Peace and Development: An Uneasy Partnership

Peace and development are routinely described as two sides of the same coin, yet the partnership between them has always been uneasy. Development agencies want measurable progress on poverty, health and education. Peacebuilding practitioners insist that none of that progress survives contact with violent conflict. Both are right, and the tension between their working cultures has shaped two decades of donor policy.

A substantial body of research produced for the European Commission around 2010, led by Partners for Democratic Change International (PDCI), examined exactly this problem. Its starting point was blunt: development interventions that ignore the drivers of conflict cannot be sustainable, just as a ceasefire alone will not make communities grow and flourish. The research found that even where officials knew the theory, few applied a conflict-sensitive approach at the stages that matter, from policy formulation through programming to evaluation.

Why peace and development depend on each other

The clearest statement of the peace and development nexus in European policy came from the Council of the European Union in November 2007. Its conclusions on security and development have been quoted ever since:

“There cannot be sustainable development without peace and security, and without development and poverty eradication there will be no sustainable peace.”

The logic runs in both directions. Violent conflict destroys infrastructure, livelihoods and institutions, and it is often rooted in the discrimination and exclusion that keep particular groups poor. Exclusion prevents people from reaching food, clean water, health care, education and justice, and from taking part in the political and economic life of a state. Unless a development programme addresses the continued or potential exclusion of groups such as women, demobilised soldiers, disillusioned youth and marginalised minorities, its gains rest on sand.

The United Nations peacebuilding architecture is built on the same premise, and the World Bank has drawn similar conclusions in its work on fragility, conflict and violence, which treats conflict prevention as a core development concern rather than a diplomatic add-on.

What peacebuilding actually means

Definitions vary, but the PDCI guidance settled on a simple one: peacebuilding assumes that conflict is a natural part of human existence, and its goal is to transform the destructive ways societies deal with conflict into more constructive outcomes. Conflict itself is not the enemy. Violence is.

Five foundational principles recur across the research:

• Locally owned. Strategies must be rooted in local needs, resources and capacities, and must empower local populations to carry them out.
• Inclusive. Violent conflict is most often rooted in the marginalisation of minorities and women, so their participation is a condition of success, not a courtesy.
• Long term. There is no quick fix and no blueprint. Crisis-response measures have their place, but structures and attitudes change over years.
• Human rights and justice centred. Where rights violations go unaddressed, peace does not hold and development achievements remain precarious.
• Comprehensive. Peacebuilding spans the whole arc of a conflict, from early warning and prevention to post-conflict reconstruction, and must cohere with work in other sectors.

Aid is never neutral

One of the most influential ideas absorbed into this field comes from Mary B. Anderson’s 1999 study Do No Harm. Every external intervention transfers resources into a setting where power relations are contested, and those transfers can feed the conflict. Anderson identified recurring patterns: aid goods stolen for consumption or to buy weapons; market effects that sustain a war economy; distribution politics that favour some groups over others; substitution effects, where aid frees local resources to be channelled into fighting; and legitimisation effects, where assistance empowers some actors and sidelines others.

The practical answer is conflict sensitivity. A conflict-sensitive programme starts from a structured conflict analysis covering four elements: the profile of the context, the actors and their motivations, the structural causes and triggers, and the dynamics that link them. That analysis then informs every stage of the programme cycle. At the planning stage it shapes the choice of beneficiaries, staff and partners. During implementation it guides monitoring against a conflict baseline. At the end, impact assessment asks not only whether the project met its targets but whether it eased or inflamed local tensions.

Not every project labelled peacebuilding passes this test. Activities can sit comfortably in the peacebuilding “sector” while ignoring the actual drivers of conflict, and the research is explicit that such work can fuel new or latent disputes.

What counts as aid: the ODA boundary

Money is where the peace and development partnership gets tested. The Development Assistance Committee of the OECD decides which peace-related and security-related activities may be reported as official development assistance, and the boundary has shifted over time. By the late 2000s the eligible list included rehabilitation assistance for demobilised soldiers, conversion of military production facilities to civilian use, training of police in routine functions, customs and border-control training, mine clearance for developmental purposes, prevention of child-soldier recruitment, and support for civilian oversight of the security sector.

The exclusions matter just as much. Training in counter-subversion, suppression of political dissent or intelligence gathering on political activity cannot be reported as aid, and mine clearance carried out for military training does not qualify. Development and humanitarian organisations have remained wary of any drift towards counting military expenditure or counter-terrorism work as development assistance, arguing that it would blur the purpose of aid and expose it to securitised agendas.

