Foreign Aid Composition and Sustaining Peace After War

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between aggregate foreign aid and conflict relapse or sustained peace in postconflict settings. We use Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data for all country allocable aid to postconflict contexts in the 1990–2022 period, and break down aid into humanitarian, development and peacebuilding types. The findings confirm a statistical relationship between total aid levels and sustained peace. Results also highlight the composition of the aid portfolio as important for avoiding conflict relapse—the peacebuilding support share in particular. Our contribution is to take a necessary first step to analyze the collective behavior of donors in postconflict environments across different aid types. The findings lay the necessary groundwork for future research on the causal relationship between peacebuilding assistance and conflict. At a time where aid budgets are shrinking and the number of armed conflicts is high, traditional and new donors alike are forced to consider aid effectiveness and how to prioritize between different forms of support.