Description
Contemporary peacebuilding and conflict prevention strategies are in a state of remarkable flux. Recent years have seen a marked downscaling of ambitions, with donors moving away from a transformative liberal peacebuilding agenda, towards a more pragmatic approach cohering around the mandate of stabilisation. While these broad shifts have been well documented in the emerging academic literature (Karlsrud 2019, Curran & Hunt 2020), little existing work has examined in detail how these trends have played out in practice from the perspective of a single donor agency. This paper uses a detailed case study of the UK government’s Conflict, Stability and Security Fund since 2015, to explore how shifting domestic and international priorities have shaped the UK’s evolving approach to peacebuilding and the perceived relationship between security and development. Drawing on discourse analysis of policy documents and key informant interviews, the paper highlights growing tensions between the government’s waning commitment to development spending and its proposed commitment to a more integrated and comprehensive approach to conflict response. It also highlights more long-standing failures to institutionalise structural conflict prevention and take seriously the challenge of developing a comprehensive and long-term strategy for responding to conflict. The paper closes with some reflections on the future prospects for the security-development nexus, extending David Chandler’s (2007) claim that the nexus reflects a ‘retreat from strategic policy making’ by arguing that, in the UK case, this retreat has accelerated over time.
