• Capacity building
• Good governance
• Security sector reform

Capacity building

Using data from India, this briefing paper compares the effectiveness of redistributive transfers and policing in reducing conflict. It asks how policymakers can reduce and prevent civil unrest in highly unequal societies.

The author explains that there is much evidence to suggest that economic and social factors are major causes of civil unrest. However, governments often resort to the use of the police and military to tackle such upheavals, rather than using policies that directly address the causes of discontent. The paper finds that transfers have a significant effect on the prevention and reduction of civil unrest, particularly in the medium term. While policing reduces conflict in the short term, the continued use of police has either inconsequential effects, or even leads to increases in rioting. These findings have important lessons for other countries where social cohesion breaks frequently, but large-scale conflict may be avoidable.

Some of these findings include:

• some countries in Latin America, such as Brazil, Mexico and Peru, have exhibited a combination of high income inequalities and high potential for socio-political conflict, while other countries have shown signs of deterioration of previously successful social development policies (e.g. ex-Soviet Union republics) - this can result in increases in civil unrest
  
• the implementation of adequate programmes of redistributive transfers may have an important role to play in the establishment and/or maintenance of stable socio-political environments in those countries
  
• in many developing countries that are neither high-functioning democracies nor efficient dictatorship regimes the only way to decrease conflict in the long term is to reduce inequality
  
• an important institutional form of conflict management is the federal system of government -  federalism allows the compartmentalisation of conflicts in contained borders, so that they rarely spill into neighbouring states.
  

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