You are driving on a road and are coming to a fork. The road splits into two: one a major motorway and the other a slightly smaller service road. After the fork, the service road continues to trail the motorway in a straight line as far as the eye can see. These two parallel roads are in a country called Conflict Affected. Not many detailed maps exist of Conflict Affected, but it is known that this fork is located not far from the border, which means that the one road splits into two not far from where the country begins.

The roads have names, too: the major motorway is Stabilization/Statebuilding Highway, the service road is Economic Development Lane. And, as the map shows, once the two roads have split, Economic Development Lane stays largely in the shadow of Stabilization/Statebuilding Highway, almost as if it is unable to find its own way. When Stabilization/Statebuilding Highway develops a pothole, Economic Development Lane can help out. Together, these roads offer something very tempting for travel in Conflict Affected: a clear direction.

The clear direction is reassuring amongst all the complexities of lives amid violence. Travelling alongside statebuilding and stabilization, there exists a third promise of solution: economic well-being. People need to have the means to eat enough, to live healthily, to get an education, to have the time to care for their families, to talk to their friends, to nourish their communities, to enjoy and care for nature, as well as to create or revel in music, art, reading, worship or whatever else feeds their soul. Economic hardship makes all of that much more difficult or impossible – and more. Poverty and the struggle for a livelihood are cruel constraints in every moment of every day, for individuals, for communities, for the planet. Not having enough to live on today and not knowing whether you will tomorrow is both a symptom and a cause of inequality and inequity: being poor gives you the worst starting point for getting out of poverty.

Alleviating poverty is necessary. Everyone’s opportunity to have a decent, non-precarious, non-exploitative and sustainable livelihood is a non-negotiable goal. How to do this, though, continues to be the central question of societies in general and in international development in particular. Livelihood questions tend to sit with economic advisors, so economic policies to pursue some sort of economic growth tend to be the approach. But the question how to really achieve equality and equity and a decent livelihood for all has thus far an incomplete answer. This chapter, unfortunately, also does not give the step-by-step breakdown of how to do it. But it offers a couple of reasons for why creating decent livelihoods has been so difficult in conflict-affected settings.

Statebuilding and economic development share the assumption that a priority is to get the structures right and all else will follow. Both approaches and the theories that carry them are deeply rooted in the psyche of the international development industry. The mental – and practical – model of economic development has long focused on what the OECD calls the ‘“supply side” of the economy – attempting to ensure that economic conditions such as infrastructure provision, competition and regulatory policy, and the education and incentives of the labour force, are supportive of private sector investment and growth’.[i]

With a supply side that is immaculate (as fresh as paint), it is assumed, that it drips – trickles down – to become poverty reduction. Also assumed is that investment will happen as long as there is competitive access to labour and capital markets and, therefore, prices. Because the paths of stabilization/statebuilding and supply side economic development intersect, they reinvigorate each other’s philosophy that putting structures in place will order all the pieces in the right way. The two roads lead in the same direction, each supportive of the other.

Both roads offer comforting mental maps, so comforting in fact that they touch almost all types of development programmes in some way or another, even programmes that are not about statebuilding or economic development. That is why something as complex as participation or inclusion becomes a line graph showing that the amount of people who have participated is growing; why setting up an office is often a first requirement to get funding for working on changing people’s minds about social norms; and why the success of peacebuilding is presented as an Excel table that shows the number of attendants at a meeting. Building structures, road-mapping a project (with milestones), measuring impact, counting progress (which has to clearly show that something is growing to be considered progress) – all of these elements are common development parlance, even for projects that seek to support even the most complex, challenging and delicate social changes. But what is the origin of these maps that are so rooted in the traditional statebuilding and economic development thinking? Ironically, the vast amount of post-conflict programming that starts from the fork in the road uses mental models that many development economists themselves no longer occupy. These are the development economists that grapple with what exactly their mental identity is, because it is not clear from what is written on the tin.

A double surname suggests that each name is taken from one parent. Normally, this creates a merged harmonious identity – except in the case of the double name Development Economics. The linear presentation of this double surname belies the power struggle between the two parental identities underneath. On the days when Economics sets the dinner table, the dinner guests are Growth, GDP, Line Graph and Neoliberalism; all sitting on stiff-backed chairs. When Development is hosting, the bean bags are out to welcome Sociology, Anthropology and Political Science; all lounging about and sometimes even crawling over each other.

