Erin A. Snider, George Washington University
Introduction
Since the fall of the Assad regime in 2024, Syria has faced a daunting dual challenge: Reviving an economy that has contracted by over 64 percent since 2010 with an estimated $250 billion in reconstruction needs while also rebuilding state institutions weakened by five decades of authoritarian rule and 14 years of war.[1] Most of the attention in policy and academic circles over the last year has understandably focused on providing immediate humanitarian relief and security stabilization in Syria and on the importance of lifting Assad-era sanctions. But neglecting inclusive economic recovery in the early years of transition may undermine all such efforts.
The trajectory and success of that recovery hinges in no small part on the role of powerful international and regional actors like the EU, Gulf states, the IMF, the United Nations, and the United States, each of which bring resources and influence but have diverging priorities. Research on post-conflict transitions underscores of course that aid is never neutral. How donor funds are distributed, conditioned, and sequenced will shape whether Syria’s transition builds inclusive institutions and growth or reconstitutes the patronage networks and extractive economy that fueled its collapse. In the sections that follow, I briefly survey what we know about the current aid landscape in Syria and the efforts of international actors. I then detail why inclusive economic reform is critical to the success of Syria’s transition drawing on comparative lessons from transitions elsewhere and set out a framework that scholars might use in order to both monitor and understand how economic recovery and reconstruction efforts may evolve in the coming years.
The Current Landscape of Aid in Syria
Nearly a year after Assad’s departure, Syria’s humanitarian needs remain vast. The UN identifies food security, access to water and sanitation, restoring medical care, and sustainable reintegration programs for the return of internally displaced Syrians and Syrian refugees as the most critical priorities.[2] The Norwegian Refugee Council estimates that over 90 percent of Syrians live below the poverty line and 13 million lack sufficient food with the country’s overall economic decline a primary barrier to recovery.[3] In addition, explosive ordnance incidents have increased significantly over the last year. Landmines, cluster bombs, and other explosive devices remaining from 14 years of war are an enormous obstacle to large-scale reconstruction projects and investment, impairing the progress of Syria’s transition.[4]
Progress on tackling all of these areas have been hampered by a lack of funding and poor coordination and information management among international donors. The UN’s Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) for Syria is severely underfunded, with only $939 million received on the ground this year of an estimated $3.19 billion needed to address priority humanitarian needs.[5] The top sources of that funding thus far have come from Türkiye (22%), the European Commission (18.3%), Qatar (9.6%), Saudi Arabia (7.4%) and Canada (7.2%).[6] In March 2025, the EU organized a conference in Brussels to mobilize support for Syria’s transition, continuing efforts that began in 2017. Notably, the conference emphasized the importance of supporting a Syrian-owned, Syrian-led inclusive transition that would privilege both humanitarian needs and economic recovery.[7] The EU and its partners collectively pledged $6.3 billion with the EU committing €2.5 billion; Germany €300 million; and the UK up to £160 million.[8] More than half of those pledges, including Germany’s, will bypass Syria’s transitional government, going directly to Syrians through NGOs or UN agencies.[9]
While these pledges are ambitious, whether they materialize in practice remains to be seen and even if they do, they still fall far short of meeting Syria’s immense humanitarian and socio-economic needs. In 2011, the international community spoke of the Arab uprisings as a historic opportunity to support economic and political transformation in the region. Donors struggled then to marshal domestic support for aid in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. Now, despite similar rhetoric about the importance of supporting Syria’s historic transition, domestic constituencies in donor countries are arguably even more reticent to back substantial transitional support to Syria from their governments in the wake of conflicts like Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan. The context for international cooperation has also changed significantly since 2011. Under the Trump administration, the US has retreated significantly from its past leadership role in many international organizations and from multilateral global governance. The administration’s recent closing of USAID—the lead US agency managing foreign assistance—suggests that Washington is unlikely to play a substantial role in leading or aiding transition efforts.
