Civil war destroys lives, and it destroys livelihoods. If economic and social devastation is not alleviated, hardship and inequality will beget new instability, and possibly new conflict. Thus, when the fighting has ended, communities not only have to grapple with accountability and how to share power going forward. They also face the daunting task of rebuilding the economy from the ground up, and to do so in a way that does not reignite the grievances that led to conflict in the first place. This project aims to examine how communities and peacebuilders grapple with these issues in light of ever more detailed international rules on economic and social development.
The importance of economic factors in the outbreak of internal conflict is now well established in the political science literature. For example, the secession of South Sudan and subsequent civil war in the young nation, even though motivated by ethnic tensions, was and is fuelled by the allure of the region's oil reserves. And in Colombia, rural poverty and unequal land ownership were important factors in the decades long guerilla campaign of the FARC. Nevertheless, international law scholarship on post-conflict situations has mostly focused on issues of governance and transitional justice. Even those that have addressed themes of sustainable development have often done so by examining international law in the abstract, rather than its practical implementation in peace processes, although there have been important contributions in particular on environmental peacebuilding.
At the same time, international organisations engaged in peacebuilding, like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, are beginning to pay more attention to inclusive economic reconstruction. The project investigates the role of sustainable development and international law in peace agreements through several case studies. Building on earlier work of other scholars on the role of international law in intra-state peace processes, it evaluates the existing theories in the context of economic and social issues.