The two parts of the identity grapple with how neoclassical economic thinking and the much broader definition of development need to interact. This tension became very visible in the evolution of how the global community articulated its own goals of human well-being. In 2000, throwing a party in honour of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) would have required a generously sized dinner table. With their slender definitions, all MDGs could comfortably fit around that table: eight goals, twenty-one targets and sixty-three indicators. Fifteen years later, a hosted brunch for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) required at least a couple of decently sized marquees to accommodate the bulk of the ambitions and the more detailed articulation of global problems that has become the SDGs: 17 goals, 169 targets and 232 indicators.[ii] Problems had always been complex, but the complexity had just become much more visible.

Gunasekara unpacks how complex the reality of making a living in post-war Sri Lanka (and elsewhere) is, writing about people’s

seemingly endless struggle to secure livelihoods and move on with their lives after conflict while positioned along inimical economic, political, social and cultural fault lines. These fault lines operate not only at the level of gender, class, caste, and ethnicity, but also in relation to capital and labour, market and the state, and centre and periphery.[iii]

Confined theories of economic growth that equate growth with poverty reduction cannot capture such detail. And while that is true, it is not the main point of this chapter.

The main point is to lay out how limiting the mental imagery is that underpins development approaches, particularly in violence-affected situations. And just how much a particular model of thinking about economic development continues to be weirdly myopic about the humans that are the economy. This is not an ignorant dismissal of the many economists working on supporting livelihoods with innovative ideas and patient long-term strategies on how to harmonize livelihood interventions with existing market systems, or on how to strengthen value chains within their specific political economies. It is not a dismissal of an economic structural transformation that grapples with change in activities, employment and the need to use fewer resources to support more people.

But something often happens to economic development policies specifically in situations of violence: inspiration and courage disappear. Because Economic Development Lane first intersects with Stabilization/Statebuilding Highway, economic thought becomes glued to the imagery of bricks and mortar, the allure of straight lines and blueprints. The result is that in situations where the state is diagnosed as needing construction, inspired and thoughtful economic programmes are replaced by those that lean in to the blunter ideologies of structures, rules and capitalism.

Just like Weber’s ideas about the state suggest a clear roadmap towards getting to the state when reduced to three bullet points, mental models of conflict-affected development heavily feature statebuilding and the linear clarity of economic growth. And just like Weber’s legacy is – unbeknown to him who believed in multi-causality – to suggest such clarity, the idea of straightforward economic growth as a solution to a multitude of problems is incredibly powerful.

[i]  OECD. 2020. Beyond Growth: Towards a New Economic Approach, New Approaches to Economic Challenges. Paris: OECD Publishing. Page 18

[ii] I am indebted to Stephen Gelb for his help with framing this chapter.[iii]  Gunasekara, Vagisha. 2020. Paradoxes in Livelihood Interventions: A Synthesis of evidence from selected war-affected areas in Africa and Asia. London: Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium/ ODI. Page 1.

This article is an excerpt from the book Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (pages 53-78), published by Bloomsbury (2023). 

This book draws on work conducted under the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC) headquartered at ODI. Mareike Schomerus was the research director of the SLRC from 2017 to 2021. You can download your open-access copy of the book here. For more information about the book visit this website.

More resources on fragility and life in violence

1. Wairimu Muthike and Mareike Schomerus (2023), Learning from Insurance Agents: Peacebuilding, Resilience and the Mental Landscape in Horn of Africa Bulletin, accessible via https://life-peace.org/hab-bulletin/learning-from-insurance-agents-peacebuilding-resilience-and-the-mental/ 
2. Mareike Schomerus (2023), Resilience in fragility: mental models, humans and complexities at the Fragility Forum and beyond, on LinkedIn, accessible via https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/resilience-fragility-mental-models-humans-complexities-forum-otlkf 
3. Mareike Schomerus and Nikka Saeedi (2023), The ‘Mental Landscape’ When Living Amidst Violence, in the Fragile Truths podcast (2023) by Knowledge Platform Security & Rule of Law (KPSLR), accessible via https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fragiletruthspodcast/episodes/The-Mental-Landscape-When-Living-Amidst-Violence-e2260aq  
4. Mareike Schomerus (2023), Lives Amid Violence, in the Root of Conflict podcast by the University of Chicago Public Policy, accessible via https://x.com/TheUC3P/status/1699806567300776030