Centre on Conflict, Development & Peacebuilding

Abstract Human–wildlife conflicts are complex and defy simple explanations and solutions. The fields of conflict analysis and peacebuilding offer insights into the intensity, intractability, and possible approaches to addressing different kinds of conflict. Building on these fields, as well as advances in conservation practice, we adapt a framework for human–wildlife conflict that consists of three levels of conflict over wildlife: Level 1 conflicts are disputes over issues such as crop or livestock loss or concerns about safety, yet typically involve relatively high tolerance of the damage‐inducing species. In level 2 conflicts, in addition to visible impact of wildlife, there is a history of unsatisfactory attempts to address these issues, creating underlying resentment, tensions, and a sense of injustice among at least one of the parties. Level 3 conflicts are deep‐rooted and become intertwined with the identities of the parties and community involved, and extend to broader tensions over social identities and clashing values and beliefs. Such conflicts require mediated reconciliation dialogues and conflict transformation approaches. A structured understanding how to address a conflict before it escalates to a deeper level is fundamental for managing conservation challenges as complex and dynamic as conflicts over wildlife.

This article examines how peacebuilding theory has influenced the shift from the international to the ‘local’ in the practice of international peacebuilding and analyses the consequences for local communities, international peacebuilding practice and critical peacebuilding research. The results demonstrate that transformative peacebuilding theories, in particular John Paul Lederach's work, have enormously influenced the policy discourse and practice of supporting the ‘local’. Revisiting 20 years of this theory–practice encounter, this article concludes that peacebuilding practitioners have overwhelmingly recognised the importance of Lederach's shift towards local actors. However, this has failed to result in the desired peacebuilding outcomes. This article identifies three main reasons: (1) particular understandings of the ‘local’ by the ‘international’; (2) narrow international support strategies, ignoring the broader international, regional and local peacebuilding arena, and existing power relations; and (3) the mantra status of Lederach's middle–out approach as an almost unquestioned theory of change in civil society peacebuilding that invites reflections on theory–practice encounters and responsible peacebuilding scholarship.

This article argues that rentier states stand in contrast to states that have to rely on domestic resource extraction. They display a particular path to state-formation that by and large defies the European path of state-formation: natural resource dependence (mainly oil dependence) has created weak states that are autonomous from societal demands and that do not rely on domestic taxation. State-formation has not been accompanied by political accountability, transparency, or what Charles Tilly has termed the ‘civilianisation of government’. In rentier states the expenditure side of public revenues is most clearly linked to a state-building agenda of creating societal peace and political acquiescence. On a theoretical level, this article offers a new reading of state-formation based on the form and the performance of the state. Focusing on a functional understanding of statehood, it thereby highlight where Arab states are strong (security function and in times of oil booms, welfare function) and where they are weak (representation function, and in times of fiscal crisis, welfare function).

The rise of China in peacebuilding has invoked lively debate about its role vis-à-vis the dominant peacebuilding order, or liberal peace. Extant research revolves around the binary construct of challenger-versus-supporter, ignoring the nature and scope of challenges that China poses to liberal peace. Also, these studies tend to unidimensionally examine China’s stance on particular elements of liberal peace. There is scant research assessing China’s role against the overall normative structure of the liberal peace paradigm. This article proposes a typology of contestation that targets different constitutive parts of liberal peace. China’s stances on these constitutive parts are scrutinised based on a systematic review of its policy documents and interviews with scholars and practitioners in Beijing, Shanghai, Geneva and New York. This article finds that China has generally abstained from contesting the normative basis of liberal peace (validity contestation). However, it has been actively pursuing content contestation by reshaping the sequencing of existing elements of liberal peace and by incorporating the democratisation of the international system into the peacebuilding agenda. Moreover, China clearly opposes externally formulated or imposed peace solutions, whereby it advances application contestation against liberal peace.

