By Jevgenijs Steinbuks and Mathilde Lebrand
In many conflict-affected countries, roads and bridges are more than just infrastructure – they are lifelines. Yet an estimated one billion people in low-income countries still lack access to an all-weather road – a gap that is even more acute in places torn by conflict. The absence of safe, reliable roads leaves communities isolated, cut-off from markets, schools, and even humanitarian aid.
Responding to this challenge, donors and governments have poured billions of dollars into road projects in fragile states, hoping to spur economic development and stability. But can rebuilding a road truly help build peace? New evidence from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) suggests that it can – but also shows why it often doesn’t deliver.
Evidence from the DRC
The DRC has been one of the world’s most protracted conflict zones. Most of its road network has long existed only on paper, with vast stretches of officially mapped roads impassable or non-existent on the ground.
In response, the international community invested heavily in rehabilitating DRC’s roads as a part of post-war recovery and peacebuilding efforts. To find out if these investments made a difference, we compiled data on 192 road rehabilitation projects across the DRC since 2003 and analyzed local conflict levels before, during, and after each project.
The resulting study, Road Investment and Violence in DRC: Perishable Effects, found that road upgrades contributed to peace. In areas where roads were rehabilitated, the incidence of violent conflict dropped significantly – by about 5 to 10 percent – after project completion.
While it is difficult to answer with certainty what exact mechanism explains the observed decline in violence following road rehabilitation, our data suggests that insecurity correlates with inaccessibility. Notably, the decrease was strongest for violence against civilians – suggesting that better connectivity helped protect vulnerable populations. Communities became safer once a road was improved.
A ‘perishable’ peace dividend
However, this success story comes with a twist. The peace dividend from roads in the DRC turned out to be perishable. Within three years, those initial gains had vanished: violence returned to pre-levels in the areas that had benefited from road upgrading.
Machine learning analysis of large-scale satellite imagery tracking road conditions over time found that once rehabilitation projects were finished, roads deteriorated rapidly again. This is because they weren’t subsequently maintained – something that’s crucial given the DRC’s combination of fickle soils with tropical rainfall. On average, roads lost more than half of their structural integrity or service quality within just three years after rehabilitation. As the roads fell back into disrepair, the advantages they had brought also faded.
The conflict mineral
We also observed that not all rehabilitated roads lead to peace. Since mobility is a key strategic concern for parties in conflict, improved connectivity can also exacerbate violence.
One subset of roads stood out: if roads transacting gold mining areas were rehabilitated, we observed greater instead of lesser violence. Gold has proven a notoriously resilient ‘conflict mineral’ in the DRC, and a trend that improved access has not reversed.
This demonstrates that investment in transport infrastructure, when coupled with strong state authority, can contribute to delivering sustainable peace to the population.
Implications for fragile states
The Congolese experience underscores a broader lesson for fragile and conflict‑affected states: while infrastructure connotates durability, without maintenance, investments in transport infrastructure only yield short-term benefits. Roads can support peacebuilding only when engineered for durability and backed by sustained maintenance.
In conflict‑affected contexts, from Afghanistan to the Sahel, governments are allocating resources to road construction as an instrument for integrating peripheral communities and consolidating state authority.
To ensure these efforts have lasting impact, policymakers and development practitioners should consider the following:
- Build for the long term: Prioritize durable road designs and materials that can withstand local conditions.
- Plan for maintenance from Day One: Build maintenance funding and local capacity into project plans.
- Monitor and respond quickly: Utilize technology for real-time monitoring and rapid maintenance response.
- Pay attention to rapacity dynamics: By lowering transport costs, road investments can intensify armed violence in fragile settings where sizeable resources remain outside state control.
Bottom line: Infrastructure investments in fragile states can indeed pave the way to peace – but the job doesn’t end at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. The case of DRC’s roads shows that, in the absence of continuous maintenance, even well‑conceived infrastructure investments deliver only fleeting benefits. For policymakers, the mandate is clear: build it but also maintain it.
Peer Schouten and Hannes Mueller contributed to this blog.
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