Situating the Contribution of the Political Marketplace Framework to Peace Processes

Authors: Alex de Waal, Benjamin Spatz and Aditya Sarkar (World Peace Foundation)

The political marketplace framework (PMF) is a lens for analyzing the logic of transactional politics in the contemporary era. It plays three roles:

• as a theory of the practice of politics including armed conflict
• as a critique of peacemaking practice
• as a toolkit or set of diagnostic lenses for the practitioner

This paper summarizes the theory, the critique and outlines the diagnostic lenses that the framework brings to bear.