Post-Conflict Risks

Post-conflict societies face two distinctive challenges: economic recovery and reduction of the risk of a recurring conflict. Aid and policy reforms have been found to be effective in economic recovery. In this article, the authors concentrate on the other challenge — risk reduction. The post-conflict peace is typically fragile: nearly half of all civil wars are due to post-conflict relapses. The authors find that economic development substantially reduces risks, but it takes a long time. They also find evidence that UN peacekeeping expenditures significantly reduce the risk of renewed war. The effect is large: doubling expenditure reduces the risk from 40% to 31%. In contrast to these results, the authors cannot find any systematic influence of elections on the reduction of war risk. Therefore, post-conflict elections should be promoted as intrinsically desirable rather than as mechanisms for increasing the durability of the post-conflict peace. Based on these results, the authors suggest that peace appears to depend upon an external military presence sustaining a gradual economic recovery, with political design playing a somewhat subsidiary role. Since there is a relationship between the severity of post-conflict risks and the level of income at the end of the conflict, this provides a clear and uncontroversial principle for resource allocation: resources per capita should be approximately inversely proportional to the level of income in the post-conflict country.