Short Abstract

This panel explores the budgetary politics of conflict, crisis, and post-conflict environments; examining how financial decisions operate as instruments of power. This focus on fiscal strategy offers a new framework for reimagining development in an era of geopolitical flux.

Description

As the global balance of power shifts, nations are recalibrating their financial tactics to navigate emerging challenges. This recalibration brings forward the inherently political nature of financial decisions, particularly in conflict and crisis environments. Beyond their technical functions, budgets and financial flows serve as important instruments for projecting influence, managing dissent, and negotiating social order. However, the specific strategies through which fiscal allocations become contested instruments of power remain largely under-examined, leaving a gap in our understanding of their impact on global dynamics.

This panel invites academic and practitioner papers that explore the political dimensions of financial decisions in conflict, crisis, and post-conflict environments. We welcome submissions that feature, inter alia, the state’s fiscal response to civil conflict; the political economy of financing and implementing peace agreements; the strategic use of development assistance as a foreign policy instrument; the role of international financial institutions in shaping post-conflict governance; and the ways national budgets become sites of political contestation between a range of domestic and international actors.

We welcome contributions from researchers at all career stages to ensure a diverse and inclusive dialogue. By analyzing government spending, the panel will present how major shifts in global politics have real-world consequences, offering a new perspective for reimagining development in an era of systemic uncertainty.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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