Instead, pivotal investments and contributions from Gulf states over the last eight months suggest their influence in shaping Syria’s transition. For example, Saudi Arabia and Qatar agreed to pay off Syria’s $15.5 million debt to the World Bank, and in doing so, allowed Damascus to take out new loans to fund reconstruction efforts.[10] In September 2025, both countries in cooperation with the UNDP, also pledged to pay $89 million towards funding public sector salaries in Syria for three months—an initiative that would allow essential public services in the country to remain uninterrupted.[11] In July, Saudi Arabia signed nearly $6 billion in investment deals in Syria between the government and private companies covering a variety of sectors including energy, telecommunications, financial, and banking.[12] And in May 2025, a UAE subsidiary company signed an $800 million agreement with Syria’s new government to develop the port of Tartus.[13] At a minimum, such investments, particularly in strategic sectors like energy, suggest that Gulf states will have significant leverage over transitional decision making in Syria and ensuring influence through reconstruction and investment, similar to their recent investment strategies in Egypt.
The Primacy of Inclusive Economic Reform
These initial pledges and commitments suggest both opportunities and constraints in Syria’s evolving financing landscape. They also highlight a common tension with post-conflict assistance: how to balance short-term humanitarian efforts alongside longer term strategies for economic transformation. Studies of foreign assistance underscore that aid effectiveness is determined less by its scale than the way it is implemented and structured. For Syria, the key challenge is not only how to mobilize aid, but how to channel that assistance in ways that support a more equitable and durable transition process.
This is where the primacy of inclusive economic reform becomes critical. Post-conflict and development scholars have long recognized the importance of inclusive economic reform to post-conflict recovery and transition. Research underscores that economic reform can target and reduce ethnic and regional horizontal inequalities in wealth and political power.[14] Economic reforms can lower the relapse to conflict through strategies that expand jobs, rebuild fiscal capacity, and diversify economies.[15] Evidence from studies on the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of combatants and employment-focused programs also show that such reforms can weaken wartime networks and reduce violence by reconnecting ex-combatants and at-risk youth to licit livelihoods.[16] Inclusive economic reforms can also build state legitimacy and strengthen the social contract if citizens see fair benefits from improvements in service delivery and economic gains.[17] Finally, reforms strengthening property rights, financial systems, and fiscal transparency can create conditions for growth by encouraging investment and accelerating recovery. In short, privileging economic inclusion and reform ensures that post-conflict aid does not simply rebuild the past, but supports a more just and resilient society where the conditions for renewed violence are less likely to take root.
Donors have struggled with how do this in practice. Peacebuilding scholars themselves have been critical about the field’s inadequate attention as to how inclusive economic reform can strengthen peacebuilding. [18] This paper seeks to encourage greater engagement, scrutiny, and discussion among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers on this front and about the challenges when we talk about inclusive economic recovery. It takes as a starting point that inclusive economic recovery is a critical dimension of sustainable peacebuilding. Yet, the concept itself has too often been treated as unidimensional with practitioners and policymakers invoking it as a catch-all term rather than a framework with multiple, analytically distinct elements. Moreover, the meaning of inclusivity is contested across different institutional and epistemic communities. For example, international financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank equate it with macroeconomic stability; organizations like the UN Development Program (UNDP) see it as privileging local ownership and livelihood restoration; and the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee see it as country ownership of transition priorities and settlements.[19] As many critical scholars of aid have also noted, ‘inclusive economic recovery’ has often just become shorthand for ‘development as usual models’ that solely privilege neoliberal market reforms.[20]
Towards a Framework for Monitoring Inclusive Economic Recovery in Syria
Given such issues with conceptual ambiguity and measurement how should we think about inclusive economic reform and the best ways to support it in Syria? What starting point can we use to more meaningfully and concretely monitor how and whether economic aid to Syria best supports inclusive economic recovery? Lessons from other transitional moments underscores the necessity of moving away from narrow interpretations of inclusivity that privilege macroeconomic stabilization and market liberalization as ends in themselves.
