Development Strategies and Inter-Group Violence : Insights on Conflict-Sensitive Development

Although many scholars and practitioners recognize that development and conflict are intertwined, there is much less understanding of the mechanisms behind these linkages. This book takes a new approach by critically examining how various development strategies provoke or help prevent intrastate violence, based on cases from all developing regions.

Throughout the world, development has been affected by armed violence - from civil wars and separatist struggles to explosions of religious and communal violence and terrorism. Ethnolinguistic and religious diversity, rivalries among regional groups and clans, and competing economic interests create a potential for acrimonious intergroup divisions. Yet some nations remain stable, while others, earlier touted as pillars of peaceful growth, have foundered badly. Development Strategies and Inter-Group Violence argues that economic development strategies, though embedded within a complex matrix of social and political conditions, have often shaped such different outcomes. Drawing on economic, political, and psychological theory, policy experiences, and case studies of the three regional volumes in the series (Economic Development Strategies and the Evolution of Violence in Latin America; Development Strategies, Identities, and Conflict in Asia; and The Economic Roots of Conflict and Cooperation in Africa), this book assesses the risks and opportunities of development strategies regarding the likelihood of inter-group violence. Policymakers and development practitioners will greatly benefit from this detailed and comprehensive analysis of how development initiatives may affect group identities, influence multiple disparities among groups, create "conflict-opportunity structures," and change the dynamics of state-society relations.