The Relationship between Peacebuilding Policy and Economic Institutions of Corporate Conflict Financing in South Sudan and Ethiopia

In immediate post-conflict conditions, a rising number of powerful TNCs are free to engage with warring political elites while appearing as legitimate business ventures and promoting countries' (neo)liberal economic development. Warring parties increasingly seek out private transnational support as an effective method to overcome weak, conflict-affected domestic markets and avoid public scrutiny.

Their engagement is facilitated by a proliferation of 'enablers' of transnational corporate networks, i.e. international banking systems and middlemen such as capital holding companies, who base themselves in progressively secretive Western jurisdictions. Such financial institutions appear to sustain and multiply during economic reconstruction periods at the centre of post-conflict peacebuilding processes, risking the re-widening of economic space to new streams of conflict financing.

Peacebuilding policy, especially economic reconstruction efforts, to date has focused heavily on the actors involved (specific individuals/companies) and often ignored the structural/systemic conditions (e.g. a weak international regulatory framework) that enable conflict financing, such as the private international finance system, resulting in narrow policy initiatives. These rely on a globally dominant logic of (neo)liberal/free-market economics, which suppresses state control over private industry and deprioritizes financial regulation.

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 the oil, large infrastructure, and related industries-potentially facilitated by the measures put in place after 2015 and 2018 peace agreements. Decades of intensive economic reconstruction efforts across Ethiopia failed to prevent TNCs from contributing to armed campaigns of the 2010s.

Recent evidence demonstrates a rapid increase in the involvement of new, highly secretive TNCs, especially those advancing Russian and Chinese efforts to control vital resource assets, in wars ongoing across the Horn.

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? To what extent does the liberal peacebuilding framework permit, or promote, transactional politics?

This study fills a critical gap in the bodies of work on the political economy of conflict/conflict financing and

peacebuilding policy, as the role of business as a transnational actor remains a side phenomenon in the study of international politics. Furthermore, this study is inspired by the scholarship on counter-orthodox economic policy and post-liberal approaches to political settlements, which rethinks post-conflict institutional development beyond liberal/free-market democratic assumptions.

Based in the new institutionalist tradition, this research will analyse case studies through a holistic systems thinking approach, allowing for bottom-up theory generation, non-linear ideation, acknowledgement of power relations difficult to quantify, and natural translation to policy development. To theorise the private transnational conflict financing system, this research is necessarily mixed methods, making use of both fieldwork and non-fieldwork.

The former includes review of public/private financial reports, media monitoring, and open-source intelligence, and secondary research. Planned fieldwork involves key informant interviews with journalists, scholars, financial analysts and public officials/policymakers, and observational visits to industrial development sites and hosting/adjacent communities.