Every year, the international community spends billions of dollars on peacebuilding activities and post-conflict reconstruction. Often, a significant portion of these funds are siphoned off due to corrupt activities, eroding confidence in new democratic institutions, undermining economic development, diverting scarce public resources for infrastructure investments, and reducing the delivery of vital social services. As peacebuilding missions, bilateral aid agencies, and international NGOs struggle to balance quick delivery of services with full accountability for taxpayer dollars, the problem of corruption inevitably arises. For some, it is an additional operating expenditure and receives a budget line like any other expense; for others, it fuels a financial divide between political elites and the rest of the population that undermines and retards the peacebuilding process.
This workshop has brought together leading international scholars and practitioners to develop a framework for thinking about peacebuilding and corruption by building on existing theories. This framework and its associated concepts and ideas will be applied to case studies of Liberia, Afghanistan, and Bosnia and Herzegovina— each at a different stage of the peacebuilding process. The convenors will be editing a special issue of International Peacekeeping on this topic in 2008.
The successful outcome of this workshop is owed to all of our sponsors: the Department of Politics and International Relations, the Centre for International Studies, Nuffield College, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (Waterloo), and the African Studies Centre.
