Soldiers and development aid
| Published date | 01 March 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343314561363 |
| Date | 01 March 2015 |
| Author | Jeffrey Pickering,Emizet F Kisangani |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles |
Soldiers and development aid:
Military intervention and foreign aid flows
Emizet F Kisangani & Jeffrey Pickering
Department of Political Science, Kansas State University
Abstract
This article argues that military intervention by traditional members of the OECD’s Development Assistance
Committee (DAC) has a significant impact on the development aid given to target states. This seemingly innocuous
thesis contributes to two literatures. First is the literature on foreign aid, which examines a long list of donor and
recipient state variables to explain assistance patterns. It has yet to analyze the signal that DAC military intervention
sends about the importance of specific recipient states, however. Second is the literature on foreign policy substitut-
ability, which maintains that increasing the resources allotted to one change-inducing foreign policy tool often
reduces the resources available for other tools. Using interrupted time-series panel-corrected standard error estimates
of 120 recipient countries from 1960 to 2004, we find that aid flows from traditional DAC donors rise significantly
when one or more of their members dispatch soldiers in support of a target government, but gradually recede after
troops depart. The opposite pattern holds for interventions that oppose the target government. These outcomes sug-
gest that studies of foreign aid should consider donor state military actions as an additional explanatory variable, and
that policymakers may at times view foreign aid and military intervention as complementary rather than competing
foreign policy tools.
Keywords
DAC, foreign aid, military intervention, traditional donors
Introduction
It seems apparent that foreign aid tends to follow soldiers
into foreign countries. The year after the US invasion of
Iraq in 2003, US aid to that country totaled $7.6 billion.
This amount is nearly double the total sum of aid Iraq
received from the USA from 1962 to 2003, $3.89 billion
(USAID, 2008). It represents a 195% increase on the
average annual level of aid given to Iraq prior to 2003.
The USA is not alone in sending economic aid to target
countries during and after military missions abroad.
A more obscure example comes from the 1978 French
and Belgian intervention to shore up Mobutu Sese Seko
in Zaire (now Congo) when the autocrat encountered a
challenge from rebels based in Angola. Foreign aid to
Zaire jumped roughly 25% in the wake of the French
and Belgian military action (OECD, 2007).
Despite abundant anecdotal evidence that increased
levels of foreign aid tend to flow into target countries
when donor states dispatch troops abroad, the literature
on foreign aid largely overlooks the relationship between
donor state military force and foreign assistance levels.
Research exists on other aspects of the link between aid
and intervention. Foreign aid has itself been conceptua-
lized as a form of non-military intervention (Baldwin,
1969), and both military and non-military assistance
have been found to have some effect on military expen-
ditures and presumably military capabilities in recipient
states (e.g. Khilji & Zampelli, 1994). Other research has
found that stark increases in military assistance may be
related to increasingly conflictual behavior by recipient
governments (Sylvan, 1976) and sharp declines in aid
may cause the outbreak of intrastate conflict (Nielsen
et al., 2011). Increasing aid during civil conflict may,
conversely, reduce its duration (de Ree & Nillesen,
2009). These and other studies in the existing literature
Corresponding author:
emizetk@ksu.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2015, Vol. 52(2) 215–227
ªThe Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343314561363
jpr.sagepub.com
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