The goals of Project FORGE are threefold. First, to map the networks of actors, organizations, and coalitions shaping reconstruction governance during active warfare - constructing an original dataset and charting for the first time the relational architecture of a field in the making. Second, to understand how authority and legitimacy are distributed across this landscape, and why certain actors occupy central positions while others remain peripheral despite their on-the-ground relevance. Third, to assess how this governance landscape evolves over time, and what the implications are for local actors, the EU, multilateral institutions, and the shifting global order they underpin.
To this end, Project FORGE takes the Ukraine Recovery Conference as its entry point - a space where over 6,000 participants including governments, diplomats, civil society and private actors gather yearly to coordinate the largest wartime reconstruction effort currently underway in the world - and traces how the network of actors, mandates, and priorities shifts across successive iterations of the conference. It thereby draws on original datasets of multilateral actors, archival research, and interviews with key actors across the reconstruction field.
By uncovering the structure of reconstruction governance and the conditions that shape it, Project FORGE will advance our understanding of how authority is negotiated in contested international spaces. While rooted in the Ukrainian case, the project speaks to a broader challenge: how multilateral coordination can be sustained under political pressure - a question with growing urgency across a range of conflict-affected settings worldwide.