Program on Crisis, Conflict, and Cooperation (C3)

Instability, violence, conflict, disaster, and poverty are permanent features of the international landscape. Civilan and military leaders in the developed world are repeatedly called on to respond to complex crises, but the record of success is mixed and not, overall, encouraging. Outsiders rarely have the knowledge, skills, patience, or resources to succeed at statebuilding and peacebuilding in fragile, violent, and conflict-affected countries. The practical requirements remain poorly understood, and local processes remain undervalued. In a time of economic crisis and declining budgets, many donors are seeking new approaches that are less costly for them, less disruptive to recipient societies, and more effective at sustaining positive outcomes and breaking dependency on foreign aid.

The Program on Crisis, Conflict, and Cooperation (C3) examines the intersections of conflict, crisis, development, and governance. Established in 2002 as the Post-Conflict Reconstruction (PCR) Project, C3 today has in-house expertise on topics increasingly recognized as critical to understanding complex crises: hybrid political orders, nonstate-controlled territories, state-society relations, absorptive capacity, governance, legitimacy, and private-sector development. In 2012, C3 launched the Global Statelets Initiative (GSI) to collect lessons from efforts at building capacity and stability, to identify new thinking about state formation and peacebuilding, and to find constructive alternatives to current practice. Building on a decade of influential work on reconstruction and stabilization, the GSI is helping donors identify wasteful and disruptive practices, improve decisions about aid and interventions, understand local dynamics, and improve the effectiveness of stabilization, development, and humanitarian work.