Co-Directors: James Boyce and Omar Dahi
In wartorn societies, well designed economic policies can help to resolve conflict and build a durable peace, but poorly designed economic policies can exacerbate conflict and jeopardize the implementation of peace accords.
PERI's research on peacebuilding and statebuilding explores how economic policies can be designed to ease tensions along the fault lines of violent conflict and to assist in the successful implementation of peace accords and the building of effective and legitimate states. This includes work on peace conditionality, public finance in postconflict statebuilding, and the mobilization of international and national resources in postconflict countries and fragile states.
Peace conditionality ties the disbursement of external assistance formally or informally to measures to resolve conflict, implement peace accords and build a lasting peace.
Building a durable peace requires building an effective and legitimate state that provides needed public goods and services for its citizenry. This in turn requires the ability to raise revenues and to allocate and manage expenditures – capabilities that may be strengthened or weakened by the policies of international aid donors.
Postwar reconstruction, peacebuilding and statebuilding do not come cheap, and success hinges on the mobilization of sufficient international and national resources for these purposes as well as their effective use.
More on peacebuilding and statebuilding:
PERI-African Development Bank Workshop on Enhancing Effectiveness of Development Assistance in Post-Conflict and Fragile States, Dakar, Senegal, April 2015.
James K. Boyce, "International Assistance and Post-conflict Agrarian Transitions," presentation at Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, June 2015 (begins at 41:55 of the video).
James K. Boyce, "Postconflict Recovery: Resource Mobilization and Peacebuilding"' paper prepared for the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2008
James K. Boyce and Madalene O'Donnell, eds., Peace and the Public Purse: Economic Policies for Postwar Statebuilding. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2007.
