Conflict and Violence Prevention at the World Bank— Recommendations for the Spring Meetings

This is made more salient not only because of the suffering and risks of horizontal escalation in the Middle East and the ongoing war on Ukraine but also because global conflict has escalated significantly in the last two years in many forgotten crises, from Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and the Sahel, to Myanmar and Haiti. [...] In the negotiation on the SDGs, when these targets were among the most controversial, it helped enormously to have the US and others come to the table and acknowledge that they have problems in their criminal justice system. [...] In DRC, for example, the PRA appears to have spurred a fairly deep discussion between the government, the Bank, and other actors, such as the African Union (AU) and the NYU CENTER ON INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION (CIC) | CIC. [...] Despite some setbacks that continue to this day with the situation with the M23 and the East of DRC, the Bank’s support to DRC seems to have been well adapted, in partnership, to nudging feasible reforms that cross the development and political arenas—for instance in the balance of a robust dialogue on corruption and implementation efficiency, on community involvement in conflict- affected regions. [...] The second is the always- difficult-to-measure counterfactual: when countries have all the conditions that could produce conflict and violence and yet avoid it (as is the case in Sierra Leone in the last 20 years given their history and NYU CENTER ON INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION (CIC) | CIC.