ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses the politics of development actors and how people 'doing development' operate in conflict and post-conflict areas, it is useful to consider at what points development actors can have the most impact. The author outlines some of the key paradigms or understandings that have been dominant since the Second World War of what development is and how it can be achieved. Aid involves a range of different kinds of assistance offered to a developing country by another state or international organisation. Looking at aid and conflict dynamics from another perspective, Mary Anderson identifies two broad ways in which aid affects conflict: resource transfers and implicit ethical messages. It is of course difficult to argue with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) focus on human development and the aims of the Millennium Development Goals. The impact of the rise of these countries, both individually as aid donors and the ways to build new kinds of development assistance relationships, is still uncertain.
