GCRF Development Award - Preventing conflict in fragile countries through understanding and promoting economic justice (AHRC/GCRF)

Our overarching vision for this project is to model equitable and long-lasting working partnerships with research organisations in five low and middle countries (LMICs) - Afghanistan, Colombia, Guatemala, South Sudan and Syria - and strengthen their and our capabilities in regard to the global challenge of understanding the relationship between informal and formal economics in conflict zones and promote more robust research and evidence gathering around these themes. This project will implement a series of five national workshops which will feed into a global workshop to scope out a significant contributing factor to sustainable peace - economic justice and transformation. Set inside a larger funding proposal (GCRF Network Plus), this project will ultimately impact marginalised communities, who often experience economic inequalities connected to conflict and the widespread struggle to understand the interaction of formal and informal economics and what measures lead to sustainable peace. More specifically, this project will enable thematic, methodological and management skills sharing through a series of workshops, virtual capacity-building for partner organisations, and commission scoping exercises to: 1) illuminate context-specific and locally-identified and prioritised themes and issues (related to economic justice) by marginalised people affected by conflict, 2) gather and document local and/or local-language data, literature, commentary and other resources relevant to what economic justice and transformation looks like in specific contexts and 3) map local research institutions and infrastructure.

This project will enhance our research network's ability to strengthen the evidence base for effective and contextually sensitive policies and programmes that prevent conflict and promote economic justice. Project activities are keenly informed by an awareness that global research partnerships have structural, social, material, personal and linguistic issues and exhibit power relations that determine whose knowledge, skills, agendas and values are prioritised. Further, the legacy of historical colonial relationships and current global power dynamics shape each of our five selected contexts and expectations of international development and research partnerships. In response, our proposed activities recognize that partners will have diverse priorities, concerns, schedules and capacities, and that ignoring these differences or assuming that partnerships are built on a level playing field can obstruct effective ways of working and limit our transformative capacity. Thus, this project has been conceived of and developed in partnership with project partners in the five selected LMICs, including five local offices of the international NGO Christian Aid along with a selection of their partner NGOs with whom Christian Aid has already established and nurtured relationships. The input of these organisations has directly shaped our project activities and will amplify project impact due to the knowledge, skills and experience that each partner brings.