Publications & Tools

USIP trained hundreds of African peacekeepers in seven nations this year in how to negotiate and mediate the peace.

Economists typically work in the realm of modeling rational economic behavior and drafting policies to foster growth, income and financial stability in that context. But when conflict strikes, the best designed models and the normal interplay of supply and demand can run head-on into some brutal realities. The disconnect between economic theory and real-world practice in societies torn by conflict is something that USIP’s Raymond Gilpin experienced firsthand early in his career as the research director of the Central Bank of Sierra Leone, his native country.

In conflict and post-conflict situations, youth constitute a reservoir of energy. Some young people choose to fight or are forced into a life of violence.  Others  are able to work to improve their communities, contribute to peacebuilding, reconciliation and reconstruction,  and become invested in their countries’ future peace. Youth and Post-Conflict Reconstruction: Agents of Change uses three cases of post-conflict reconstruction—Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Kosovo—to explore how youth affect the post-conflict reconstruction process, and how domestic policy, NGO programming, international interventions, and cultural contexts may change that role.

For more than five years, the people of Zaire have struggled to survive in a state on the brink of utter collapse. Amid growing economic disarray and infrastructural breakdown, standards of living have plummeted, moral and ethical standards have withered, and violence has risen. Political authority is almost hopelessly fragmented and discredited.