Emerging from ethnic conflict : challenges for social protection design in transition countries

This paper is an attempt to shed some light on issues relating to social protection in transition countries, emerging from ethnic conflict. It analyzes how constraints posed both by conflict itself, and its ethnic nature, affect social protection policies, and suggests ways out. Both conflict, and continuing ethnic tensions thereafter, affect labor markets, as well as render social safety net policies difficult to implement. Instead, policymakers often have to resort to second-best solutions. In particular, in the light of precarious public finances, a limited ability of the government to provide services and assistance, with ethnic tensions massively constraining social safety nets, people will continue to rely on many wartime coping mechanisms. Social protection design has to be mindful of this, and may even build on these mechanisms. Furthermore, employment - formal and informal - needs to take over a key poverty alleviation role in a post-ethnic-war environment. The resulting main social protection policy implication, therefore, is to create the right conditions for the labor market to absorb those able to work.