The nexus between development and peace has become a central focus of development thinking and practice. What should the relationship between development aid and peace building be? This article from the Journal of Peace building and Development presents and critiques a typology of seven ways in which this interaction has historically been conceived.
Two key variables underlie the typology of the relationship between development and peace building: (i) how far conflict matters are incorporated into development, and (ii) how far the development enterprise engages in the political realm.
Seven ways of conceiving the relationship between development and peace building are identifiable. These increasingly take steps away from the traditional development paradigm:
- Development by definition promotes peace (so simply more aid is required). This causal link does not stand up to scrutiny.
- Military conditionality. Threats of reduced aid to countries engaged in war have persisted but been inconsistent. Significant competence in security sector reform has been acquired by some donors.
- Post-conflict assistance. This prioritises areas that had been off the development agenda, such as governance and representation, justice and security, prejudice and reconciliation. It may be too ambitious, broad, scattered and unrealistic, due to shortages of resources and knowledge. Ethically, problems include the cost of error borne by local people and a potentially unrestrained licence to intervene.
- ‘Do No Harm’. This practical approach highlights that aid resources can be stolen and spent on weapons, aid can affect markets and inter-group relationships, support civilians thereby freeing resources for conflict, and it can legitimise people and agendas. This approach touches less on the root causes of conflict.
- Conflict prevention. This follows logically from earlier approaches, but constitutes an enormous expansion of the development and uses an explicit political lens. In terms of implementation, it matches the post-conflict agenda.
- Human security. This focuses on the human dimensions of security such as child soldiers, landmines and small arms, or more broadly, threats to lives, livelihoods and dignity, stating ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’ are inseparable. This may find little support in military establishments and is hard to measure.
- Global system reform. This final level views rich countries’ and corporations’ behaviour in the military, political and economic realms as having potential to minimise conflict. It is an attempt to moralise all international relations. The most radical arguments advocate structural reform of the world economy.
The intellectual and operational gap between development and security has shrunk significantly. However, problems are caused by the weakness of the knowledge and ethical base on which this work rests, its breadth, paucity of resources and lack of prioritisation mechanisms. Without changes, the new agenda may be only rhetoric with continuing ignorance, inconsistency and irrelevance.
- To avoid intrusiveness and political sensitivities, the reach of the international community should be minimised but its impact maximised. The list of objectives and domains of intervention must be limited by new mechanisms to allow for appropriate choices to be made in each case.
- Donors must take their engagements more seriously and behave more consistently across cases. Control, accountability and assessment mechanisms are needed.
- This work needs to be more anchored in the societies involved, with greater discussions, knowledge generation, transparency and local dialogues to guide donor policy.
