Land Issues and Poverty Reduction Requirements for Lasting.pdfVIP

C h a p t e r 1 6 Land Issues and Poverty Reduction: Requirements for Lasting Peace in Sudan and Afghanistan Gunnar M. Sørbø and Arne Strand uring the past decade, an increasing share of foreign aid has been provided to countries coming out of civil war or experiencing severe conflict. Most of these countries—such as Liberia, the Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and D Sudan—suffer from a combination of conflict, a state in crisis, underdevelopment, and poverty. Under most circumstances, poverty is greatly exacerbated by conflict, but it is also one of a number of factors that may contribute to violent conflict. Addressing what Frances Stewart has called “horizontal inequalities” is therefore likely to play a role in preventing the shift from grievance to violence, as well as in building and sustaining peace in postwar situations. In several countries that have suffered from pro- tracted conflict, however, an approach focused on poverty has been slow to emerge. To a large extent, peace-building missions have become state-building missions, first, because “fragile states” are seen as a risk both to their society and to international security and, second, because it is broadly assumed that one vital condition for sustain- able peace is that the state apparatus has the capacity to perform the core functions of statehood in an efficient, nonviolent, and legitimate way. In the process of state- building, however, the extent to which the poverty and marginalization of large rural populations have spurred recent wars has been underestimated. As a consequence, donors and policymakers risk rebuilding the causes of war. This chapter uses examples from Sudan and Afghanistan to highlight the role that land issues have played both in causing poverty and in driving and sustaining protracted conflict. In both