OBJECTIVES: Empirical work with western populations suggests that aging is associated with changes in economic decision making, including, for example, increased prosocial tendencies. We investigated the generality of age effects in social and nonsocial domains by assessing various measures of economic decision making in a rural population from Morocco. METHOD: We measured age/cohort differences using a number of economic games (risk game, time preferences game, dictator game, trust game, and public goods game) in over 700 participants ranging from 17 to 92 years of age. RESULTS: The results suggest a negative relation between age and risk taking and a concave relation between age and contribution to a public good, but no significant age trends in time preferences, altruism, trust, or trustworthiness. DISCUSSION: Our results indicate that the relationship between aging and decision making is not universal and is shaped by local culture and the type of task rather than biological factors alone. More research is needed to understand the unique age trends prevalent in specific populations and tasks.

Despite a principled commitment to assist people in need equally, the allocation of humanitarian assistance across conflict and post-conflict states shows remarkable variation that is not easily explained by differences in the level of recipient-need. This paper attempts to explain these “forgotten conflicts“ by analyzing the determinants of humanitarian aid to civil war and post-civil war states. Using cross-national panel data on humanitarian aid provisions, I show that the most important determinants of international humanitarian assistance are not always demand-side factors measuring humanitarian need – as the principals of humanitarian action would dictate – but often strategic factors that reflect donors’ political interests in providing humanitarian assistance. Although humanitarian aid to ongoing civil wars appears to be substantially more humanitarian than strategic in its allocation, humanitarian aid provided to post-conflict states in the aftermath of civil war tends to go to conflicts where donors perceive important strategic and political interests. These results suggest that one important explanation for why some conflicts are essentially ignored or gradually neglected over time is that strategic interests of donors can dominate humanitarian concerns over time.

This article, primarily focused on Europe, charts some of the momentous transformations in bordering practices, migration and global mobility that have been sparked by the new coronavirus pandemic. In a first part it argues that since the onset of the pandemic, the enduring ‘global mobility apartheid’ which uses citizenship and visa restrictions to police the differential access to mobility founded on race and class, has been supplemented by a fluctuating ‘sanitary apartheid’, seeking to separate populations designated as at risk of Covid-19 infection from those designated as Covid-free. While these logics are distinct, where states have conflated them, we have seen eruptive and mutating border violence. In a second more normative part the article seeks to rethink the demand for freedom of movement in the context of the pandemic, arguing that allowing migrants who today are illegalised to move in safe and legal ways is also the condition to implement sanitary measures to protect the health of migrants and sedentary populations alike. Adopting a mobility justice approach, the article also argues that the excessive mobility of the privileged through air travel that has been a major factor in spreading the virus and contributes to ecological destruction should be limited. Ultimately this article calls for re-thinking the politics of (im)mobility in the context of the pandemic as part of the process of transformation towards a more just and sustainable world.

Since the Oslo Accords came into force in 1993, the European Union (EU) and its individual member-states have invested billions of Euros, with a view to establishing the basis for an independent and sovereign Palestinian state. As Israel’s colonization of the Palestinian West Bank has progressed, Palestinian statehood has become little more than a myth. As the state-building process has atrophied, securitization has found a renewed impetus, being elevated at the expense of initiatives that seek to promote democratization. This article argues that, far from being a neutral process grounded within the building of capacities, Security Sector Reform (SSR) has strengthened the foundations of Palestinian authoritarianism. In focusing upon the development of the EU’s police mission in the West Bank (EUPOL COPPS), this article argues that EU-sponsored ‘reform’ has contributed directly to the ‘professionalization’ of Palestinian authoritarianism. The article therefore suggests that the EU consistently has failed to acknowledge the political implications that extend from its technical mandate and interventions. The EU has become, to the extent that its interventions extend Israel’s colonial project, part of the problem. In concluding, the article offers an assessment of the decade-long EUPOL COPPS (The European Union Police Mission for the Palestinian Territories) commitment, with a view to developing key lessons and recommendations that can inform future EU interventions.

Most contemporary lethal violence does not occur in conflict zones, the majority of states most affected by lethal violence are not at war, and the levels of lethal violence in many nonconflict settings are higher than in war zones. Much of this nonwar violence is organized, not random, and political in nature. A narrow focus on wars and formal armed conflicts thus obscures the high levels of everyday violence and insecurity around the world. This essay makes the case that adopting a broad understanding of political violence – including violence committed by the state and its agents, and nonphysical violence as the violation of basic rights – is essential to gain insight into the causes and consequences of, and to frame appropriate responses to, war and violence in the twenty-first century.

