Asterisk Magazine | Can we pay to prevent global war?
Alex Nabaum
Global development has a war problem. The world overall is seeing more conflict every year, and the majority of the damage is in developing countries. And while war in industrialized societies can even support economic growth, at least in the short term, developing countries can take decades to recover the growth that violence wipes away.
Yet there is a belief in the development sector that war — and its catastrophic effects on weak economies with fragile infrastructures — is an inevitable feature of human society. That even if we had more effective tools, the challenge of war is far bigger than the resources that the development community can muster to meet it. In that sense, war is treated much the same as a volcanic eruption or a cyclone: We can build resilience once it happens, but we can’t prevent it from happening.
