Development aid, support for post-conflict reconstruction and democracy promotion are highly knowledge-intensive fields of work. Drawing on experiences from many conflict and post-conflict regions, Jørn Holm-Hansen argues that aid aimed at peaceful reconstruction can sometimes perpetuate existing rivalries or foster new ones.
Huge aid packages for post-conflict reconstruction have generally failed to deliver the desired results, Bosnia and Afghanistan being striking examples. One reason for this is that aid agencies have not been sufficiently informed about the societies to be ‘reconstructed’. There is still time to avoid this pitfall in the case of Ukraine.
In order to make post-conflict reconstruction assistance work, there is a need for applied knowledge about the recipient country’s formal and informal power structures and groups, manifest and latent lines of political conflict and cleavages, and political and popular culture. Otherwise, aid runs the risk of ending up as a symbolic act of benevolence that merely benefits the donor country’s self-esteem and prestige. In more unfortunate cases, poorly informed aid has caused harm or resulted in unintended consequences that diverge from its original intentions. Much can be gained from adopting the medical principle of primum non nocere – ‘first, do no harm’.
Success in this regard depends firstly on the willingness of aid practitioners to seek research-based knowledge from area studies and other social and human sciences. Secondly, and no less importantly, it depends on the ability of the scholars involved to study Ukraine on an ongoing basis as social and political power and conflict lines shift. And it depends on the ability of scholars to avoid embellishing accounts of Ukrainian political and social life, even when motivated by the laudable desire to ‘stand by Ukraine’.
Aid workers tend to circulate between post-conflict zones. They fly in and out and are good at aid technicalities – the ‘aid architecture’ – but too often fail to understand the specificities of the new post-conflict country they have flown into. In the Western Balkans of the early 2000s, one Western aid worker with an impressive CV from Africa and Asia told me: ‘I just had to put on warmer clothes. Otherwise, the job is pretty much the same here as in Africa’.
Some aid workers I spoke with acknowledged the importance of context yet failed to grasp the specific context they were addressing. They overlooked the distinct nuances of both the Yugoslav past and the post-Yugoslav present, instead conflating these with vague stereotypes of Stalinism, Brezhnevism and the post-Soviet era – frameworks largely irrelevant to the environment in which they were operating.
Could it be that the pattern of attempts at reconstruction in the Western Balkans risks repeating itself in Ukraine? In other words, is there a risk that hard contextual realities will also be ignored or misunderstood in Ukraine? I would argue that there is.
Naturally, there is much to learn about a country set to receive significant funding for reconstruction following a devastating and brutal invasion. I would argue that a certain willingness to apply an approach of ‘devil’s advocate’ is needed for useful knowledge to be produced in this regard. Such an approach requires avoiding wishful thinking, trivialisation of obvious problems and merely operating in the comfort zone provided by local NGOs.
Acknowledge Ukraine’s agency
Too often, international aid agencies treat the receiving state as a ‘container’ into which aid interventions are to be smoothly inserted. The obstacles that they experience on the way are, more often than not, seen as results of irritating defects and flaws in the receiving society, like corruption, clan structures or the like. Despite the fact that social anthropologists and political scientists have written volumes about such phenomena, little of it informs the practitioners.
Ukraine is a pluralistic society, which is one of the reasons why the country has avoided the political authoritarianism of some of its neighbours. This pluralism will likely have an impact on the reception of post-conflict assistance. It would therefore be a mistake for aid agencies to dismiss resistance and controversy over certain elements of aid as ‘irritating flaws’ in Ukrainian society. Instead, they should engage in understanding Ukrainian diversity and pluralism. This, however, must be done without resorting to clichés.
Avoid excessive simplifications
Clichés are abundant in what is said and written about Ukraine. One of them is that Ukrainians, mainly from the eastern and southern regions of the country, are ‘pro-Kremlin’ and ‘unpatriotic’ because they tend to speak Russian and may be more likely to share a kind of common East Slavic identity than others. Much of the research that has been published on Ukraine’s regional diversity and national identity since 1991 can be of help in avoiding such simplifications. However, more research is needed, taking into account the impact of the Russian aggression on regional diversity and national cohesion and on policies to overcome them. Insight into the current character and development of underlying conflict lines in this regard is needed. Otherwise, aid may stand at risk of undermining processes that underpin social and regional cohesion in Ukraine.
