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- Convenor:
-
Heba Elsahn
(University College Dublin)
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- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Economics of development: Finance, trade and livelihoods
- Location:
- L1.20
- Sessions:
- Thursday 9 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Dublin
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.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Thursday 9 July, 2026, -Paper short abstract
Food aid targeting involves two decisions: whom to reach and what to provide. Using a randomized trial in Egypt and machine learning, we show the deprivation-versus-impact trade-off is limited; the sharper choice is which nutritional objective to prioritize. Under a fixed budget, the costlier nutrit
Paper long abstract
Food aid confronts policymakers with a choice that poverty targeting does not: whom to reach and what to provide are separate decisions, and both govern the nutritional return on a fixed budget. It remains a principal channel through which governments provide services under binding budget constraints, and what that spending achieves depends on the composition of the transfer as much as on who receives it, since in-kind transfers can distort consumption. This paper examines targeting trade-offs across nutritional objectives in a nationwide food aid program in Egypt. Drawing on a randomized controlled trial, we use machine learning to characterize heterogeneity in treatment effects, and find substantial variation. Observable characteristics, of the kind used in proxy means tests, predict this variation differently across nutritional outcomes and transfer types. Building on recent work that weighs expected impact alongside deprivation, we show that the trade-off between reaching the most deprived and the most impacted households is limited. The sharper choice is which nutritional objective to prioritize. Accounting for program costs, we find that under a fixed budget, greater nutritional gains follow from allocating a larger share to the costlier nutrition-sensitive food box, with the clearest returns for food insecurity. Targeting on observable characteristics can thus extend the reach of a constrained budget, provided the criteria are matched to the objective and the transfer. By showing how impact heterogeneity can guide these decisions, the paper offers a route to rethinking food aid design and delivery when resources are fixed.
Paper short abstract
Short abstract: This paper examines why non-warring actor inclusion in peace negotiations diffuses across certain civil wars. It argues that elites learn from international precedents via cross-border social and economic ties. Network analysis of conflicts from 1989–2023 demonstrates that these rela
Paper long abstract
Why is the inclusion of non-warring parties in peace negotiations more likely in some civil wars than others? This paper argues that inclusion spreads across conflicts through consequences-focused learning: warring-party elites deliberate under acute uncertainty about inclusion's costs, reasoning over which precedents are representative rather than weighing every case exhaustively. Cross-border ties function as information channels that transmit whether inclusion succeeded or failed elsewhere, leading elites to update positively from successful precedents and negatively from failed ones. To capture these channels, I construct two original composite indices of the inter-state network: a social tie index, which carries the survivability-relevant information that drives this updating, and an economic tie index, which does not. I test this argument using the Peace Observatory dataset on non-warring actor inclusion, linked to UCDP conflict data and to the bilateral source datasets underpinning each index, across all intrastate armed conflicts, 1989–2023. Employing Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models, I find that inclusive practices diffuse through conflicts sharing social and economic ties, raising the probability that non-warring actors gain a seat at the table. The findings carry implications for diffusion theory, the determinants of inclusive peace processes, and the design of mediation strategy in a densely connected international system.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyzes how Gulf donors (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE) use food aid. It argues their allocations are driven by a range of foreign policy interests, humanitarian and otherwise. By delinking aid from conditionality, they challenge the Western model and reflect shifting geopolitics.
Paper long abstract
For decades, the allocation of international food aid has been dominated by OECD donors, guided by a set of norms rooted in the Western liberal paradigm. However, the rise of alternative donors, particularly the Gulf states, is introducing strategic logics and motivations that are influencing international development. This paper investigates the determinants of food aid from these new actors, asking: Are the Gulf donors responding primarily to recipient need, or are their allocations better explained by strategic and commercial interests? The paper proceeds to analyze the foreign policy documents and food aid allocation patterns of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. It argues that the allocation of food aid has a strategic role in these donors’ foreign policy as it offers an opportunity to connect with recipient countries who want to diversify their donor base. This challenges the Western-centric paradigm by setting an alternative development model that delinks aid from democratic conditionality. The paper contends that the rise of these donors reflects rapidly shifting geopolitics and the growing unpredictability of global food security. The conclusion raises critical questions about the future of multilateral cooperation and the possibilities for establishing a consensus on the principles of humanitarian action on a global scale.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyzes how political and policy shifts have shaped tax revenue trends in four fragile sub-Saharan African countries, revealing the importance of tailored, context-sensitive approaches for effective tax capacity building and domestic resource mobilization in post-conflict settings.
Paper long abstract
This paper investigates the role of political and policy changes in shaping tax revenue trends in four Sub-Saharan African countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Mozambique. While these four countries have faced significant statebuilding challenges and received sizeable aid flows, they display divergent patterns in tax revenue collection over the period 1980–2023. Using a structural break test model on time series data of tax revenue as a share of GDP, the study identifies the timing and significance of shifts in tax revenue trends and examines their correspondence with key political and policy changes. For example, in the DRC, a major break in 2007 aligns with political normalization following the 2006 elections, while in Mozambique, a notable shift corresponds to reforms in tax administration and tax policy structure (e.g., introduction of digital taxation, removal of tax exemptions, introduction of value-added taxes). Sierra Leone’s 1999 break coincides with political stabilization after conflict, and in Rwanda, structural changes are linked to post-conflict reconstruction and the introduction of significant tax reforms. Complementary comparative analysis of tax categories and reform reports since 2000 highlights the country-specific nature of these developments. The results underscore the importance of context-sensitive policy evaluation and suggest that international support for tax capacity building must be tailored to the unique political and institutional environments of fragile states. These insights offer valuable guidance for future research and policy interventions to strengthen domestic resource mobilization in post-conflict settings.