After war ends: Aid paradigms and post-conflict preferences

Abstract

This article is interested in aid preferences, or what people desire in terms of aid, in a post-conflict and post peace accord context. When examining post-conflict preferences around peace thirty years after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we observe less of an emphasis on transitional justice or security-related needs and more concrete demands for traditional development-related needs such as infrastructure, jobs, improvement of public spaces and business. Using extensive and systematically collected community-generated data, we show a widespread diversity of needs and priorities related to peace depending on people’s gender, age, ethnicity or nationality and location. This diversity points to the need for peace programming that is multi-modal, flexible, and able to recognize different timelines. This is significant in that Bosnia and Herzegovina has experienced very substantial international peace support and reconciliation assistance over the past three decades, but citizens are anxious to move on and return to ‘normal.’ The research suggests a fatigue with post-conflict contexts being perennially linked to a ‘post-war’ or ‘post-conflict’ status and thus serves as a guide for future international support decades after war has ended.