Soldiers and development aid

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 substitutability, 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 suggest 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.