ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on the theoretical debates that inform current attempts at theorizing both war and post-war situations (outlined in Chapter 2) and is set to examine challenges and viable routes to the reconstruction of a war-produced economy. As noted earlier, the limitations and in most cases the irrelevance of the conventional approach to reconstruction, based on a narrowly defined engineeringeconomic notion of rebuilding devastated areas, is evident. Furthermore, as stressed in the theoretical sections, prolonged civil war produces a number of irreversibilities in socio-economic structures and triggers new processes and dynamics for societal change. These irreversibilities are a direct result of abrupt and massive flows affecting not only populations but also their institutions, assets, skills, levels of entrepreneurship and means of reproduction. The production of these irreversibilities seriously undermines the validity of the main assumptions underlying the conventional approach to post-conflict reconstruction: ‘retrievability’ of the pre-war situation, that war is a temporary instance of disequilibria, the localized nature of war effects, and finally its emphasis on macro variables or alternatively negligence of the vital and profound impact of micro variables. War produces new forms of multilayered and overlapping urbanities, ruralities and extensive and interactive local, translocal and transnational networks that are constantly reshaping institutions and unleashing new transformative potential. Understanding such transformative potential and its dynamics is an essential step towards building a sound framework for addressing post-war reconstruction.
