Financing Peace Processes

Peace negotiations, almost inherently, involve imbalances and inequalities between the actors involved (e.g. national governments versus non-government violent organisations) and, consequently, typically require external funding for at least one negotiating party. At first glance, however, funding for peace negotiations does not appear to conform to a typical, economic, market logic. Those who demand the services of negotiators, for example, seldom pay for the services of those offering them. Consequently, the standard concepts of demand and supply neither regular the price of peace negotiations, nor their quantity. At the same time, negotiations cannot be thought of as a public good. They are certainly excludable, as organisations can be wilfully left out of the process and they are rivalrous as there is not an infinite pool of financial and technical resources. In this project, we seek to define the structure of the market for funding peace negotiations, including which kinds of market failure might be at play. Ultimately, we seek to understand the impact this market (and its failures) has on the process and outcome of negotiations and to use this information to determine best-practice for future peace negotiations.