PCIA Five Years On: The Commodification of an Idea

The structure and content of the Hoffman article is straightforward. It consists of a general discussion of traditional donor evaluation, followed by brief overviews of the various methodologies employed in A Measure of Peace, the INTRAC study and the ARIA project. It closes with a one-page conclusion containing four relatively technocratic points to bear in mind in the subsequent development of PCIA.  

While the Hoffman article does a fine job of summarizing some of the methodological details of a number of studies, I cannot help but be struck by the question: “Where are the politics?” PCIA, in its origins and implications, is fundamentally political. To treat it in a non-political, technocratic, manner is therefore just as dangerous as it would be to deal similarly with arms control mechanisms. A full examination of the evolutionary path of PCIA, either as an idea or as an evolving methodology, must be placed within the very political context of the “Development Industry”. Only once this has been accomplished, can analysis profitably turn towards issues of power and control, as well as to the question of whether the empowering potential of PCIA can be realized through developmental structures which have been known to have net dis-empowering and anti-peacebuilding impacts. Two examples discussed at greater length elsewhere are the international response to Kosovo and the hundreds of international donor-sponsored conflict resolution workshops (so-called) in the Republika Srpska of Bosnia Herzegovina (see Bush 2001 forthcoming).