Some of the most trenchant criticisms about donor efforts in places like Tunisia and Bosnia have centered on the dangers of narrow conceptions of economic inclusion and growth informing aid efforts. For example, despite acknowledging the need to redress the economic grievances that fueled Tunisia’s 2011 uprising, IMF loan programs required painful subsidy cuts and austerity but came without meaningful social protection along the way, which would later fuel public discontent leading to the country’s subsequent backsliding in 2021.[21] In post-Dayton Bosnia, aid efforts by the international community focused disproportionally on privatization and growth (reflective of the ideology at that time) without attention to the high levels of social insecurity generated, which were an impediment to reconciliation and peacebuilding.[22] As Timothy Donais writes, in the context of fragile post-conflict environments like Bosnia and by extension, Syria, “effective peacebuilding requires that a much better balance be struck between the single-minded pursuit of economic growth and the need to provide for a level of social protection to prevent widespread public apathy and disillusionment with the peace process itself.”[23]
Recent work by political economists at the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) offers a promising framework for scholars to monitor and use in assessing how reforms might support inclusive economic recovery as donors expand their support for Syria’s transition.[24] Authors of the framework define an inclusive economy as one that encompasses five characteristics: equity, participation, growth, sustainability; and stability. To summarize briefly, equitable economies are those in which more opportunities exist to enable upward mobility, especially the poor and those socially disadvantaged. In such economies, citizens have equal access to adequate public goods, services, and infrastructure and inequality is declining. Participatory economies are those in which citizens can fully participate in economic life and transparency around common knowledge of rules and norms allows citizens to start a business, find a job, and engage in markets.[25] Their definition of a growing economy conceives of growth as more than just improvements in GDP, instead privileging improvements in material well-being with indicators that capture progress in food security, living conditions, and life longevity. Sustainable inclusive economies are those in which social and economic well-being is sustained over time with attention to environmental health and reduced natural resource use with decision-making processes that consider long-term costs. And finally, stable economies are those whose economic systems are resilient to shocks and stresses, especially those disproportionally affecting the most vulnerable.
Each of these characteristics, they note, should be understood as part of an integrated whole; Patterns of inclusiveness or exclusion in one area may reinforce or undermine inclusiveness in another.[26] Each characteristic also includes several sub-categories critical to each with context for categorizing measurable indicators.[27] Indicators that work best are embedded in a theory of change, which this index seems to capture more substantively than previous efforts in a way promising for monitoring and evaluating donor efforts in Syria. One of the strengths of their framework is that it draws on fields like feminist economics, ecological economics, political economy, and theories of social well-being and considers both drivers and outcomes of an inclusive economy. It also reflects a multi-dimensional idea of inclusive development lacking from many of the indicators developed by international organizations and institutions, thus avoiding, “heterodox-tinged, yet essentially orthodox framings of inclusive growth.”[28]
Comparative research on post-conflict transitions and foreign assistance suggests three central areas that scholars should monitor to understand how economic recovery and reconstruction are unfolding in Syria: aid distribution; institutional rebuilding and reform; and aid coordination and delivery. In this section, I briefly describe key insights from scholarship on each dynamic. I then describe an example of a current reform issue in Syria relevant in some way to each dynamic and suggest RF informed indicators that scholars could monitor to assess the economic inclusivity of reforms.