The volume of firearms sold in USA and trafficked across the US–Mexico border is notoriously difficult to estimate. We consider a unique approach using GIS-generated county-level panel data (1993–1999 and 2010–2012) of Federal Firearms Licenses to sell small arms (FFLs) to estimate the realized demand for firearms based on the distance by road from the nearest point on the US–Mexico border. We use a time-series negative binomial model paired with a post-estimation population attributable fraction (PAF) estimator. We do so to control determinants of domestic demand. We are able to estimate a total demand for trafficking, both in terms of firearms and dollar sales for the firearms industry. We find that nearly 2.2% (between 0.9% and 3.7%) of US domestic arms sales are attributable to the US–Mexico traffic in the period 2010–2012, representing 212,887 firearms (between 89,816 and 359,205) purchased annually to be trafficked.

Kenyan business was important in mitigating episodes of election violence in 2007–2008 and 2013. This article finds that this role was motivated by the ethical and moral commitments of key business leaders to further peace in times of violence; and by interests in preventing future economic loss. However, by adopting a lens that situates business roles in violence prevention and peace-building within Kenya’s conflict systems and political economy, the article finds a paradox: this lens confirms the Kenyan ‘success story’ with respect to specific violent episodes; but it also reveals a much more limited role for business in transforming the underlying sources of conflict; especially when these are congruent with key business fundamentals connected to land ownership, property rights, export-oriented production or services, or a ‘limited’ access order. Overall, the article highlights that business should leverage its comparative advantages within broader multi-stakeholder coalitions, especially in terms of its ability to influence political leaders, entry-points for informal dialogue to diffuse crises and capital to support peace-building initiatives.

This article connects the literature on the political economy of conflict with the mediation of peace processes and elaborates the conceptual and practical value offered by this perspective. It shows that armed conflicts and groups have economic dimensions that should be recognised and managed in peace processes. An economic perspective helps to understand the multiple disputes within an armed conflict, the disposition of armed groups to engage, and the economic interests of the parties. Focusing on mediated states opens new avenues of engagement through perceiving alternative sub-state authorities and economic networks as an opportunity for dispute resolution. Overall the political economy of conflict and the mediated state offer new vantage points to shape the planning and management of peace processes.

This article considers what demobilisation, disarmament, and reintegration (DDR) programmes might learn from research on gangs and the problems associated with government-instituted ‘wars on gangs’ putatively aimed at reducing or fighting gang-related violence. It begins by considering interventions associated with the global war on gangs, and compares their underlying premises and practices with those of DDR programmes while highlighting how both are plagued with problems associated with drawing on de-contextualized templates. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research carried out in Nicaragua and South Africa, the article then goes on to explore why individuals leave gangs, focusing in particular on the more organic processes that deplete gangs of their members, as well as the consequences that the different possible occupational trajectories of ex-gang members can have for patterns of violence. These offer a number of potential lessons for DDR programmes, particularly with regard to reducing violence in a realistic and sustainable manner.

The rise of fundamentalist movements in major religions has forced decision-makers, development organizations and academics to turn their attention to its meaning for development. Global scholars and

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) has become part of the livelihood strategy for a large section of the rural population in Burkina Faso. In some areas of the country, two out of three households have at least one family member working at an artisanal or small-scale mine. Whether this leads to a de-agrarianization of the rural area or rather to a diversification of livelihood strategies is debated. Using a mixed research methods approach, we analyze the interaction between agriculture and ASGM at the household level at four mining sites in the Center-North and North Regions of Burkina Faso. We focus, in particular, on how labor and capital are allocated, and how mine workers reinvest their eventual revenues. We find that both mine characteristics and time devoted to mining influence the extent to which livelihood strategies change over time. Mineworkers who fully engage with mining and choose to pursue work at productive mines are the most likely to step up their livelihoods or discontinue agricultural activities. Others who work on less productive mines to complement their income during the dry season are more likely to stagnate or even see their situation worsen. Our findings suggest that ASGM fosters a socio-economic differentiation and the formation of an ASGM-based upper class in rural areas.

