War is not a breakdown of the economy — it is an economy, with its own rents, incentives, and networks that reward those who wage it. So what does it actually mean to negotiate an exit from violent conflict, and a pathway towards peace, under such economic conditions? Silencing the guns or signing agreements might not be enough.
In this year's Nagulendran Chair Lecture, Professor Achim Wennmann argues that lasting peace requires something even harder: transforming the economic agendas that deploy violence and coercion as strategies of business by other means, whether as a byproduct of fighting or its core objective. Drawing on over two decades of research on the political economy of peacemaking, he distills what it takes to build off-ramps from violent conflict out of the very economic interests that sustain it. Through examples of frontline innovation in peacemaking, he shows why "money matters" more to many peace processes than current practice tends to admit.