but which early failures of the post-colonial and (more recently) the post-socialist development effort exposed all too clearly.<sup>7</sup> First, in an increasing number of cases, early development ‘wins’ in terms of accelerated economic growth were undercut by outbreaks of social unrest. It became clear that destructive conflict could set back, by decades, hard-won social and economic development gains. In El Salvador, Sierra Leone and Kosovo, for example, outbreaks of civil war thwarted the best ideas of the development planners. It became increasingly clear that development investments which did not factor in the potential for conflict in the contexts in which they operated could be (and indeed were) wasted: what use was there in building a road, renovating a hospital or opening a school if the resulting infrastructure was burned down in a violent protest, if doctors would not work in the hospital because of security concerns, or if children were too frightened (or being lured) by local militia groups to pay much attention to their homework? This led to the rise of the field of ‘conflict studies’ within the development industry. In the applied academic field, large-N datasets were established which investigated the demographic and geographic (that is to say, easy to measure) characteristics that made countries more prone to violence<sup>8</sup> , giving rise to an early warning literature (and industry) that served to help donors identify when particular countries were at risk of conflict. Importantly, these datasets were largely, until recently, crossnational, investigating variation between states rather than areas within countries.

Second, the rise of the view of development as being the pursuit of increased ‘freedom’ (Sen 1999) provided a basis for mainstreaming consideration of security issues into development thinking. The physical, economic and psychological insecurity that accompanies outbreaks of violence—and that lingers long thereafter—negatively impacts on freedom, opportunity and choice, the basis of development itself. This helped give rise to the concept of ‘human security’ and, coupled with the rise of human rights approaches (Uvin 2004) and the clear persistence of intra-state wars in the aftermath of the Cold War, provided a broad basis for both scholars and practitioners to take a more pragmatic interest in conflict.

Third, it became increasingly clear that not only were development interventions at times ineffectual in the face of violent conflict, they were also, in other cases, an actual cause of conflict. One extreme example, carefully documented by Uvin (1998), was the development industry’s role in the lead-up to the tragic genocide in Rwanda in 1994. In the humanitarian field, a debate emerged over the political role of interventions and the inability of actors (such as the International Red Cross or Medicin San Frontier) to be neutral agents<sup>9</sup> . Recognizing the damaging impacts of conflict, aid agencies increasingly tried to design projects that were “conflict sensitive” and that would “do no harm” (Anderson 1999). Over time, as Uvin (2002)

> 7 The discussion of the literature here focuses on works that have had impact on development practice (e.g., within international development agencies) rather than on the full academic literature.  While the latter is wide and diverse enough to have made significant theoretical advances, all too often this literature has had little impact on the design and implementation of approaches in the field.

> 8 Some of the more prominent of these datasets include the Correlates of War studies (COW and COW2) at the University of Michigan and Pennsylvania State University (Singer 1990), the Conflict Data Project at the University of Uppsala (Wallensteen and Sollenburg 1998), the Major Episodes of Political Violence (MEPV) dataset at the University of Maryland (Gurr, Marshall and Khosla 2001), and the Minorities at Risk dataset, utilized by Toft (2005) amongst others.  A good summary of these datasets is given at the web-site of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute web-site: <u>www.sipri.org.  Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler’s work has also been highly</u> influential (World Bank 2003).

> 9 For useful discussions on this point, see Gourevitch (1999), Rieff (2003) and Ignatieff (2004).

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