to core development objectives. Although the concrete impacts of these shifts on resource allocation are still emerging, some shifts in aid allocations and institutional changes are apparent.

We have demonstrated that although the UK’s experience is unusual in some respects – Brexit generated a particularly volatile political climate which undermined long-term strategic policymaking and politicised questions of security and development – it shares commonalities with the trajectory of other donors and international agencies, which have also moved from a mechanistic to a fragmented approach, and placed growing emphasis on harder security concerns. These shifts are underpinned by broader international changes including the COVID pandemic, the growing threat posed by climate change, and a more competitive global security environment. While we should be cautious about extrapolating too far from this UK case study, the broader trends we describe in this article reflect wider global changes in the SDN.

How should we characterise the changing status of the SDN in this new global environment? For some scholars such as de Simone and Iocchi,¹⁰¹ the nexus (or at least the version that emerged from the liberal peacebuilding consensus of the 90s and early 2000s) is ending and being replaced by a more securitised military approach seeking to stabilise rather than transform conflict-affected regions, while the frameworks of western governments are losing relevance as African governments become more assertive in the security space. While we do see some evidence of a shift from ‘soft’ to ‘hard’ security-development related activities, our findings suggest that in UK policy the picture is more mixed. The most clearly discernible shift has been a downgrading and fragmentation of the SDN with any shift towards a more securitised approach being limited to specific sub-areas of UK policy and specific localities.

Our findings resonate with the wider literature on the SDN, which has emphasised the adaptability of the nexus and its tendency to track wider geopolitical trends.¹⁰² We argue that the mechanistic version of the SDN that emerged in the late 1990s and persisted until 2015 in UK policy is easier to maintain in a relatively stable global political terrain where there is strong and sustained domestic commitment to development issues. Conversely, a more fragmented version is likely to arise at times when the global security terrain becomes more crowded, competitive and complex, and when domestic political or economic pressures undermine government commitment to development issues.

While the SDN has been deprioritised within UK policy (and amongst other western donors), it is unlikely to wither completely and instead we expect it to adapt to respond to emerging global challenges. In line with de Simone and Iocchi’s¹⁰³ analysis, we would also expect future iterations of the nexus to be more influenced by the strategies and actions of governments in conflict-affected countries and by new and emerging non-western approaches to the SDN, such as China’s ‘development-as-security’ approach described by Benabdallah and Large.¹⁰⁴

Although this article has traced a broad de-prioritisation of the nexus within UK policy, continued progress has been made since 2015 in areas such as atrocity prevention, driven by successful advocacy by specialist NGOs and alliances with individual politicians. This highlights the contested nature of the security and development policy space and suggests that islands of effectiveness may be quickly revived under a more supportive future government.¹⁰⁵

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oliver Walton

Oliver Walton is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath. His research examines the political economy of war-to-peace transitions, NGO politics, social welfare, conflict, and peacebuilding, with a geographical focus on Sri Lanka and Nepal.

Andrew Johnstone

Andrew Johnstone is a retired senior British Army officer who served in Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Darfur, Djibouti and Afghanistan. Having completed his military career, he gained a PhD for his research into structural conflict prevention at the University of Bath and is now a freelance researcher on conflict prevention.

Notes

¹ FCDO, ‘The UK Government’s Strategy for International Development’ (FCDO, UK, 2022).

BOND, ‘The International Development Strategy: A Rapid Assessment’, May 16, 2022 https://www.bond.org.uk/news/2022/05/the-international-development-strategy-a-rapid-assessment.

² BOND, ‘The International Development Strategy’.

³ IDC, ‘Sarah Champion MP: ‘A Double Whammy Against the Global Poor’, May 16, 2022 https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/98/international-development-committee/news/170805/sarah-champion-mp-a-double-whammy-against-the-global-poor/.

⁴ N. Hailey, ‘The New UK International Development Strategy Doesn’t Join the Dots On.

Conflict’, May 17, 2022 https://www.bond.org.uk/news/2022/05/the-new-uk-international-development-strategy-doesnt-join-the-dots-on-conflict/.

⁵ N. Waddell, ‘Ties that Bind: DfID and the Emerging Security and Development Agenda’, Conflict, Security & Development 6, no. 4 (2006): 542.

⁶ D. Chandler, ‘Resilience and Human Security: The Post-Interventionist Paradigm’, Security Dialogue 43, no. 3 (2012): 225.

⁷ J. Karlsrud, ‘From Liberal Peacebuilding to Stabilization and Counterterrorism’, International Peacekeeping 26, no. 1 (2019): 1–21; D. Curran and Hunt, C.T., ‘Stabilization at the Expense of Peacebuilding in UN Peacekeeping Operations’, Global Governance 26 (2020): 46–68;

J. Pugh, Gabay, C. and Williams, A.J., ‘Beyond the Securitisation of Development: The Limits of Intervention, Developmentisation of Security and Repositioning of Purpose in the UK Coalition Government’s Policy Agenda’, Geoforum 44 (2013): 193–201.

