Aid,growth and peace: a comparative analysis

This article disaggregates aid data to enrich our understanding of the patterns of post-conflict aid. We find that the front-loading of aid after a peace agreement, detected by previous research, has not been the general pattern. To begin with, relief and aid need separating out, commitments and disbursement distinguished, and four-year averages replaced by annual figures. Detailed analysis of seven post-conflict cases confirms that the political contexts of donation and implementation, including political assessments of peace agreements, have considerable influence on aid patterns. Finally, high levels of aid and rapid economic growth are not essential preconditions for sustaining peace. More significant are the short-term stabilisation strategies adopted and the distributive effects of structural adjustment.     

Reconstruction as modernisation: the ‘post-conflict’ project in Afghanistan

This paper examines the post-war reconstruction programme in Afghanistan, arguing that it contains the seeds of radical social change. The paper analyses the tensions of the present reconstruction project in light of the past experience of similar programmes launched by Afghan rulers and their foreign supporters. The central argument is that the conflation of post-war reconstruction with a broader agenda for development and modernisation has brought out a wide range of tensions associated with social change. Simultaneously the prominent foreign role in the undertaking has increasingly had negative effects. As a result, the entire project shows signs of severe contradictions that are adding to the problems caused by the growing insurgency.     

Economic aid to post-conflict countries: a methodological critique of Collier and Hoeffler

In the past five years, research sponsored by the World Bank on the economic aspects of civil war1 ?1. The project was titled the Economics of Political and Criminal Violence. View all notes under the research directorship of Oxford economist Paul Collier has had an extraordinary influence on the subsequent study of violent conflict and civil war and on international policy. The research project has now turned its attention to the problem of countries emerging from civil war and what Collier and his co-author, Anke Hoeffler, call ‘a first systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post-conflict growth process.’2 ?2. First reported in a World Bank Policy Research Working Paper circulated in October 2002, their article, ‘Aid, Policy, and Growth in Post-Conflict Societies,’ the paper was in 2003 posted on the website of the Centre for the Study of African Economics, Oxford University until it was published in 2004 in the European Economic Review. There are some minor differences between the two versions of their work, but the conclusions are identical. In the present article, the paper version will be referred to as Collier & Hoeffler (2003) and the published version as Collier & Hoeffler (2004). View all notes Building on the influence of their earlier research and the lively interest currently in knowledge about and policy on post-conflict strategies, this work is likely to be equally influential on research, thinking, and policy. It is all the more important, therefore, to subject the research to critical examination before it becomes established as conventional wisdom. This note reports one such attempt to analyze some major methodological problems with the study and argues that the research cannot sustain the conclusions they draw or the resulting policy recommendations.     

Democratizing a Dependent State: The Case of Afghanistan

The post-Taliban democratic reforms in Afghanistan were in part a recreation of the past. Afghanistan has had six constitutions between 1923 and 1990, and most have provided for national assemblies and elections in one form or other. Yet the degree of foreign involvement in the most recent reform process was unprecedented. The heavy foreign hand contradicted the promise of national autonomy, representation, and fair process held out by the democratization agenda. By implicitly devaluing the institutions it sought to promote, the democratization process has also had potentially counterproductive effects. Moreover, while promoting democratization, Western governments simultaneously created a state so dependent on external support that it deprived the critical institution of liberal democracy – the legislature – of its meaning. The logical response of the national assembly has been to engage mostly in politics with symbolic or nuisance value. This study focuses on three areas of political reform: the structuring of the interim administration, the promulgation of a new constitution, and the establishment of the legislature.     

Post-war aid: patterns and purposes

A recent report by the World Bank reiterates the widely held view that donor agencies commit large amounts of funding in the immediate post-conflict phase, only for this to taper off to more ‘normal’ levels once the crisis is over. The World Bank criticises this phenomenon, referred to as ‘frontloading’, claiming that it damages the prospects of economic growth, which in turn undermines the peace. This article argues that the Bank's analysis is flawed because it does not distinguish between commitments and disbursements, or take sufficient account of other factors influencing aid patterns over time and in different settings. Moreover, the link between official aid and post-war economic performance is of only marginal significance. Any critique of aid policies needs to be based on a detailed analysis of what is delivered rather than what is promised, and of the impact of donors' assistance on the ground.