Oliver Walton and Andrew Johnstone discuss how UK conflict and development policy since 2015 has become more fragmented and explore the wider implications of this case for the security-development nexus.
International development policy in the UK, long seen as a relatively stable area of cross-party consensus, has grown more contested since Brexit, with this period marked by deep cuts to the aid budget, a concerted effort to repurpose aid to bolster the UK’s national interests, and the loss of a standalone Department for International Development (DFID).
The International Development White paper, signed off by the new Foreign Secretary David Cameron in December, showed signs of a return to the pre-Brexit consensus: poverty reduction was once again at the forefront of UK policy and there was renewed support for working through multilateral institutions.
The White paper also signalled an effort to rehabilitate the UK’s status as a global leader in providing aid to fragile and conflict states. The need to tackle conflict and fragility were restored to key development priorities, albeit in a crowded agenda that also highlighted mobilising private capital, reforming the international system, human rights, digital innovation, and working with civil society.
In new research, published in Peacebuilding (read the full Open access article here), we examine what has happened to UK conflict, security, and development policy between 2015 and 2022.
From the late 1990s, security became central to the development strategy of the UK and other western donors. This close relationship (which became known as the security-development nexus) was articulated in broad terms – development depended on security, while the security (both of those in the Global South and in the UK) was not possible without development.
This approach continued into the years of coalition government (2010- 2015) and became even more firmly embedded in the pre-Brexit days of Conservative rule when David Cameron committed to spending 50% of the UK’s aid budget on fragile and conflict-affected states.
Post-Brexit shifts in policy
There have been three key changes since Brexit. First, the links between security and development became less prominent and less central to the UK’s overarching development rationale. Whereas tackling conflict was a headline goal of previous aid strategies, after 2016, it became subsumed under a range of other goals such as responding to humanitarian crises or promoting open societies.
Second, where these links were made, they became more fragmented and scattered and tied to a growing range of ‘new generation’ security threats including digital technologies, climate change, and pandemics.
Third, a declining proportion of aid was spent in fragile and conflict-affected states (down from 27% in 2016 to 16% in 2021), and a diminishing share allocated to ‘conflict, peace and security’ activities (down 22% between 2016 and 2020). Within this conflict and peace spending, there was a shift away from softer civilian peacebuilding activities towards harder security management work. Over a similar period, the proportion of UK aid spent on humanitarian aid in fragile and conflict-affected contexts has increased from 14% to 35%. The biggest growth sector in UK aid spending has been support for refugees in the UK (mostly in response to the Ukraine crisis). In 2022 this sector increased from 9% to 29% of total UK aid spending, which saw a sharp rise in the proportion of aid spent by departments outside the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO; from 28% in 2021 to 40% in 2022).
While differences in how DFID and the old Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) approached conflict before 2020 have undermined the FCDO’s efforts to forge a clear approach since their merger, the Ministry of Defence has become more active in the space of human security, expanding its doctrine around human rights and civilian protection, and training activity in conflict settings, and increasingly seeing ‘stabilisation as within its purview’. One interviewee argued that MoD had developed a ‘parallel framing’ of human security which was emerging ‘at the expense of a broader more civil definition of human security’, although another highlighted the limits of this in practice. While initiatives such as the Office for Conflict, Stabilisation and Mediation (OCSM) (established in 2022) point towards a more coherent approach, several respondents argued that the new conflict centre has not been given any priority by the government and its role remains unclear.
Explaining change
What explains these changes? In part, the more fragmented approach is an outcome of the volatility of UK politics over this period. Brexit then COVID sucked attention. High political turbulence undermined efforts to build coherent strategy, with new ministers tearing up previous strategies or introducing new areas of focus without any clear re-ordering of priorities or rationalisation. Government commitment to development also nosedived during this period – Boris Johnson characterised development aid as a ‘giant cashpoint in the sky’, abandoned the 0.7% of GNI commitment, and oversaw what many saw as the ‘hostile takeover’ of DFID by the FCO.
While changes in security and development policy after Brexit reflect the unusual turbulence of UK policy, they are not purely a UK phenomenon. Australia, New Zealand, and Canada all merged their development offices with foreign affairs, and the securitisation of foreign aid has been a consistent feature of western aid approaches since 2001. A focus on resilience and a more complex interpretation of the connections between security and development has also become more apparent in key international policy documents over recent years, as exemplified by the UNDP’s 2022 Special Report on Human Security.
The future of the security-development nexus
Do these shifts signal the end of the security-development nexus as some have argued? We see the picture as more mixed and argue that the nexus has experienced a process of fragmentation rather than collapse. Our findings resonate with the wider literature on the nexus, which has emphasised its adaptability and tendency to track wider geopolitical trends. We argue that the mechanistic version of the security-development nexus that emerged in the late 1990s and persisted until 2015 in UK policy is easier to maintain in a relatively stable global political environment where there is strong and sustained domestic commitment to development issues. Conversely, a more fragmented version is likely to arise at times when the global security terrain becomes more crowded, competitive, and complex, and when domestic political or economic pressures undermine government commitment to development issues.
Although we describe a broad de-prioritisation of the nexus within UK policy, continued progress has been made since 2015 in areas such as atrocity prevention, driven by successful advocacy by specialist NGOs and alliances with individual politicians. This highlights the contested nature of the security and development policy space and suggests that islands of effectiveness may be quickly revived under a more supportive future government.
A shorter version of this article was first published by the University of Bath on 11 Jan 2024.
Oliver Walton is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath. His research examines the political economy of war-to-peace transitions, NGO politics, social welfare, conflict, and peacebuilding, with a geographical focus on Sri Lanka and Nepal.
Andrew Johnstone is a retired senior British Army officer who served in Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Darfur, Djibouti and Afghanistan. Having completed his military career, he gained a PhD for his research into structural conflict prevention at the University of Bath and is now a freelance researcher on conflict prevention.
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: Wirestock. Sanatorium Medea in Tsqaltubo, Georgia. The spa town was a prosperous tourist site in Soviet Georgia but has been home to thousands of people displaced from Abkhazia since the 1992-1993 conflict and its sanatoria now lie largely derelict.
A very interesting commentary. To me, it is incredible that politicians don’t realize that to fight instead of seeking peace in any situation will come back to bite them. Incredible, and so sad for the populations of war-torn countries.