Conflict Sensitivity Community Hub

Peacebuilding, stabilisation, conflict sensitivity, and social protection: time to join the dots…

Rob Parker and Tim Midgley

When insecurity spread across parts of Niger and Mali in recent years, humanitarian and social protection actors faced an obvious dilemma: how do you keep a cash transfer programme running when the roads aren’t safe and state presence is thin? In both countries, programme teams found workarounds. By adopting conflict sensitive practices they began leaning more heavily on local facilitators, women’s groups and village networks, moving payment points to safer locations, and piloting mobile money. The transfers kept flowing. Households kept a predictable lifeline through periods of shock and displacement.

It’s a delivery story. But it’s also a peace and stability story, and that’s the connection this blog wants to draw out.

Social protection – the policies and programmes that help people manage poverty, food insecurity, ill health and other risks across their lives, through measures such as cash transfers, public works schemes, school feeding and fee waivers – rarely appear on the radar of peace, stabilisation and conflict sensitivity practitioners. If it’s considered at all, it’s typically filed under ‘welfare’ or ‘development’ and left to specialists in that field. At the same time, most social protection programmes aren’t designed or evaluated with peacebuilding objectives in mind, and few peacebuilding or stabilisation programmes think of social protection as a tool they might use to address conflict risks and support more sustainable peace outcomes.

That’s a missed opportunity in both directions, and it’s exactly the gap we explored in a recent briefing for peace and stabilisation actors that builds on the recent report of the High-Level Panel on Social Protection in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Settings.

The case for paying attention…

The direct evidence here isn’t overwhelming, but it’s real, and it points in a consistent direction. Well-designed, conflict- and gender-sensitive social protection programmes can:

  • ease the grievances that fuel conflict. Reducing poverty, food insecurity and livelihood stress, addresses some of the structural conditions that make violence more likely, particularly where exclusion and inequality are already driving instability.
  • strengthen relationships between communities. In Lebanon, cash transfers reaching both host and refugee populations helped ease the economic pressures that were fuelling tension between the two groups – though this effect is far from automatic, and depends heavily on how targeting is handled.
  • reduce the pull of armed groups. Research from Colombia found that conditional cash transfers raised school attendance and household income, which in turn raised the opportunity cost of joining an armed group and was associated with higher demobilisation in programme areas.
  • rebuild trust between citizens and the state. Somalia’s Baxnaano safety net programme, delivered through national systems rather than purely humanitarian channels, has been linked to greater beneficiary trust in state institutions in areas where it is clearly associated with government. That effect is uneven, though – plenty of beneficiaries still credit international donors rather than the Somali state, and exclusion in areas outside government control undercuts the legitimacy gains.
  • support gender equality, which itself correlates with lower conflict risk – though insecurity can simultaneously increase women’s reliance on these programmes while restricting their access to them, through mobility constraints, safety risks at distribution points, or missing ID documents.

None of this makes social protection a peacebuilding silver bullet. The honest reading of the evidence is more modest: social protection can support peace and stability objectives when it’s inclusive, conflict-sensitive, politically informed and coordinated with wider efforts. That’s a real contribution, but a conditional one.

It works both ways…

The flip side matters just as much. Any programme that moves resources – money, goods, access – into a contested, resource-scarce environment creates winners and losers, and decisions about who benefits, who doesn’t, and who gets to decide, are inherently political. Perceived unfairness can do as much damage as actual inequality: a transparent process with clear grievance mechanisms and inclusive targeting reduces tension; a poorly explained or inconsistently applied one can inflame it, corrode trust, and deepen the very divisions it was meant to ease.

And in places where the state can’t reach – parts of Somalia, Sudan and Myanmar for example – social protection doesn’t disappear, it just becomes informal. In Somalia, decades of weak central authority have left clan networks and remittances doing much of the work formal safety nets would otherwise do, with UN agencies and NGOs delivering what national coverage does exist. In Sudan, the collapse of state services after the 2023 civil war saw local ‘Emergency Response Rooms’ – volunteer networks that grew out of neighbourhood resistance committees – step in to run communal kitchens, clinics and evacuations across the country, reaching millions of people that formal humanitarian channels couldn’t. And in Myanmar’s contested ethnic borderlands, ethnic armed organisations and community-based groups have built parallel health and welfare systems alongside the government’s, while faith networks, monks and extended family ties continue to function as the first and last line of support in times of crisis. In each case, informal provision ends up substituting for, complementing, or occasionally competing with state functions.

Three ways peace and stability actors can engage…

For conflict sensitivity practitioners, as well as others working in peacebuilding, stabilisation and related roles, there are practical ways to engage in three broad areas:

  1. Shaping how programmes are designed. Peace actors bring skills – conflict sensitivity, political economy analysis, understanding of non-state authority and local legitimacy, gender analysis in conflict settings – that can meaningfully improve how a social protection programme is built, particularly in places where the state doesn’t control all the territory. Joint diagnostics between social protection, humanitarian, gender and conflict teams, working toward shared outcomes, would be a concrete starting point.
  2. Helping manage risk during delivery. Conflict analysis can surface the dilemmas that come with routing support through state systems where the state is itself a conflict actor, and can sharpen attention to who’s included or excluded, how targeting decisions are communicated, and whether grievance systems are actually trusted. Peace actors’ networks – often extending into areas the state can’t reach – are a genuine asset here.
  3. Influencing the wider political environment. Peace processes, recovery and reconstruction planning, security sector reform, DDR, and donor priority-setting all shape the conditions in which social protection either succeeds or fails. Peace actors – mediators, UN missions, donor governments – are often already in the room for these conversations, and can push for social protection to be recognised as part of the infrastructure that helps societies absorb shocks and rebuild legitimacy, not a peripheral welfare add-on, whilst ensuring that programmes are designed in a conflict sensitive manner.

Joining the dots…

Social protection won’t produce peace by itself. But the pathways connecting it to reduced vulnerability, stronger social cohesion, and better state-citizen relationships are clear enough to justify closer collaboration between the two fields. That perhaps starts with something unglamorous but necessary: shared language, joint context analysis, and realistic common objectives, so that social protection programming doesn’t inadvertently deepen the grievances it’s trying to ease – and so peacebuilding practitioners stop overlooking a tool that’s already in the toolkit.

Rob Parker is a former NGO director and independent consultant with over 25 years’ experience in policy, advocacy and communications on peacebuilding, human rights and international development. Starting out as a campaigner on arms transfer controls at Amnesty International UK and later Oxfam, he spent nearly two decades as Director of Policy and Communications at Saferworld, with responsibility for an extensive portfolio of peacebuilding and conflict sensitivity programmes. He now consults on peace and security issues. Rob holds an MA in International Relations from the University of London and he is a trustee of White Ribbon UK.

Tim Midgley is an independent peacebuilding consultant, a Senior Associate with Saferworld and an Associate Consultant with PeaceNexus. For much of the last 10 years he has focused on supporting the integration of conflict- and gender-sensitive approaches into international humanitarian, development, peacebuilding and commercial efforts.

All blog posts