Post-Conflict Risks

Post-conflict societies face two distinctive challenges: economic recovery and reduction of the risk of a recurring conflict. Aid and policy reforms have been found to be effective in economic recovery. In this article, the authors concentrate on the other challenge – risk reduction. The post-conflict peace is typ-ically fragile: nearly half of all civil wars are due to post-conflict relapses. The authors find that eco-nomic development substantially reduces risks, but it takes a long time. They also find evidence that UN peacekeeping expenditures significantly reduce the risk of renewed war. The effect is large: dou-bling expenditure reduces the risk from 40 % to 31%. In contrast to these results, the authors cannot find any systematic influence of elections on the reduction of war risk. Therefore, post-conflict elec-tions should be promoted as intrinsically desirable rather than as mechanisms for increasing the dura-bility of the post-conflict peace. Based on these results, the authors suggest that peace appears to depend upon an external military presence sustaining a gradual economic recovery, with political design playing a somewhat subsidiary role. Since there is a relationship between the severity of post-conflict risks and the level of income at the end of the conflict, this provides a clear and uncontroversial principle for resource allocation: resources per capita should be approximately inversely proportional to the level of income in the post-conflict country. * We thank the Guest Editors of the current issue of Journal of Peace Research, Ibrahim Elbadawi, Håvard Hegre and Gary Milante, and three anonymous referees for very helpful comments on an earlier version of the article. We would like to thank Sarah Cliffe for suggesting the analy-sis of UN military peacekeeping expenditures and for arranging access to the data, and Meron Destra and Alice Kuegler for transforming them into a manageable form. We would like to thank participants at seminars at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), an