ABSTRACT
Before the end of the Cold War and the (re-)emergence of ideas of conflict management and resolution and reconstruction, which were the subject of Chapters 4 and 5, for a long time it had been believed that ‘aid’ would help developing countries to overcome their ‘development’ and ‘conflict’ problems in the broad senses of these terms. Even today some standard texts on conflict have very little mention of aid in their indexes, good as they may be in other respects. But since the end of the Cold War that omission makes increasingly less sense. The characteristics of the wars that we have identified have now put humanitarian agencies in the front line, not only as distributors of conventional aid, such as foodstuffs, but also as potential participants, along with conventional government agencies and military forces, and paramilitary actors in rebuilding ‘failed states’ (Ghani and Lockhart 2008). The actors that try to help alleviate the suffering of those increasingly caught up in current wars are collectively the ‘humanitarians’ in Hoffman and Weiss’s (2006) term. ‘External assistance’ has become vitally important for both governments and IGOs, and it has also become big business for firms who disburse or build infrastructure for the disbursement of aid and other economic help (Boyce and O’Donnell 2007). One important question that all who now study the conflict-development nexus are now asking is whether they can provide any kind of solution to the evident suffering of developing countries’ populations, or whether they are indeed part of the problem.
