Training Goldfish (in a Desert): Transforming Political Economies of Conflict Using Voluntarism Regulation and Supervision

Abstract

One of the features of the post-Cold War era has been a remarkable growth in academic and policy attention devoted to the role played by economic actors and economic agendas in the inception and perpetuation of civil conflicts as well as in shaping the prospects for postconflict peacebuilding. This has incorporated a large and diverse range of themes ranging from the trading of specific conflict goods, the conflict dynamics resulting from the interaction of greed, feasibility, and grievance factors at the local level, the broader economic and governance challenges arising from what has been labelled the ‘resource curse’, and the even broader challenges produced by the interaction of local, regional, and global economic structures.