March 1988 was, for a kid from Northern Ireland, a maelstrom. Three IRA members are shot dead in Gibraltar. At their funeral in Milltown, a loyalist opens fire and throws grenades at mourners. Two days later, two soldiers drive into a crowd at the funeral of one of those mourners; they are dragged out of their car and shot dead. Families burying families burying families.
This violence did not begin in 1988, but is rooted in centuries of identity politics. The modern version, however, begins in the ordinary arithmetic of exclusion. In the 1970s, Catholics made up 40% of the population but more than 60% of the unemployed. In 1987, the Catholic male unemployment rate was two and a half times higher than that of Protestants, and it had hardly changed since 1976. Catholics largely worked in manual jobs; Protestants in white-collar positions. Segregation in housing, education, and access to services, state or self-enforced, hardened economic inequity.
The legacy of economic exclusion bred grievance. Grievance bred violence. And often, violence destroyed what little local economic life existed. Real recovery didn’t come until the 1990s, when violence ended and external conditions improved. But the region had learned an expensive lesson: economic resilience without a strong local foundation fails.
When the architects of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) negotiated peace in Northern Ireland a decade after 1988, they diagnosed the problem. Economics is front and centre. So they mandated a new regional development strategy, and the UK government committed to “broad policies for sustained economic growth and stability … and for promoting
social inclusion”.
The rationale, according to a group of distinguished public policy and legal experts 25 years after the GFA was signed, was explicit. “Matters of economic and social justice which were defining of the causalities and perpetuation of conflict … You needed robust protections for economic and social rights in order to remove some of the causes of conflict.”
Related: ‘Hate divides communities, co-operation builds them’
The negotiators and authors of the GFA understood that peace is impossible without economic resilience. Economic revitalisation is foundational to peacebuilding and economic recovery, and livelihoods development is critical to post-conflict resilience. Without tangible improvements in people’s socio-economic wellbeing, peace remains elusive. Conversely, the lack of employment opportunities, livelihoods, and economic participation is a catalyst for conflict.
As Marcus Lenzen, deputy chief of the UN Peacebuilding Fund, said recently: “Without tangible improvements in people’s socio-economic wellbeing, peace remains elusive.” Decent jobs are not merely employment. They are, in the words of the ILO, “symbols of dignity, belonging and stability”, the psychological and material foundation on which peace is built.
Main photo: People, including a television crew, take shelter on the ground in a cemetery during the attack on the funeral for three IRA members in March 1988 (image: Bernard Bisson/Sygma via Getty)
Now, while Northern Ireland is its own story, and each story is unique, in civil conflicts the pattern is often the same: economic exclusion and extraction breed grievance. Grievance breeds conflict. Conflict destroys livelihoods. Which breeds more conflict. Simply put, when people have economic security, a future, something to lose, they choose co-operation over violence. When they don’t, they don’t.
What does this mean for our movement?
Essentially, that the co-operative and mutual model is structurally built for creating, solidifying this foundation of economic resilience.
Member-owned capital cannot flee. When a co-op generates surplus, it stays with the members and the community. It doesn’t leave for a London head office or a global shareholder base. A co-op’s governance survives shocks because it’s democratic and distributed, not concentrated in investors optimising returns. Value stays local instead of extracting outward.
Co-ops have proven this at the local level across conflict-affected regions globally. But individual co-ops holding their ground is not the same as economic resilience at the scale a peace process requires.
That is the gap that has limited the co-operative movement for a century and a half: co-ops have never coordinated at scale. They operate as islands, even within single countries. In any developed and at-peace economy, you can find a full co-operative ecosystem, yet they work in isolation from one another. A dairy co-op doesn’t share supply-chain infrastructure with a banking co-op down the road, or coordinate purchasing power with an energy co-op, or integrate member services across the movement.
If economies built within countries with long-term peace and development have not cracked inter-co-operative coordination at scale, what does that mean for fragile states and post-conflict regions? It means they face the economic challenge with even fewer tools, relying on the same extractive capital flows and corporate investment that often flees when violence erupted, that abandons regions the moment external conditions shift.
Related: CM50 leaders pledge to ‘drive impactful change globally’
There have been incredible co-operative stories in countries coming out of or living with conflict of various kinds, in Colombia, Rwanda, Ukraine and many more. But without coordination at scale, such co-operatives and mutuals remain exemplary but local. They prove the model works. They don’t change the system.
This is where CM50 comes in.
The Cooperatives and Mutuals Leadership Circle (CM50) is a global network of the world’s largest and most influential members of our movement, enterprises with combined assets in the trillions, reaching two billion members, employing over half a billion people across every continent.
The network exists to do one thing: coordinate co-operative business-to-business action at global scale, and through this build a new global economy.
The CM50 is not another forum for talking about why co-operatives matter. It is the infrastructure and network of this work.
Its six programmatic commitments (covering access to capital; education; trade; digital infrastructure; and resilient communities and economies) are mechanisms to turn many resilient individual co-operatives into a coordinated economic platform capable of underwriting peace. And the overall key performance indicator CM50 members have endorsed: growing the movement’s annual turnover from US$2.7tn to US$5tn by 2035.
Scale, the missing infrastructure for peace.
The world is fragile. Polarised. Unequal. The 2024 UNDP Human Development Report, Breaking the Gridlock, Reimagining Cooperation in a Polarized World, made it clear that development progress was increasingly threatened by the ‘dynamics of inequality’ that connected political and socio-economic exclusion.
Yet it failed to point out that our movement is built on principles precisely to challenge, to tackle, such exclusion.
The question for our movement is whether we believe that economic resilience is foundational enough to peace that it demands our coordinated action at scale.
And scale is key. Because if it is, then CM50 isn’t optional. In our increasingly fragmented world, it will be the infrastructure peace actually requires.