Aid Distribution
Insights from scholars studying post-conflict aid in Bosnia and Tunisia underscore the importance of considering distributional equity in program designs. In the wake of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, Bosnia received over $5 billion in reconstruction funding.[29] A recent subnational study of aid distribution in Bosnia incorporated geolocated projects of ten bilateral and multilateral donors to examine the spatial distribution of aid and factors associated with its distribution.[30] Results from that work show how foreign aid can contribute to horizontal inequality. The study’s authors expected that aid would be directed to favor poorer municipalities in the country. Instead, they found that donors allocated early reconstruction aid to municipalities with higher levels of development, neglecting remote areas—a potentially destabilizing dynamic impacting economic recovery.[31]
As many scholars have noted, long-standing economic grievances, especially those linked to regional inequalities, drove the protests leading to Tunisia’s 2011 uprising. Many anticipated that donor strategies to support the transition that followed would prioritize redressing those grievances. International assistance was instrumental in cushioning Tunisia from the impact on economic shocks in the early stages of its political transition. Studies of donor aid to the country, however, showed that coordination issues amongst donors and with consequent governments created unpredictability that hampered economic planning and promises by donors to address regional inequality were largely neglected in development plans.[32] Finally, lessons from the first three years of Iraq’s reconstruction starkly illustrate how aid distribution without effective governance or oversight can derail economic recovery. More than $220 billion was spent on reconstruction in Iraq in the decade following the US’ invasion in 2003.[33] Studies by the Brookings Institute and the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction detail how weak consultations between US reconstruction managers and Iraqi leaders and the failure to establish a governance system of reliable integrity resulted in widespread corruption.[34] As Dhingra and Alshamary note, “the postwar reconstruction funding surge reinforced the perception that aid projects specifically and public services more broadly could be sources of individual and connection-based profit with little consequence.”[35]
Distribution Issues in Syria’s Current Context
As one example of the challenges facing Syria, in July 2025 the World Bank warned that Syria’s GDP is projected to grow by only one percent, with recovery hinging on inclusive electricity access. The Bank approved a $146 million electricity emergency project to rehabilitate transmission lines and bolster sector governance.[36] UNOCHA’s humanitarian response priorities stressed that 16.5 million Syrians remain in need and that inequitable access to services and livelihoods, particularly in northern governorates, is a principal barrier to return.[37]
Areas to Monitor:
- Service parity (capturing the RF’s equitable access): Electricity hours, water continuity, health clinic functionality disaggregated by governorate and return areas.
- The distribution of reconstruction contracts (aligning with RF’s participatory dimension): It may be possible to measure the share of reconstruction contracts awarded to local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) compared to foreign firms or regime-aligned enterprises.
Institutional Rebuilding and Reform
The success of economic recovery in transitioning states is intrinsically linked to institutional reforms that strengthen the economic environment in such states by attracting critical foreign investment. In the early years of transition, practitioners and scholars working in the fields of both peacebuilding and democracy assistance emphasize the critical role that reforms to the banking and judicial sectors can play in strengthening the legal system, safeguarding property rights, and enforcing contracts, all of which can reduce uncertainty and restore confidence among domestic and international investors.[38] A preliminary look at country case studies in these areas suggests two important aspects of such reforms that scholars should focus on in monitoring economic recovery in Syria: improvements in institutional capacity and strengthening the ability for institutions to absorb aid effectively. As an umbrella term, improvements to institutional capacity might capture whether governmental and regulatory agencies have the personnel skills to administer regulatory frameworks for business; how soon they are able to provide services; and how much capacity courts have to enforce contracts, among other areas. Strengthening absorptive capacity refers to the extent to which domestic institutions can manage, receive, and deploy aid without becoming destabilized or dependent. When aid exceeds an institution’s ability to manage it, it can generate inefficiencies, foster corruption, and undermine state legitimacy.
Donor reforms to these areas though well intentioned can often invertedly create more challenges for capacity building. For example, in an important intervention on donor-supported transitional justice reforms in Tunisia, Mariam Salehi shows how overly expansive notions of such reforms by donors did not align with the capacities of existing domestic institutions. Overly ambitious, expansive, and impractical donor mandates made it difficult for domestic transitional justice workers to achieve progress which created the impression that transitional justice institutions were incapable of delivering on promises to their constituencies.[39] Countless case studies of transitional aid, particularly in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, and Tunisia, also underscore the point that more aid isn’t always a good thing. Aid absorption issues are well-documented by economists and scholars of foreign aid.[40] Significant inflows of aid can encourage rent-seeking and undermine confidence in local governance, especially in the absence of measures to ensure that recipient institutions have the capacity to absorb aid. Feeny and de Silva’s research on measures of absorptive capacities in foreign aid suggests ways that donors can avoid absorption issues and better direct their aid.[41] In their work they develop a composite index of absorptive capacity for individual recipient countries towards helping donors best allocate their aid projects –a potentially useful tool for scholars to explore in understanding where aid is directed and by whom in Syria.
