Introduction
In recent years, the need to address and mitigate violence has gained currency in mainstream development thinking and practice. One and a half billion people, or more than a quarter of the world’s population, live in areas affected by fragility, conflict or large-scale, organised criminal violence (World Bank 2011). Violence is the leading cause of death among children worldwide and one of the leading causes of death among those aged 15–44, especially men, according to the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) (Krisch et al. 2015; WHO 2014). A considerable proportion of the world’s poor live in violence-affected areas and some estimate that by 2030, nearly two thirds of the global poor will be living in states exhibiting varying forms of fragility, including violence. Conflicts are often not one-off events, but rumble on in different forms over a long period of time: 90 per cent of civil wars in the period 2000–10 occurred in countries that had already had a civil war in the last 30 years (World Bank 2011). Unsurprisingly, countries emerging from war face a 44 per cent chance of relapsing within five years (World Bank 2007). In some places, particularly areas affected by long-running civil war and other forms of chronic insecurity, violence has become a valid tool for national and community conversations. Improving physical safety and security rank among the most important ways in which people’s lives could be improved in many areas outside of traditional conflict settings. The Global Peace Index estimates that the economic impact of violence on the global economy in 2014 was around 13.4 per cent of world gross domestic product (GDP) and has increased by over 15 per cent against 2008.
Yet, while the need to reduce violence lends a new rationale for aid, and pushes a much needed rethink of the role, pursuit and practice of development in fragile contexts, the global setting for armed violence reduction is highly uncertain. Slowing economic growth in China is having ripple effects across the global economy, darkening development prospects in a number of countries that rely on commodity exports to Beijing, including many that are affected by violence. Although clearly important, the relationship of such changing global economic conditions to violence in different parts of the world is poorly understood; nor do the relationships run just one way. In Syria, internecine warfare drags into a sixth year, with no apparent end to a conflict that has left an estimated 250,000 dead and over 7.5 million displaced (IDMC 2015). Here, declining oil and other commodity receipts have constricted funding flows to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). As the case of Syria shows, many of today’s armed conflicts are internationalised. The migrant and refugee crisis engulfing European countries since 2014 is the largest humanitarian crisis of modern times, with over one million refugees and migrants arriving in Europe by sea in 2015 alone (UNHCR 2016).
As public attitudes harden, and anti-immigrant populism spreads, Europe’s political leaders struggle to agree on an effective strategy or identify more imaginative responses to the mass movement. In Libya, fragmentation of political authority and a surge in violence has followed in the years since the 2011 multinational North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military operation to topple the former Gaddafi regime. In a fractured security landscape with multiple and overlapping combatants, ISIL has carved out a base in the port city of Sirte, prompting speculation of renewed international military involvement. Worsening violence is not only a problem in new flashpoints of North Africa and Syria. In places like South Sudan, Somalia and Burundi, new violence flares in old conflict systems, showing the persistence of conflict drivers and the significant challenges to establishing a durable peace and lasting reduction in violence in the world’s most protracted crises.
Globally, fatalities due to violence – in both conflict and non-conflict settings – fell from an estimated 526,000 people every year in 2004–07 to 508,000 in 2007–12 (Geneva Declaration 2015). Not only is the average rate of lethal violence diminishing, but levels of violence remain low or continue to decline in countries and territories where the incidence of violence has narrowed, as well. Yet, according to the Global Burden of Armed Violence 2015 report, while fatalities due to violence overall continue to decline, conflict deaths surged by 34 per cent between the periods 2004–07 and 2007–12, mostly due to the situations in Libya and Syria. Further, lethal violence continues to rise in some countries not experiencing armed conflict, including Honduras and Venezuela (Geneva Declaration 2015). Thus, while deadly violence has reduced in some places, conflict-related violence has spiked, including in a number of countries that were formerly stable, even while violence persists in other places that are chronically insecure. In addition, violent deaths are only the most visible outcome of violent behaviour, with even more people affected by disease and disability, and a host of other health and social consequences resulting from violence (WHO 2014). Violence is multidimensional and has substantial impacts on the safety and welfare of millions of people which spread well beyond violent deaths.
The argument to focus aid resources on addressing and mitigating violence is that the occurrence and patterns of violent conflict relate to a number of drivers, situations and processes that concern development. For the first time ever, violence features explicitly in a global development framework: reducing violence is the first target of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16 on peace, justice and strong institutions, recognition of the interrelationship between security and development. A consensus has emerged at high policy levels around the basic elements of an approach to reduce armed violence. These elements of a violence reduction paradigm include the following:
- The need to create legitimate institutions, often through efforts to craft political settlements;
- Strengthening access to justice and security systems;
- Extending economic opportunities and employment, especially for young people;
- Fostering societal resilience, both through institutions as well as by considering the sustainability of interventions.
This paradigmatic approach to reducing violence is implicit in the SDGs and proposals to foster more inclusive and secure societies. Still, while there is broad agreement on what needs to be done to transform violent, unstable states and societies into conditions that are less violent, these are statements of long-term transformation. A limitation of the best practice paradigm is that its elements imply that violent places need to evolve to more resemble places that are already peaceful and stable. Yet, as argued below, conditions of comparatively greater peace, stability and security follow extended processes of conflict and change; they are not always evident outcomes of more funding, capacity building and international political attention. Leaving aside the fundamental point that violence exists because it is so often an effective way of doing development and making change happen, a significant obstacle facing development funders and planners who seek to reduce violence is the lack of rigorous evidence pointing to what needs to be done to reduce violence over the short and medium term. Violence is often the currency of politics, the bedrock of development writ large in places now in the most intractable situations, like South Sudan, Somalia and Syria. Given the embeddedness of violence in many political systems, and the longer-term transformations needed to move to more peaceful conditions, how can violence be addressed and mitigated in the near term?
This Evidence Report details key insights from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) Addressing and Mitigating Violence (AMV) programme, which involved detailed political analysis of dynamics of violence as well as efforts to reduce and prevent violent conflict across a number of countries and areas in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and SouthAsia (see Box 1.1). In particular, the evidence highlighted here is from violent settings that do not neatly fit categories of ‘war’ or ‘peace’. The findings of these studies, published as a series of open-access reports, Policy Briefings and blogs, were discussed by conflict and security experts as well as thinkers from aid and advocacy organisations at a consultative session in London in November 2015. This report uses evidence from the programme to critically reflect on policy and programming policy approaches for reducing violence. Specifically, it provides a synthesis of findings around these themes: (1) the nature of violence and how it might be changing; (2) the connectivity of actors across levels and space; and (3) the significance of identities and vulnerabilities for understanding and responding to violence. The report concludes by examining the implications of the research for the violence reduction paradigm.