Conflict Resilience Framework for Critical Infrastructure Peacebuilding

Abstract

Apart from security issues, war-torn societies and countries face immense challenges to rebuilding damaged critical infrastructure. Existing post-conflict recovery frameworks mainly focus on social impacts and mitigation. Also, existing frameworks for resilience to natural hazards are mainly based on design and intervention, yet, they are not fit for post-conflict infrastructure recovery because they omit the possibility of enhancing resilience by assessment. Resilience by assessment is delivered by standoff observations that include the use of a disparate remote-sensing sources of data, e.g., public satellite imagery and, forensics, collected during the course of the conflict. This paper discusses why conflicts and warfare require a new framework for achieving post-conflict infrastructure resilience. It then introduces a novel post-conflict framework that includes different scales of resilience with a focus on asset and regional resilience. It considers different levels of knowledge, with focus on standoff observations and data-driven assessments to facilitate prioritisation during reconstruction. The framework is then applied to the transport network of the area west of Kyiv, Ukraine to demonstrate how resilience by assessment can support decision-makers such as governments and multilateral financial institutions to address infrastructure needs and accelerate financial and humanitarian assistance, absorb shocks and maximise infrastructure recovery after conflict.

Keywords: resilience, war-torn countries, critical infrastructure, prioritisation, standoff observations, Ukraine