Institutional Reform and Rebuilding Issues in Syria’s Current Context
In September 2025, President Ahmed al-Sharaa announced the creation of a Syrian Development Fund intended as a comprehensive national strategy to develop and repair the country with funding from both the domestic and international arenas.[42]
Areas to Monitor:
- Unified project registry and donor coordination (captures RF’s equitable access): Scholars can monitor if the Fund publishes a registry of reconstruction projects that are geo-referenced and donor and sector-tagged. Updates could show evidence of overlap or coverage gaps.
- Public consultation and inclusion (capturing RF’s participatory indicator): Questions scholars might consider in this area include whether regional consultations are undertaken before major projects and if oversight boards are created by the Development Fund, do they include members from civil society, business associations, or women’s groups.
- Food aid/agriculture (aligning with RF’s sustainability measure): Scholars may be able to track how food security assistance through the World Food Programme or donor pledges aligns with medium-term investments in agriculture like irrigation and drought resilience.
- Monitoring dimensions of absorptive capacity (captures RF’s equity and participation): Scholars could use Feeny and de Silva’s composite index of absorptive capacity to understand how and where donors are directing aid throughout the country.
Aid Coordination and Delivery
Coordination among donors is critical in shaping the early outcomes and success of economic recovery efforts in transitioning states. It is particularly key in strengthening a transitioning state’s capability to manage its economy, polity, society, and public administration—what Pritchett et al. call the four-fold transformation of a state’s functional capacity.[43] Given the risks and fragility of transitional periods, Ndikumana underscores that while the volume of donor aid channeled is important, how that aid is delivered, which instruments donors use, which sectors and activities donors choose to support, and the sequencing of aid delivery ultimately matter most to the success of institutional reforms.[44] Effective aid coordination in practice has long been a challenge and scholars have written extensively on the need for donors to work more closely together in designing aid interventions, mobilizing resources, harmonizing aid conditions, coordinating aid locally, and insuring accountability in aid delivery.[45]
Competing priorities among donors have made this difficult to realize. Donors have different priorities and preferences shaped by their political, economic, and strategic interests. Much of the lack of success with donor coordination in transitional settings stems from differing and often contradictory policy goals of international actors.[46] Effective coordination, as Roland Paris notes, ultimately requires “striking a balance between competing imperatives, which are shaped by the characteristics of the environment and the actors to be coordinated.”[47] An example from post-Dayton Bosnia illustrates how different donor priorities in the absence of coordination can cripple structural reforms during reconstruction. While mobilizing reconstruction aid in Bosnia was considered successful, major issues with donor cooperation and coordination resulted in, among other areas, duplication of aid efforts and poor management of economic reform.[48] The EU and World Bank shared leadership over Bosnia’s aid program. The primary tension between the two was that the EU and the Office of the High Representative (OHR) had political mandates in Bosnia, while the World Bank only had an economic mandate.[49] As Nedic notes, “the OHR sometimes wanted to condition aid on political steps, or design sector programs to achieve political objectives that were beyond the Bank’s mandate.”[50] This tension resulted in incoherent programs across sectors and created accountability issues. Issues briefly raised here suggest several questions scholars should consider in monitoring coordination issues with economic recovery in Syria: Are donors working at cross-purposes? Who leads coordination? Is there evidence of overlap or duplication of efforts? Are local institutions and actors engaged in the process or bypassed by donors?
