Making a market for evidence in peacebuilding

Only 1.3% of the US Agency for International Development 2021 budget was dedicated to “Conflict, Peace and Security” programs. In 2023 just 0.2% of the World Bank’s operational budget was dedicated to the organization’s largest multi-donor trust fund for “state and peace building”. The United Nations Secretary-General has frequently called for member states to spend greater resources to be spent on conflict prevention.

The paucity of international investment in preventing conflict seems out of step with the salience of the issue. High profile wars and terrorist attacks dominate news cycles and affect political debates in many countries, particularly in the OECD. After many decades in which they decreased, battle deaths have hit a 30-year high in 2024. (Wars are not only more frequent but bloodier than they have been in the past)

Analysts have frequently attempted to make the “business case” for increased investment in conflict prevention, arguing that the billions spent yearly in peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance – representing only the most direct consequences of conflict – should alone justify a greater focus on prevention. In the landmark Pathways for Peace report (2018), a dynamic cost-benefit analysis suggested that the international community could save close to $2.5bn per year in peacekeeping and other assistance 15 years after investing heavily in conflict prevention in only a few countries, effectively covering the full cost of the initial investment. More recently, an IMF working paper claims an economic return as high as $103 for every dollar spent on conflict prevention via “conflict-sensitive” macro-economic policies alone.

Unfortunately, such arguments do not seem to land with policymakers or philanthropists who control the resources needed to meaningfully reduce the chance of violent conflict. The missing link seems to be the difficulty in demonstrating how prevention funding could be spent to effectively reduce the chance of violence. In particular, the causal link between programs and policies that have been tested in the empirical scientific literature and the types of outcomes that most directly lead to large-scale outbreaks of violence is weak. While many studies have shown promising reductions in violence, crime or support for aggression, it is much less clear how violence prevention techniques might be scaled, or combined together, to reduce large-scale events like war. (How many former combatants must go through trauma-informed psychosocial support in order to prevent the resurgence of hostilities? How many national dialogue forums must be televised in order to create the political will needed to sign a peace agreement?) In 2022, the foundation Open Philanthropy investigated the social value (in comparison to other causes) that could be harvested from investing in preventing civil conflict in particular, concluding that although it is “reasonably convinced this area is both important and neglected relative to its importance….[we are] quite uncertain how much of a difference micro-scale interventions like cognitive behavioral therapy will make on macro-scale events like war.”

Demonstrating the “tractability” of conflict as a social investment requires not just ‘more’ research, but ‘better’ research – meaning research that is coordinated and targeted precisely to plug gaps in the current understanding of conflict prevention and to test particular tools in the conflict prevention toolkit. It also requires testing its utility at the scale required to prevent conflict. Taken together, the promise of some day being able to ‘engineer peace’ depends on more robust mechanisms for getting research to be used appropriately in the practice of conflict prevention.