On Thursday 24 May, DME for Peace will hold a webinar with Tilman Brück and Neil T. Ferguson of the International Security and Development Center, who will lead a discussion on “Do Jobs Aid Peace? The Impact of Employment Programming on Peace”.

That employment builds peace backstops over 2,450 interventions; and good theories suggest the idea should hold (ironically enough, with or without employment impacts). From weight of numbers, a logical assumption is that sufficient academic-quality evaluations exist to conduct a meta-analysis. Alas, not to be deterred, we conducted a “pseudo-meta-analysis” linking program locations to surveys. Fear of crime goes down, but other indicators are less consistent (and trust in government worsens!), which might suggest we capture a signalling process, rather than real attitudinal change. But what of the programs? Agencies mandate a final report, so it should be fairly easy to establish the impacts, right? We conducted a systematic review of 400 programs. Amazingly, of those 400 (and of 30 looked at in great detail), none have been evaluated for peace-related outcomes. So much for that idea. And that brings us to where we are now. Which is ending where we should have started; with the case-study evidence…

Please click here for more information and here to register.