⁸ P. Howe, ‘The Triple Nexus: A Potential Approach to Supporting the Achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals?’ World Development 124 (2019): 104629. The ‘triple nexus’ emerged around 2016 and emphasised the close relationship between development, humanitarian and peacebuilding policy.

⁹ E. Mawdsley, ‘National Interests and the Paradox of Foreign Aid Under Austerity: Conservative Governments and the Domestic Politics of International Development Since 2010’, The Geographical Journal 183, no. 3 (2017): 223–32.

¹⁰ D. Chandler, ‘The Security – development Nexus and the Rise of “Anti-Foreign Policy”’, Journal of International relations and Development 10, no. 4 (2007): 362–86.

¹¹ Cabinet Office, National Security Capability Review (London, UK: Cabinet Office, 2018).

¹² N. Barley, ‘British Army Military Capacity Building in Support of the UK’s International Defence Engagement Policy: the Deployment of Short-Term Training Teams to Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Somalia (2014–2019)’ (Doctoral dissertation, King’s College London, 2022).

¹³ Interview 8 with former UK military representative, July 2022.

¹⁴ See A. Johnstone and O. Walton, ‘Implementing Conflict Prevention: Explaining the Failure of UK Government’s Structural Conflict Prevention Policy 2010–15’, Conflict, Security & Development 21, no. 5 (2021): 541–64; E. McConnon, ‘Security for All, Development for Some? The Incorporation of Security in UK’s Development Policy’, Journal of International Development 26, no. 8 (2014): 1127–48; I. Petrikova and M. Lazell, ‘The Securitisation of UK Aid and DFID Programmes in Africa: A Comparative Case Study of Cameroon, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda’, in Britain and Africa in the Twenty-First Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 73–98.

¹⁵ We analysed the following documents: DFID, ‘UK Aid: Tackling Global Challenges in the National Interest’, UK Treasury and DFID, UK, 2015. HM Government, National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review: A Secure and Prosperous United Kingdom (London: HM Government, 2015). Cabinet Office, ‘National Security Capability Review’; HM Government, Global Britain in a Competitive Age: The Integrated Review of Security, Development and Foreign Policy (2021); FCDO, ‘The UK Government’s Strategy for International Development’; HM Government, ‘International Development in a Contested World: Ending Extreme Poverty and Tackling Climate Change: A White Paper on International Development’ (2023).

¹⁶ Ethical approval was provided by the University of Bath’s Social Science Research Ethics Committee (number S22–033)

¹⁷ F. Stewart, ‘Development and Security’, Conflict, Security & Development 4, no. 3 (2004): 261–88; B. Hettne, ‘Development and Security: Origins and Future’, Security Dialogue 41, no. 1 (2010): 31–52; M. Stern, and J. Öjendal, ‘Mapping the Security – Development Nexus: Conflict, Complexity, Cacophony, Convergence?’ Security Dialogue 41, no. 1 (2010): 5–29; R. Luckham, ‘Building Inclusive Peace and Security in Times of Unequal Development and Rising Violence’, Peacebuilding 6, no. 2 (2018): 87–110.

¹⁸ M. Stern, and J. Öjendal, ‘Mapping the Security – Development Nexus’.

¹⁹ B. Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace (New York: UN, 1992); UNDP, Human Development Report: New Dimensions of Human Security (New York: UNDP, 1994).

²⁰ Stewart, ‘Development and Security’; Waddell, ‘Ties that Bind’; World Bank, World Development Report: Conflict, Security and Development (Washington D.C.: World Bank, 2011).

²¹ M. Duffield, ‘The Liberal Way of Development and the Development – Security Impasse: Exploring the Global Life-Chance Divide’, Security Dialogue 41, no. 1 (2010): 53–76.

²² Pugh et al., ‘Beyond the securitisation of development’.

²³ UN and World Bank, Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict, (New York: UN, 2018); UNDP, Special Report on Human Security (New York: UNDP, 2022).

²⁴ S. de Simone and A. Iocchi, ‘The End of the Security – Development Nexus? Reflections from Counterinsurgency in North-Eastern Nigeria’, Third World Quarterly (2022): 1–18.

²⁵ J. Goodhand and O. Walton, ‘The Limits of Liberal Peacebuilding? International Engagement in the Sri Lankan Peace Process’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 3, no. 3 (2009): 303–23.

