Beyond Intractability: A Free Knowledge Base on More Constructive Approaches to Destructive Conflict

Introduction: Eileen Babbit explains the difficulties in using economic development schemes for reintegration.

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Difficulties for Reintegration
Eileen Babbit
Assistant Professor of International Politics, Fletcher School of Law, Tufts University

Interviewed by
Julian Portilla
2003

There's also some assumptions that are being made from donors about what kinds of projects work in these circumstances and one of the assumptions is that if you give people money to create income-generating businesses and you force them to bring everyone from party A and party B into these businesses and work together, they will form these fast friendships because everyone wants to be employed, so it gives them a common goa,l a common whatever and in the context of this everything will be well. Not so. I mean we just saw that in the projects that we looked that it was not the case. People tolerated each other. Did they form friendships? Certainly not in six months the businesses were not viable they weren't given training on how to run a business. So there were a lot of assumptions made about how you go about this co-existence work that in practice turned out not to be so effective.

Truth springs from argument amongst friends. -- David Hume

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