Engineering Peace—Asterisk
The development community treats war as inevitable. We’re learning how to pay to prevent it.
Global development has a war problem. The world overall is seeing more conflict every year, and the majority of the damage is in developing countries. And while war in industrialized societies can even support economic growth, at least in the short term, developing countries can take decades to recover the growth that violence wipes away.<br>Yet there is a belief in the development sector that war — and its catastrophic effects on weak economies with fragile infrastructures — is an inevitable feature of human society. That even if we had more effective tools, the challenge of war is far bigger than the resources that the development community can muster to meet it. In that sense, war is treated much the same as a volcanic eruption or a cyclone: We can build resilience once it happens, but we can’t prevent it from happening.<br>Pessimism reigns following resurgences of conflict in areas that had seen huge investments in “stabilization,” like Afghanistan. As Yvonne Helle, former special representative to the United Nations Development Programme’s Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People, told me days after the October 7 war in Israel and Gaza broke out, “I feel so useless and naive in believing that development was possible.”<br>It’s true that many traditional development approaches may not be great investments during wartime, when interrupted supply chains, scattered communities, and scrambled local power relationships all make such work far more expensive. But it is too fatalistic to treat war as an inevitability.<br>A new wave of empirical research is starting to expand our tool kit for preventing cycles of violence, at least when it comes to non-state actors. Our next step is to figure out what really works — and how much it costs.
Alex Nabaum
Peacebuilding: from art to science
Peacebuilding is notoriously difficult to evaluate. The chaos of war and displacement makes it difficult to survey communities. Conflict takes on different forms in different places, and extensive testing is needed to make sure promising approaches hold up in multiple environments. Destructive violence, though frequent, is rarely predictable enough to observe how it responds to a controlled intervention. It’s hard to recruit potential violent actors, often on the fringes of society, into studies, and even harder to observe how they behave.<br>These challenges shouldn’t obscure how far we’ve come in understanding the causes of violence. Since the mid-2000s, a revolution has been underway in conflict studies, driven by the marriage of novel large datasets on incident-level violence and observational methods developed in more traditional fields of development economics. This union was spearheaded by academic collectives like the Empirical Studies of Conflict project1<br>and the Irregular Warfare Initiative, which use incident-level data to test core assumptions behind efforts to stabilize regions suffering from irregular warfare. In Iraq, for instance, it turns out that young men’s job circumstances don’t have much of an effect on their decision to join insurgencies, overturning much conventional wisdom and casting a pall over job creation schemes that USAID and other donors had heavily invested in.<br>This first wave of studies of conflict based on surveys and other observational data paved the way for randomized field experiments. These experiments borrowed techniques from the randomized controlled trial movement in public health, and were often hosted by the same institutions, including groups like the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab’sCrime and Violence Initiative and Innovations for Poverty Action’s Peace & Recovery Program. This work has helped validate existing approaches, but measuring the impact of any intervention on real-world violence remains a challenge.
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One well-known paper illustrates just how tough this line of research can be. Working in the slums of Monrovia, Liberia, University of Chicago political scientist Chris Blattman and his co-authors found that eight weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy followed by a $200 cash transfer significantly reduced the likelihood that young men (previously engaged in illicit activity) display a range of violent and criminal behaviors at least a year after the study began. To show this, they had to find brave local enumerators willing to spend several hours each day over four days in casual conversation with men who were at high risk for violence, probing them with questions about their behavior. Closely and rigorously studying high-risk populations like this is critically important — new organizations have even sprung up in other parts of the world to test whether these findings hold up — but also critically difficult. This type of research is, therefore, vanishingly...