| Exclusion and violence persist in post-conflict states, despite external assistance to the demilitarization of politics, which the literature emphasizes as the primary goal of aid. Through a field-based study of Tajikistan and a survey of an additional three cases (Cambodia, Guatemala, and Sierra Leone), this dissertation finds that aid focuses on economic liberalization in the initial stage of post-war transition. Such an organization of aid empowers a particular group of elites who have privileged access to state assets at the time of civil war settlement, and establishes institutional frameworks that will consolidate the economic control of the incumbent regime elites. As the incumbent regime elites seek to remove wartime commanders and opposition leaders from the state apparatus, thereby nullifying power-sharing and other provisions of peace agreements, violence tends to be instigated by increasingly repressive governments or those facing exclusion from sources of livelihood. Aid thus institutionalizes exclusion and sustains patterns of violence along civil war divisions, rather than transforming existing political and economic structures. |
