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Significance and Necessity of the Study

Japan, as the world’s largest Official Development Aid donor country for the past ten years, has been contributing to Asia and other developing countries for their development and stability, and to curb poverty. Although the amount of Official Development Aid is tending toward decline currently, the Japan’s world-leading ODA had been attracting great attention from the international community. But in recent years, there has been significant domestic public opinion criticizing ODA. The Japanese public is casting doubt on whether there is a necessity to give such a great amount of aid, amid the severe economic and financial situations within Japan. Under these circumstances, it is essential to take a comprehensive approach regarding the connection between development aid and peace building, especially in the context of tangled international relations, after the 9-11 simultaneous multiple terrorists attacks in the United States. In the post 9-11 global community, the world situation has become unstable with the new war called the “war against terrorism,” which is being led by the U.S., the Afghan War and the intensification of Mideast conflict. This study aims to consider how development assistance can contribute to world peace. Studying the interaction between development and conflict is meaningful for the sake of positioning Japan’s development aid in a more effective and strategic way. In the process to remove the causes of conflict and to establish democratization, the most urgent issues are to arrange social and economical development to reduce poverty, one of the structural cause, and the social inequality and injustice that lies behind it. To understand development and conflict in a comprehensive manner, it is necessary to reconsider the current approach which was apt to address them separately. The necessity to do this is increasing. The increase of social inequality has been recognized as a problem amid the U.S.-led expansion of globalization. In this international situation, analyzing conflict and seeking resolutions from the viewpoint of development are pressing needs.

Emergency humanitarian assistance must be actively approached from the perspective of protecting human rights, and needless to say, it is necessary to be accomplished with smooth coordination between national governments, international organizations and international NGOs. But we also must be aware that emergency humanitarian assistance does not always bring about desirable effects. In many cases, it has sparked new disputes, invited the increase of injustice and unfairness, or became a cause for prolonged conflict. It is important that the assistance will promote self-sustaining development and leads to reduction of the structural causes of conflict in the mid-and-long term perspective. This is one of the practical significances of this study.

Development and conflict has been approached separately in development studies or the economic and international political sciences. Although these approaches were able to address each issue clearly, they could not meet practical demands. It was impossible for them to comprehensively address the extremely important study of the relationship between development and conflict. This study contains the potential to make a breakthrough toward the resolution of these problems, since it interdisciplinary binds quite highly independent study fields such as development studies, economics, international politics, international law, sociology and politics. The study is required to establish an extremely highly interdisciplinary methodology, by also interrelating actively with the new study fields, international institution theory, international NGO theory and irenology. But at the same time, the fruit of the study is expected to feed back to those fields by proposing aggressive and practical policies for peace building.