²⁶ M. Siman and V. Santos, ‘Interrogating the Security – Development Nexus in Brazil’s Domestic and Foreign Pacification Engagements’, Conflict, Security & Development 18, no. 1 (2018): 61–83.

²⁷ R. Mac Ginty, S. Pogodda, O. Richmond, eds., The EU and Crisis Response (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).

²⁸ J. Howell and Jeremy Lind. ‘Changing donor policy and practice in civil society in the post-9/11 aid context’, Third World Quarterly 30, no. 7 (2009): 1279–1296.

²⁹ S. Brown, J. Grävingholt, and R. Raddadtz, ‘The Securitization of Foreign Aid: Trends, Explanations and Prospects’, in The Securization of Foreign Aid (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1–17; McConnon, ‘Security for All, Development for Some?’

³⁰ Chandler, ‘The Security-Development Nexus and the Rise of “Anti-Foreign Policy”’.

³¹ McConnon, ‘Security for All, Development for Some?’

³² Waddell, ‘Ties that Bind’.

³³ L. Wild, and S. Elhawary, ‘The UK’s Approach to Linking Development and Security: Assessing Policy and Practice’, ODI Working Paper 347 (London: ODI, 2012).

³⁴ Petrikova and Lazell, ‘Multilateral Donors and the Security-Development Nexus’.

³⁵ See Mawdsley, ‘National Interests and the Paradox of Foreign Aid Under Austerity’.

³⁶ Floyd, Rita, ‘Global Climate Security Governance: A Case of Institutional and Ideational Fragmentation’, Conflict, Security & Development 15, no. 2 (2015): 119–46.

³⁷ Cairney, Paul, Siabhainn Russell, and Emily St Denny, ‘The “Scottish Approach” to Policy and Policymaking: What Issues are Territorial and What are Universal?’ Policy & Politics 44, no. 3 (2016): 333–50.

³⁸ See note 32 above.

³⁹ See note 31 above.

⁴⁰ T. Porteous, ‘British Government Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa under New Labour’, International Affairs 81, no. 2 (2003): 281–97; Waddell, ‘Ties that Bind’.

⁴¹ Brown et al., ‘The Securitization of Foreign Aid’.

⁴² McConnon, ‘Security for All, Development for Some?’; DFID, ‘UK Aid: Tackling Global Challenges in the National Interest’, UK Treasury and DFID, UK, 2015.

⁴³ Johnstone and Walton, ‘Implementing Conflict Prevention’.

⁴⁴ DFID, ‘UK Aid’.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ Cabinet Office, ‘National Security Capability Review’.

⁴⁷ HM Government, National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review: A Secure and Prosperous United Kingdom (London: HM Government, 2015).

⁴⁸ Personal communication, NGO representative, February 2023. HM Government, Global Britain in a competitive age: The Integrated Review of Security, Development and Foreign Policy, 2021.

⁴⁹ Brown et al., ‘The Securitization of Foreign Aid’.

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Mac Ginty et al., ‘The EU and Crisis Response’.

⁵² Mawdsley, ‘National Interests and the Paradox of Foreign aid Under Austerity’; N. Gulrajani, ‘Bilateral Donors and the Age of the National Interest: What Prospects for Challenge by Development Agencies?’ World Development 96 (2017): 375–89.

⁵³ See note 35 above.

⁵⁴ Although the UK’s decision to abandon its 0.7% commitment in 2020 meant that it was something of an outlier compared with other OECD donors, whose ODA spending continued to rise during the pandemic, in 2022, Sweden and Norway also announced aid cuts (V. Chadwick, V., ‘UN Leaders Target Norway Over Proposed Budget Cuts’, devex, May 24, 2022. https://www.devex.com/news/un-leaders-target-norway-over-proposed-budget-cuts-103245).

⁵⁵ L Brooks, Playing with Matches? UK Security Assistance and its Conflict Risks (UK: Saferworld, 2021).

⁵⁶ Interview 5 with NGO representative, June 2022.

⁵⁷ UNDP, ‘Special Report on Human Security’.

⁵⁸ See M. Leonard, The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict (Manhattan: Random House 2021); UNSC, Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace. A/72/707–S/2018/43 (New York: UN, 2018).

⁵⁹ 5 of these changes related to secretaries of state for international development (Justine Greening (2012–6), Priti Patel (2016–17), Penny Mordaunt (2017–19), Rory Stewart (2019), Alok Sharma (2019), Anne-Marie Trevelyan (2020)). Three were Secretaries of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (following merger of FCO and DFID) (Dominic Raab 2020–21, Liz Truss (2021–2022), and James Cleverley (2022–2023).

⁶⁰ (Foreign Affairs Select Committee 2020, 10).

