The Multi-Dimensional Challenge of Mass Violent Conflict

Abstract

War has become central to the development policy debate in a way that the pioneers of development studies would have found inconceivable. Although struggles for independence were often bloody, there was at least an expectation in the 1950s and 1960s that new countries would eventually consolidate a measure of political stability sufficient to enable them to put effective development plans into action. The mainstream view that war was some kind of exception to the development process persisted right up to the 1990s, when the tragedies in Somalia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and the then Zaire (to name just four major African conflicts) finally pushed civil war onto the centre stage of the development debate and donor activity. Since that time, the donor community has been involved in numerous conflict situations ranging from Afghanistan to Angola to Burundi to Mozambique to Timor-Leste. This activity has not only included efforts at brokering peace and the use of military deployment (under UN auspices or otherwise), as well as coping with the emergency and humanitarian impact, but also what has come to be known as ‘post-conflict reconstruction’: the attempt to rebuild societies and economies after many years of war.