Achieving Peace, Participation and Prosperity

Abstract

One of the difficulties faced by everyone working with post-conflict countries is the multiplicity of ‘overarching’ goals. The first of these is ‘peace’: most ambitiously, a complete end to large-scale organized violence or, more modestly, a reduction in its intensity. The second is ‘political participation’: ranging from introducing (or restoring) multi-party democracy with all its constitutional trap**s to the simpler goal of more political representation for weaker ethnic groups and regions. The third is economic and social ‘reconstruction’, which — at some (usually vague) point — is expected to merge into the fourth goal: sustained and longer term ‘development’ (in its turn, often conflated with growth in gross domestic product (GDP)). Both reconstruction and development are, in their turn, expected to be ‘broad-based’ — the fifth goal — embracing poverty reduction and gender equality together with, hopefully, a reduction in ‘horizontal’ (or ‘group’) inequalities (see Chapter 7 by Frances Stewart). And within this fifth goal, and paralleling the move from reconstruction to development, poverty reduction is expected to take over from humanitarian assistance. With ‘prosperity’ providing a wrapper for these last three goals, we arrive at a triad — Peace-Participation-Prosperity (P-P-P) — that organizes this chapter’s discussion of the opportunities, difficulties and tensions existing in post-conflict reconstruction.