After war ends: Aid paradigms and post-conflict preferences

Pamina Firchow, Julianne Funk and Roger Mac Ginty

World Development, 2025, vol. 189, issue C

Abstract: This article is interested in aid preferences, or what people desire in terms of aid, in a post-conflict and post peace accord context. When examining post-conflict preferences around peace thirty years after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we observe less of an emphasis on transitional justice or security-related needs and more concrete demands for traditional development-related needs such as infrastructure, jobs, improvement of public spaces and business. Using extensive and systematically collected community-generated data, we show a widespread diversity of needs and priorities related to peace depending on people’s gender, age, ethnicity or nationality and location. This diversity points to the need for peace programming that is multi-modal, flexible, and able to recognize different timelines. This is significant in that Bosnia and Herzegovina has experienced very substantial international peace support and reconciliation assistance over the past three decades, but citizens are anxious to move on and return to ‘normal.’ The research suggests a fatigue with post-conflict contexts being perennially linked to a ‘post-war’ or ‘post-conflict’ status and thus serves as a guide for future international support decades after war has ended.

Keywords: Post-conflict preferences; International aid; Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH); Localization; Triple nexus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X24003875
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:189:y:2025:i:c:s0305750x24003875

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106916

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().