Coordination Issues in Syria’s Current Context
In its latest (July 2025) Humanitarian Response Priorities report, UNOCHA emphasizes the importance of both expanding support and coordination from international donors.[51]
Areas to Monitor:
- Funding and Geographic Coverage (captures RF’s equitable dynamic): Scholars can monitor the percentage planned early-recovery funds that have been disbursed with attention to per-governorate and per-sector allocations and to look over overlaps or gaps in coverage.
- Inclusion of Syrian CSOs in design and oversight (captures RF’s participatory dynamic): It may be possible to track the share of projects co-designed with local councils/NGOs and the number of CSOs with multiyear vs. short-cycle grants. Examining the percentage of oversight recommendations that have been acted on may also be fruitful.
- Creating a joint project registry (capturing RF’s equity indicator): A centralized, publicly accessible database listing all donor and government financed recovery project with details such as budget and implementing partners would allow scholars to monitor overlap/gaps as well as understand potential conflicts of interests with political implications that might emerge.
Conclusion
Syria’s transition is unfolding amid deep uncertainty. While initial pledges and investments give some indications of the actors and priorities that will shape Syria’s economic recovery, greater scrutiny will need to be given in the coming months towards how aid will be distributed, structured, and coordinated in practice. Insights from comparative research on post-conflict transitions underscore the importance of inclusive economic reform to a more equitable and durable transition. This paper does not offer a definitive framework for evaluating such reforms; rather, it outlines preliminary entry points for scholars to monitor as reconstruction efforts unfold in Syria. By focusing on three core dimensions—aid distribution, institutional rebuilding and reform, and aid coordination and delivery—scholars may be able to generate early empirical insights into how external assistance shapes inclusive economic recovery. Monitoring across these dimensions is promising in providing both a foundation for more rigorous future research and for holding both donors and domestic actors accountable to their stated commitments of inclusivity.
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[1] Estimates of Syria’s GDP contraction are drawn from a January 2025 report by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) and UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Accessible online: https://www.unescwa.org/sites/default/files/pubs/pdf/syria-crossroads-stabilized-transition-english_0.pdf
[2] UNOCHA, Humanitarian Response Priorities, Syrian Arab Republic. July 2025. PDF Report Accessible at: https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/syrian-arab-republic-humanitarian-response-priorities-january-december-2025
[3]Norwegian Refugee Council. NRC’s operations in Syria: Humanitarian Overview. Accessible: https://www.nrc.no/globalassets/pdf/fact-sheets/2025/factsheet_syria_apr2025.pdf
[4] Raya Jalabi and Hussam Hammoud. “Syrians return home to a land littered with explosives.” Financial Times. October 9, 2025. Accessible: https://www.ft.com/content/f89d751f-3de8-4966-a150-e4352feb50f0
[5] UNOCHA Financial Tracking Service. Syrian Arab Republic 2025. Accessible: https://fts.unocha.org/countries/218/summary/2025 and https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/syrian-arab-republic-humanitarian-response-priorities-january-december-2025
[6] UNOCHA Financial Tracking Service. Syrian Arab Republic 2025. Accessible: https://fts.unocha.org/countries/218/summary/2025
[7] Standing with Syria: The Ninth Brussels Conference. Accessible: https://unric.org/en/standing-with-syria-the-ninth-brussels-conference/
[8] Amina Ismail. “EU conference pledges $6.3 billion for Syria’s recovery.” Reuters. March 17, 2025. Accessible: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/syrias-new-rulers-seek-aid-boost-eu-conference-2025-03-16/
[9] Melissa Enoch. “Germany Pledges €300 million in Aid for Syrians Ahead of EU Donor Conference. Accessible”: https://www.arise.tv/germany-pledges-e300-million-in-aid-for-syrians-ahead-of-eu-donor-conference/#
[10] Vivian Nereim, “Gulf States Lead Push to Invest in New Syria.” New York Times. June 30, 2025. Accessible: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/30/world/middleeast/gulf-states-invest-syria-iran.html
[11] Fareed Rahman, “Saudi Arabia and Qatar pledge $89 million to support Syria’s public sector.” The National. September 25, 2025. Accessible: https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/economy/2025/09/25/saudi-arabia-and-qatar-pledge-89-million-to-support-syrias-public-sector/
[12] “Saudi business delegation arrives in Syria; deals worth $4 billion to $6 billion seen being signed.” Reuters. July 24, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/saudi-business-delegation-arrives-syria-deals-worth-4-billion-6-billion-seen-2025-07-23/
[13] Sarmad Khan and Deena Kamel. “Syria and UAE’s DP World sign $800 million agreement for Tartus port development.” The National. May 16, 2025. Accessible: https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/economy/2025/05/16/syria-and-uaes-dp-world-sign-800-million-agreement-for-tartus-port-development/
[14] Lars-Erik Cederman, Nils B. Weidmann, and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, “Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnonationalist Civil War: A Global Comparison,” American Political Science Review 105, no. 3 (2011), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055411000207, https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/840A4D0FA634987190FD73A38E136860.
