Lives and Violence with Mareike Schomerus

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Violent conflict lingers in many ways after it ends: It affects people’s abilities to trust, collaborate and plan for the future. It entrenches or breaks structures and relationships. It shows who is vulnerable and who is powerful. The many layers of conflict mean recovery after violence also happens as many different, but parallel phenomena (each with their own rules and dynamics). But post-conflict development is not the automatic end result; in fact many presumed programmes and interventions to make people’s lives after conflict better do not work: economic growth programmes, migration, entrepreneurship, access to credit, improved security and services do not automatically represent improved stability in people’s lives, secure livelihoods, or better prospects. In fact, in a post conflict environment, the necessary forces of recovery and stabilization work in contradiction with each other, which is one reason why life is simply not getting better.
Using research from ten years of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC)—conducted in nine countries between 2011 and 2020—this session draws out a some principles that require a benevolent discourse on how to improve development programmes in conflict contexts.

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