A project management outlook of international development in a conflict context: TIKA's projects in Libya

International development is a field that relies fundamentally in its practice on implementing projects, meaning project management is a core field influencing the success of development initiatives. This becomes even more pivotal when addressing international development in conflict areas. This thesis seeks to bridge the two realms in a way that provides a broad outlook, specifically in a conflict context where international development efforts are needed the most and where the efficiency of project management is more crucial. The work of the Turkish international development agency TİKA in the conflict context of Libya is taken as a case study. After analyzing the project management methodology, the thesis studies the role of these projects in peace building, and also how the conflict affected development activities. Furthermore, as international development is profoundly an instrument of foreign policy, the thesis examines the correspondence of the case study's activity with the donor country's foreign policy. Through the information provided by the TİKA country office in Tripoli, an analysis was conducted to discover the current implementation process aligns with which project management methodology, where it was found to align mostly with the waterfall model. This insight provides an opportunity to standardize the process, either officially according to the waterfall methodology, or even to amplify the process towards a more complex accredited methodology such as the ones demonstrated. Following, the project details were studied in the framework of the international UN concept of sustaining peace, in which TİKA projects in Libya were recognized to have served this concept. Finally, the interaction and interdependency between TİKA's activity in Libya and Türkiye's foreign policy in the country was highlighted, in which the correlation between the two was made clearly visible.