Some member states went beyond bookkeeping. Spain integrated conflict prevention and peacebuilding into its Master Plan for Spanish Cooperation 2005–2008, then adopted a dedicated Peace Building Strategy Paper in 2007 that declared development “the first line of defence” in preventing violent conflict. The strategy covered security and defence measures such as security sector reform and demining, social and economic recovery, and political development, while deliberately limiting the role of the military. Newer donors have travelled the same road more slowly, as the record of Bulgaria’s development assistance programme illustrates.

Four lenses that keep development honest

The research treated four cross-cutting issues as the connective tissue between peace and development work.

Gender

Women, men, girls and boys experience conflict differently, and women and girls suffer disproportionately because of socially constructed roles and expectations. Programmes that ignore this reproduce exclusion. The evidence gathered across gender and peacebuilding research shows that interventions designed around women’s actual needs and capacities are consistently more durable.

Human security

Human security shifts attention from the state to the person, asking which downside risks could wipe out development gains if left unattended. Food insecurity, displacement, criminal violence and disease can each undo years of progress, which is why people’s security needs belong inside development planning rather than alongside it.

Transitional justice

Sustainable development requires that grave human rights violations be addressed rather than buried. Work on transitional justice brings truth-seeking, accountability and reparations into the reconstruction agenda, on the argument that impunity corrodes exactly the institutions development seeks to build.

Mediation and dialogue

Communication, facilitation, negotiation and problem-solving are process skills, and development practitioners use them daily whether they realise it or not. Structured mediation and dialogue makes participation real: it is the mechanism through which local ownership and inclusion move from principle to practice.

The gap between policy and practice

The most sobering finding of the PDCI research concerned the newer EU member states of Central and Eastern Europe, which were building donor programmes at speed after accession. Their governments and NGOs were developing capacity in line with international frameworks, yet the study found that not all state and non-governmental actors even recognised the importance of a peacebuilding perspective in development interventions. Those who knew the concept rarely applied it systematically.

That gap has not closed by itself anywhere. Closing it requires training, honest evaluation and political will, and it requires donors to accept that a conflict analysis might tell them things they would rather not hear about their own programmes. The partnership between peace and development remains uneasy precisely because taking conflict seriously is uncomfortable. It slows disbursement, complicates reporting and challenges the fiction that aid is a purely technical exercise. The alternative, though, is development that builds on fault lines. Sooner or later, fault lines move.

Frequently asked questions

What is the link between peace and development?

Peace and development reinforce each other. Violent conflict destroys livelihoods, institutions and infrastructure, while poverty and exclusion are among the structural causes of conflict. The EU Council put it plainly in 2007: there is no sustainable development without peace and security, and no sustainable peace without development and poverty eradication.

What is peacebuilding in simple terms?

Peacebuilding is the effort to transform the destructive ways a society handles conflict into constructive ones. It covers a broad range of activities across the whole span of a conflict, from prevention and early warning to post-conflict reconstruction, and it treats conflict itself as normal while working to end violence.

What are the core principles of peacebuilding?

Research for the European Commission identified five: local ownership, inclusion of marginalised groups, long-term commitment, a human rights and justice orientation, and comprehensiveness, meaning coherence with other sectors and phases of a conflict.

What is conflict-sensitive development?

Conflict-sensitive development examines how an intervention and its context interact, then acts on that understanding to avoid negative impacts and strengthen positive ones. It rests on conflict analysis and applies at every stage of a programme, from design through implementation to evaluation.

Can development aid make conflict worse?

Yes. Aid transfers resources into contested settings. Documented patterns include theft of aid goods, market distortions that feed war economies, unequal distribution that deepens grievances, substitution effects that free local resources for fighting, and legitimisation of armed actors.

What is a conflict analysis?

A conflict analysis is a systematic study of a conflict’s profile, causes, actors and dynamics. It maps the context, identifies structural causes and triggers, examines who is involved and why, and outlines likely scenarios, giving programmes a baseline for design and monitoring.

Which security activities count as official development assistance?

Under OECD DAC rules of the period, eligible items included reintegration of demobilised soldiers, conversion of military facilities to civilian use, routine police training, demining for developmental purposes, prevention of child-soldier recruitment and civilian oversight of security budgets. Counter-subversion training and intelligence work were excluded.

Why is gender central to peace and development work?

Conflict affects women and men differently, and women and girls often suffer disproportionately because of socially constructed roles. Interventions that overlook these differences entrench exclusion, which is itself a driver of conflict, so a gender perspective improves both fairness and durability.

What role does transitional justice play in development?

Transitional justice addresses past human rights violations through truth-seeking, accountability and reparations. The research argues that development achievements remain precarious where violations go unaddressed, because impunity undermines the trust and institutions that development depends on.

How can donors integrate peacebuilding into their programmes?

By commissioning a conflict analysis before design, choosing partners and beneficiaries with the conflict context in mind, building conflict indicators into monitoring, planning exit strategies that do not destabilise local structures, and assessing impact against the conflict baseline as well as project targets.