Peacebuilding and Politics of Aid: New Dilemmas of Cooperation Between Governments and NGOs.

In the past decade, NGOs have been hailed as the new conflict managers for their emerging role in peacebuilding in violent conflicts. Many relief and development organizations have come to realize the impact of their presence and their provision of aid in conflicts, and they have decided to be purposeful about that impact by adding peacebuilding to their mandates. For the most part, the NGO and peacebuilding literature has praised the advent of NGOs in peacebuilding. This paper seeks to provide a more critical analysis of NGO peacebuilding, drawing from the literature on relief and development NGOs and concerns that this literature raises about NGO interactions with state actors in relief and development work. Just as development NGOs are interdependent with the government agencies that fund them, the new NGO mandate of peacebuilding is heavily influenced by state interests in post conflict settings. The dilemmas this raises for NGO peacebuilding work are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]