[15] Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, and Måns Söderbom, “Post-Conflict Risks,” Journal of Peace Research 45, no. 4 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343308091356,
[16] Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy M. Weinstein, “Demobilization and Reintegration,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 51, no. 4 (2007), https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002707302790. Christopher Blattman, Julian C. Jamison, and Margaret Sheridan, “Reducing Crime and Violence: Experimental Evidence from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Liberia,” American Economic Review 107, no. 4 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20150503, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20150503.
[17] Claire Mcloughlin, “When Does Service Delivery Improve the Legitimacy of a Fragile or Conflict-Affected State?,” Governance 28, no. 3 (2015), https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12091.
[18]Graciana Del Castillo, Rebuilding war-torn states: The challenge of post-conflict economic reconstruction (OUP Oxford, 2008), 19-21.
[19] See for example, “UNDP Guidance Note: Building Resilience Through Livelihoods and Economic Recovery.” Accessible: https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/2023-06/livelihoods_and_economic_recovery.pdf; OECD DAC Blended Finance Guidance 2025, Accessible: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-dac-blended-finance-guidance-2025_e4a13d2c-en/full-report/principle-3-tailor-blended-finance-to-the-local-context_8dcaaf86.html ; IMF Working Papers: Macroeconomic Stability and Inclusive Growth, March 19, 2021. Accessible: https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2021/081/001.2021.issue-081-en.xml?cid=50259-com-dsp-crossref
[20] Alexander E Kentikelenis, Thomas H Stubbs, and Lawrence P King, “IMF conditionality and development policy space, 1985–2014,” Review of International Political Economy 23, no. 4 (2016); Del Castillo, Rebuilding war-torn states: The challenge of post-conflict economic reconstruction.
[21] Sarah Yerkes et al., “Global Lessons for Tunisia’s Stalled Transition,” (2022).
[22] Timothy Donais, The political economy of peacebuilding in post-Dayton Bosnia (Routledge, 2005), 160.
[23] Donais, The political economy of peacebuilding in post-Dayton Bosnia, 159.
[24] Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor, Inclusive Economy Indicators: Framework and Indicator Recommendations, The Rockefeller Foundation (2016), https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/report/inclusive-economies-indicators-full-report/.
[25] Benner and Pastor, Inclusive Economy Indicators: Framework and Indicator Recommendations.
[26] Benner and Pastor, Inclusive Economy Indicators: Framework and Indicator Recommendations, 13.
[27] Benner and Pastor, Inclusive Economy Indicators: Framework and Indicator Recommendations, 12-27.
[28] Colin Hay, Tom Hunt, and J Allister McGregor, “Inclusive growth: the challenges of multidimensionality and multilateralism,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 35, no. 6 (2022).
[29] https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/28040/121_bosnia.pdf
[30] Zdeněk Opršal et al., “Foreign aid in a divided country: Subnational aid allocations in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina,” World Development 195 (2025/11/01/ 2025).