Another common cliché is that Ukraine is a robust democracy. This notion likely originated as a response to Putinist propaganda portraying Ukraine as a supposedly ‘Nazi’ regime, serving a positive purpose in that context. However, for analytical clarity and the effective allocation of international aid, this characterisation is overly influenced by wishful thinking. Ukraine’s democracy, like that of many countries in the EU, is challenged and not only by external factors. Nepotism and corruption still play a role, and political parties tend to be centred around some ‘chiefs’ and offer little in terms of programmatic political alternatives or membership power. However, the fact that many Ukrainians now are eager to democratise bodes well. Democratisation forms part of the endeavours to make Ukraine as different as possible from contemporary Russia, and to align with the democratic standards of most EU member states.
Seeing through stereotypes depends a lot on the sources of information. Preferred sources of information can turn out to be biased and have an agenda. This is where local NGOs come in.
NGOs and civil society
The NGOs cannot be criticised for having an agenda and being biased. That is their role and function. However, solely or mainly relying on them for insight is risky. The more NGOs represent only one side in ongoing domestic rivalries, the bigger that risk becomes.
In general, risk occurs when some parts of the society have easier access to funding from donors than others simply because they are better at positioning themselves. This may, for instance, be the case when donors lack insight into the nuances of the societies they aim to assist and therefore operate with a black-and-white approach to local actors. This approach may lead to the alienation of actors and groups that otherwise would have been able to contribute in a constructive way to post-conflict reconstruction.
Also, when aiming to support civil society, donors tend to prefer working with professional NGOs with an English-speaking staff able to produce exactly the kind of reports that fit into the donors’ administrative systems without friction. If this inclination among donors manifests itself also in the Ukrainian case, donors risk missing an opportunity to support the many vibrant protest groups, voluntary organisations, charitable outfits and other groups that work locally.
Despite the lack of ‘professionalism’, these local activist groups are probably more likely than the NGOs to produce beneficial side-effects of civil society activities. After all, belief in such side-effects is why donors focus on civil society. But again, working with the ‘non-professionals’ is an insight- and knowledge-intensive task. What starts as genuinely local citizen initiatives easily go from serving their constituencies to reporting to donors. In such cases, donor support for civil society has the opposite effect of the one intended.
Democratic accountability and aid
Moreover, aid potentially undermines the political accountability that constitutes one of the pillars of democracy. When welfare, housing and infrastructure by and large come from external sources through processes far beyond the voters’ control through elections, the need and willingness among citizens to organise politically and hold political leaders accountable may diminish. Receiving aid and building democracy at the same time, therefore, is a hard nut to crack. Hopefully, the problem will be solved in the Ukrainian case. In order for that to happen, intensive and innovative political research and thinking may be of help.
Civil society is a real thing, although too often referred to without specifying what it actually means. Albanian political scientist Lea Ypi describes this phenomenon with due sarcasm in her wonderful book ‘Free – Coming of Age at the End of History’ (2022) about growing up in the aid-ridden Albania of the 1990s. ‘Civil society’ was used as a magical word, a miraculous panacea against all ills: ‘No problem, civil society will fix it’.
Conclusion
To sum up the argument, it is not too late for Ukraine to avoid some of the harmful effects that development assistance, post-conflict reconstruction support and democracy promotion have had elsewhere. A different approach to aid is needed, one that is open-minded, analytical, based on facts, and willing to seek an understanding of realities ‘on the ground’. This approach requires a readiness to avoid simplifications and comfortable clichés and a willingness to seek the truth by confronting ‘uncomfortable’ issues.
The scholarly community in the humanities and social sciences can play an important role in helping international aid agencies understand power relations and conflict lines in Ukraine’s society, economy and politics. The task ahead for scholars is to bring in knowledge, which means drawing on existing research, undertaking new research, communicating it in applicable ways and, not least, making sure it is being applied. It also means that not only the aid agencies but also the research community must avoid wishful thinking and conflict aversion.