Much attention has been paid to how digital technologies affect peacebuilding through the production of information, data and evidence. While research has thus documented how digital technologies enable a sincere peacebuilding approach concerned with the hurtful past and present and how the world ‘really’ is, digital technologies can also play a role in enabling a subjunctive sensitivity for future worlds that ‘could’ or ‘should’ be. The article explores how in peacebuilding, subjunctivity is produced through performative uses of digital technology that are primarily non-discursive and non-cognitive. Documenting examples from practitioners engaged inter alia in mediation, dialogues, peacekeeping, and ceasefire monitoring, the article introduces a compilation of subjunctive affordances and demonstrates their powerful effects: shepherding conflict stakeholders along the process, detaching them from hurtful content, reframing their perspectives on the world and envisioning possible futures, as well as unlocking existing social structures and evoking new ones through digital communitas.

Abstract Nicaragua is often held up as an exception within the Central American panorama of criminal violence, widely presented as the safest country in the region due to its particular revolutionary legacies, the (supposed) absence of transnational gangs and drug-trafficking organisations, and the National Police's representation as an efficient and professional force. This commentary proposes an alternative reading of Nicaragua's contemporary political economy of violence in order to reveal the profoundly misleading nature of this prevalent view. In particular, it highlights how Nicaragua is governed through a particular political ‘settlement’ underpinned by drug trafficking, police and judicial corruption, as well as ‘mafia state’ governance. These factors have coalesced to establish a highly efficient and engrained ‘narco-state’ whose undoing is unlikely in the short term.

Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) processes will often dismantle the command-and-control structures of non-state armed groups (NSAGs) to prevent possible remobilization. Recent studies demonstrate that in some cases ex-combatant networks provide important social and economic support that hasten transitions to civilian life; however, this literature focuses exclusively on networks that emerge among commanders, peers, and foot soldiers. In this article, we broaden existing literature on ex-combatant networks by examining the role that family relations play in combatants’ war and post-war trajectory. Drawing on 18 life history interviews with former male combatants from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) we argue that the familial can often be as influential as peer-relations. Specifically, our study shows that, first, familiies can shape the defection, demobilization, and reintegration processes of ex-combatants, and, second, ex-combatant networks can play an important role in facilitating the reunion of families in the aftermath of war. The endurance of familial relations forged within NSAGs pose important considerations to DDR policies.

Abstract Gangs are widely considered major contributors to the high levels of violence afflicting Latin America, including in particular Central America. At the same time, however, the vast majority of individuals who join a gang will also leave it and, it is assumed, become less violent. Having said this, the mechanisms underlying this ‘desistance’ process are not well understood, and nor are the determinants of individuals’ post-gang trajectories, partly because gang desistance tends to be seen as an event rather than a process. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research carried out in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighbourhood in Nicaragua's capital city Managua, and more specifically a set of ‘archetypal’ gang member life histories that illustrate the occupational options open to former gang members, this article offers a longitudinal perspective on desistance and its consequences, with specific reference to the determinants of individuals’ continued engagement with violence (or not).

Going beyond a static conceptualization of the mining enclave, recent research increasingly scrutinizes the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) schemes as a means of territorial entanglement. Several authors refer to the notion of the “corporate gift” to describe these control and coping strategies as well as the resulting power relations between companies and the population around the production facilities. In this article, we focus on electricity provision as an example for such a “gift”. Extensive field research in the Guinean mining areas of Siguiri, Kamsar, and Mambia showed that in all of these areas, the mining companies not only acted as “givers” of electricity, but also handed over the bill for this electricity provision to the state. Confronted with this curious fact of state-sponsored CSR, this article questions the foundations of the arguments around the notion of the corporate gift and comes to the conclusion that these three electrification projects were, at the same time, acts of “political sacrifice”. This concept points beyond the obvious conclusion that mining companies try to maximize their legitimization efforts in an increasingly competitive environment and underlines the role of the state in “company-community” relations and the maintenance of extractive enclaves.