Conflict matters

I did something yesterday morning I don’t usually do:  I went to a discussion of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs to the initiated).  The goals fixed in 2000 were supposed to be achieved by 2015.  So that UN is working on a new set for then.

The existing goals focus on canonical development issues:  eradicating poverty, universal primary education, improving maternal health, reducing child mortality, and combating disease, with a dollop of gender equality and women’s empowerment as well as environmental sustainability.  Then a cherry of global partnership to top it off.  The exercise has been a useful one, with some real progress made.

But the conflict, peacebuilding and statebuilding communities were left out last time around.  So the Alliance for Peacebuilding,  John Filson moderating, convened the meeting yesterday to discuss the obstacles to including conflict issues and how they might be overcome. Speakers included Molly Elgin-Cossart of the Center for American Progress, UN Millennium Campaign adviser Ravi Karkara, women’s empowerment advocate Karen Mulhauser, and the State Department’s Charles Call. 

Conflict and poverty go together, but development folks and developing countries would rather not focus on that reality.  Molly suggested some developing countries fear it will lead to conditionality, that is making funding conditional on doing something about conflict.  They prefer their aid unconditional.  Both donors and developing countries fear the “securitization” of development, which I suppose means they don’t want resources diverted to law and order or other conflict issues, no matter their impact on development.  Developing countries are concerned that introducing conflict issues will divide their “G77” lobby, which provides much of the clout poor countries wield in the UN.

There is a deeper issue:  the development world sees its issues as mainly economic and peripherally environmental and social.  Governance, security, and political inclusion–key words in the conflict world–are not entirely anathema in the development world, but their place there is marginal, uncertain and sometimes unwelcome.  Never mind that conflict is a major contributor to poverty, disease, mistreatment of women and inadequate education.

Violent conflict on a large scale is about power and its distribution.  It is politics by other means.  The development world may like nongovernmental organizations, transparency and accountability, but it gets nervous around politics.  So how will the new post-2015 development goals take conflict (hence politics) into account?  Still unclear, though Chuck Call suggested “responsive governance based on rule of law” and “durable peace” might be acceptable rubrics.  Others thought conflict issues might appear in the guise of “equity” and “participation.”  “Inclusion” is another possibility, as is “restorative justice.”

Why does any of this matter?  Maybe it doesn’t.  Those of us who focus on conflict don’t need to sell the subject.  It sells itself in everyday events.  Syria, it is thought, has lost 35 years of development since the beginning of the war less than three years ago.  It will take that long for the country to achieve the gross domestic product it would have had without the war.  Anyone worried about poverty will have to worry about conflict in something like 50%, or more, of the countries concerned.  The UN itself is all about political conflict, and overcoming it, even if its development-focused agencies would like to ignore it.

I confess to enormous impatience with discussion of issues where the answer is obvious:  you are not going to have much development in those large parts of the world where violent conflict is endemic.  Violent conflict is about how power is distributed in a society, and exercised through governmental and nongovernmental institutions.  The MDGs may be able to do a lot of good without mentioning conflict.  But they will do a lot more if they acknowledge its pervasive influence and encourage both donors and recipients to pay it mind.