Getting peace to the pointy end of the spear

The Foundation Center and and the Peace and Security Funders Group this morning offer a flashy new webpage and report, “The Peace and Security Funding Index: an Analysis of Global Foundation Grantmaking.” The report, not really an “index” in my way of thinking, is the first of an annual series. It’s a brave effort to assemble in one place the who, what and where of private grants related to peace and security worldwide.

The result is a molehill: $283 million from 288 foundations spread across nearly 2000 grants to 1200 organizations. Even assuming that the survey has missed almost as much grant money as it has tallied, the total is likely under 1% of the Foundation Center’s total of $25 billion in grants in 2013. Most conflict countries are poor and many poor countries are in conflict. So this is a remarkably small amount devoted to a problem that on the face of it would appear to merit much more.

This is not for lack of US participation. The top six peace and security grant makers are American: Open Society (Soros), Carnegie Corp., National Endowment for Democracy, Ford, Buffett and MacArthur. So too are 12 of the top 15. Only Swiss, Dutch and Canadian foundations make it into that upper crust.

The bulk of the money (64%) went to a category labelled “stability” that ranges pretty far from the pointy end of the spear to include things like climate security, national security, foreign policy and diplomacy. Not that I object: I teach many of those things and appreciate that a good deal of the material I rely on comes from some of these grants. Twenty per cent of the total was spent on research and evaluation. Three-quarters of the money went to institutions in the developed world (the Global North in the report, which isn’t intended literally). One-third went to global issues. Africa was the region most focused on.

The newly minted Sustainable Development Goals include no. 16: “promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.” Peppered throughout the other goals are many other peace and security  objectives. It seems to me private foundations might do well to ponder steering a bit more money and effort in that direction.

Of course one of the reasons they don’t is that they can’t. This may sound odd: conflict zones have become downright dangerous. That wasn’t always so true. There is an enormous difference between working for peace and security in Kosovo and Bosnia during the wars there and trying to do anything like that in Syria, Libya or Yemen today. Even Ukraine is far less permissive than the Balkans of 20 plus years ago.

An Iraqi engineer visited me today. A Muslawi who worked for more than a decade to build democratic local governance there, he is now an expatriate, chased from his hometown by the Islamic State. I imagine he is unlikely to return permanently to his country, or to encourage his soon-to-be American children to do so, whatever his current intentions may be. 

So in addition to urging the private foundations to spend more overall on peace and security, I’d also like to urge them to spend more on figuring out how to get their resources closer to the conflict zones that really count today. Technology gives us capabilities to track and aggregate information gathered remotely. I am thinking of the work of Bellingcat and Caerus, as well as many others. Information is flowing very rapidly out of conflict zones. What we need to do now is turn that information into on-the-ground efforts that produce peace and security. Easier said than done, I know, but still worth saying and contemplating.