⁶¹ Interview 7 with NGO representative, July 2022.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ ICAI, The UK’s Approach to Peacebuilding: A Review (UK: ICAI, 2022).

⁶⁴ Interview 2 with UK government official, May 2022.

⁶⁵ See note 61 above.

⁶⁶ See note 64 above.

⁶⁷ Interviews (4, 5 and 6) with NGO representatives, June/July 2022.

⁶⁸ Saferworld, ‘The UK Integrated Review: The Gap Between the Review and Reality on Conflict Prevention’ (April 18, 2021).

⁶⁹ FCDO, The UK Government’s Strategy for International Development (UK: FCDO, 2022).

⁷⁰ Interviews (4, 5 and 7) with NGO representatives, June/July 2022.

⁷¹ Interview 6 with NGO representative, July 2022.

⁷² See note 61 above.

⁷³ Interviews (6 and 7) with civil society representative, July 2022.

⁷⁴ DFID, ‘UK Aid’, 3.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 3–4

⁷⁶ J. Gaskarth, ‘Brexit, British Foreign Policy, and Governance’ in The Routledge Handbook of Diplomacy and Statecraft, ed. B. McKercher (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), 60–70.

⁷⁷ See note 73 above.

⁷⁸ Hansard, ‘Global Britain, Vol 677: debated on Tuesday June 16, 2020.

⁷⁹ DFID, Fighting Poverty to Build a Safer World A Strategy for Security and Development (DFID: UK., 2005), 6.

⁸⁰ Interview 2 with UK government official, May 2022.

⁸¹ Ibid.

⁸² MOD, National Statistics: MOD Departmental resources 2022, December 1, 2022. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/defence-departmental-resources-2022/mod-departmental-resources-2022#:~:text=Defence%20spending%2C%20when%20using%20NCR,commitments%20in%20the%20Cold%20War

⁸³ OECD, States of Fragility, Fragile Context Profiles. http://www3.compareyourcountry.org/states-of-fragility/countries/0/.

⁸⁴ OECD, States of Fragility, Fragile Context Profiles. http://www3.compareyourcountry.org/states-of-fragility/donor/12/. Although OECD changed eligibility rules for peace and security in 2016, the categories analysed here from the States of Fragility report were not affected by this change.

⁸⁵ OECD, ‘Query Wizard for International Development Statistics (QWIDS) data’. https://stats.oecd.org/qwids/.

⁸⁶ Overall, UK ODA during this period fell by 9%.

⁸⁷ FCDO, Statistics on International Development: Provisional UK Aid Spend 2021 (UK: FCDO, 2021).

⁸⁸ R. Taylor, ‘UK Aid Spending: Statistics and recent developments’, December 8, 2022. House of Lords, UK.

⁸⁹ Interviews 4 and 7 with NGO representatives, June/July 2022.

⁹⁰ Interviews 6 and 7 with NGO representatives, July 2022. Interview 2 with UK government official, May 2022.

⁹¹ S. Dercon and R. Dissanayake, ‘Not a Centaur, but Better: Supporting the FCDO to be a Force for Good’, Center for Global Development Blog, June 26, 2020. Interview 4 with NGO representative, June 2022.

⁹² See note 71 above.

⁹³ Interview 2 with UK government official, May 2022.

⁹⁴ Ibid.

⁹⁵ Interview 6 with NGO representative, July 2022. Interview (8) with former UK military representative, July 2022.

⁹⁶ Interviews 4 and 6 with NGO representatives, July 2022.

⁹⁷ Interviews 1 and 2 with UK government officials, May 2022.

⁹⁸ Brooks, ‘Playing with Matches’. Interview 6 with NGO representative, July 2022.

⁹⁹ V. Ford, ‘Letter to Select Committee Chairs’, February 9, 2022 https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/9069/documents/159486/default/.

¹⁰⁰ Interview 2 with UK government official, May 2022. Interviews 6 and 7 with NGO representatives, July 2022.

¹⁰¹ De Simone and Iocchi, ‘The End of the Security-Development Nexus?’

¹⁰² Stern and Öjendal, ‘Mapping the Security – Development Nexus’.

¹⁰³ See note 101 above.

¹⁰⁴ L. Benabdallah and D. Large, ‘The Key to Solving All Problems’? Unpacking China’s Development-As-Security Approach in Mali’, Third World Quarterly (2022): 1–19.

¹⁰⁵ As this paper was being finalised, the UK government published a new white paper (‘International Development in a contested world’), which partly confirms this view. While conflict and security are not prioritised to the extent of the 2005 or 2015 aid strategies, ‘tackling conflict and state fragility’ is once again restored as a major priority and there are echoes of the ‘mechanistic’ framing of conflict as a key driver of poverty and underdevelopment.