Delia Claire Burns

Just after many wars’ official ‘end’, a rising number of powerful transnational corporations are free to engage with warring political elites while appearing as legitimate business promoting countries’ (neo)liberal economic development. Their engagement is facilitated by a proliferation of ‘enablers’ of transnational corporate networks, i.e. international banking systems and middlemen, who base themselves in progressively secretive Western jurisdictions. These financial institutions appear to sustain and multiply during economic reconstruction periods, risking the re-widening of economic space to new streams of conflict financing.

Peacebuilding policy, especially economic reconstruction efforts, to date focuses heavily on the actors involved (specific individuals/companies) and often ignores the structural conditions that enable conflict financing, such as a weak international regulatory framework, resulting in narrow policy initiatives. In few places are the economic failures of the liberal peacebuilding paradigm more evident than in South Sudan: In the country’s nine-year long civil war, TNCs have directly funded warring elites through contracts awarded in large extractive industries. Decades of intensive economic reconstruction efforts across Ethiopia failed to prevent TNCs from contributing to armed campaigns of the 2010s.

Amid this urgency, this study will investigate the interactions between modern peacebuilding policy and the systems of transnational capitalist enterprise that reignite armed conflict in South Sudan and Ethiopia, asking: How has modern peacebuilding policy in South Sudan and Ethiopia engaged with the financial institutions that enable transnational corporate financing of armed conflict? This investigation hopes to promote improvements in international reconstruction assistance rooted in the principles of global economic justice.