[31] Opršal et al., “Foreign aid in a divided country: Subnational aid allocations in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
[32] Sarah E. Yerkes, “Tunisia’s Unfinished Revolution: Addressing Regional Inequality,” in Geopolitics and Governance in North Africa: Local Challenges, Global Implications, ed. Sarah Yerkes, Edinburgh Studies on the Maghreb (Edinburgh University Press, 2023); Erin A Snider, “Containing change: the politics of transitional aid in Egypt after the Arab uprisings,” Globalizations (2023).
[33] World Bank. The reconstruction of Iraq after 2003. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/5a53f6dd-84f1-5b4a-a3c9-dfd3364c34f4/content
[34] Reva Dhingra and Marsin Alshamary, “Corruption is the forgotten legacy of the Iraq invasion,” Commentary, Brookings Institution 3 (2023); Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Hard lessons: The Iraq reconstruction experience (Government Printing Office, 2009).
[35] Dhingra and Alshamary, “Corruption is the forgotten legacy of the Iraq invasion.”
[36] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2025/06/25/syria-world-bank-us-146-million-grant-to-improve-electricity-supply-and-support-sector-development
[37] https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/syrian-arab-republic/syrian-arab-republic-humanitarian-response-priorities-january-december-2025
[38] See for example, Benjamin J Appel and Cyanne E Loyle, “The economic benefits of justice: Post-conflict justice and foreign direct investment,” Journal of Peace Research 49, no. 5 (2012); Arnim Langer and Graham K Brown, Building sustainable peace: Timing and sequencing of post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2016); Rob Mills and Qimiao Fan, “The Investment Climate in Post-Conflict Situations,”(2006). World Bank
[39] Mariam Salehi, “Trying just enough or promising too much? The problem-capacity-nexus in Tunisia’s transitional justice process,” Journal of intervention and statebuilding 16, no. 1 (2022): 109-10.
[40] See Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Aid, policy and growth in post-conflict societies,” European economic review 48, no. 5 (2004); Yoon S. Hur and Baran Han, “Aid modality and growth under post-conflict conditions,” Review of World Economics 160, no. 2 (2024/05/01 2024), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10290-023-00511-7.
[41] Simon Feeny and Ashton de Silva, “Measuring absorptive capacity constraints to foreign aid,” Economic Modelling 29, no. 3 (2012/05/01/ 2012), https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econmod.2012.01.013, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264999312000272.
[42] “Rebuilding Syria: New Fund Aims to Shape a Nation’s Recovery. Levant 24. September 5, 2025. Accessible: https://levant24.com/news/2025/09/rebuilding-syria-new-fund-aims-to-shape-a-nations-recovery/
[43] Léonce Ndikumana, “The Role of Foreign Aid in Post-Conflict Countries,” in Building Sustainable Peace: Timing and Sequencing of Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Peacebuilding, ed. Arnim Langer and Graham K. Brown (Oxford University Press, 2016), 149. Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock, and Matt Andrews, “Looking like a state: techniques of persistent failure in state capability for implementation,” The Journal of Development Studies 49, no. 1 (2013).
[44] Ndikumana, “The Role of Foreign Aid in Post-Conflict Countries,” 140-42.
[45] Stewart Patrick, The donor community and the challenge of postconflict recovery (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000), 35.
[46] Roland Paris, “Understanding the “coordination problem” in postwar statebuilding,” in The dilemmas of statebuilding (Routledge, 2009).
[47] Paris, “Understanding the “coordination problem” in postwar statebuilding,” 53.
[48] Goran Nedic, Financial and Technical Assistance in the Reconstruction and Development of Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina, The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, wiiw (2006), 8, https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wii:bpaper:073. See also the IMF’s 2001 report: https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/28040/121_bosnia.pdf
[49] Nedic, Financial and Technical Assistance in the Reconstruction and Development of Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina.
[50] Nedic, Financial and Technical Assistance in the Reconstruction and Development of Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina, 8.
[51] https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/syrian-arab-republic-humanitarian-response-priorities-january-december-2025