# Humanitarian Aid and the Duration and Outcome of Civil Wars Based on Rebel Group Motivation Open Access

## Ratto, Andrew D. (2013)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/m039k543x?locale=en
Published

## Abstract

Rebel groups can be differentiated based on whether their primary motivation is a desire for economic opportunism and personal greed or whether they are motivated by a desire for political change or policy reform. Based on this distinction, these rebel groups will interact with humanitarian aid in different ways. In theory, the presence of humanitarian aid will be damaging to rebel groups that are primarily motivated by grievances while the presence of humanitarian aid will be beneficial to rebel groups that are primarily motivated by greed. An instrumental variable probit with cubic time splines and a competing risks model are used to evaluate the impact of humanitarian aid on civil war duration and outcomes based on rebel group motivations. There is empirical evidence to support the hypotheses that the presence of humanitarian aid is associated with longer conflicts and that an increase in the amount of humanitarian aid is associated with an increase in the expected amount of time until a rebel victory.

Contents

1 Introduction 1 2 Greed and Grievance in Civil Wars and Theory of Conflict 4 2.1 Economic Inequality and Grievance as a Motivation for Conflict . . . . . . 7 2.2 Greed as a Motivation for Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2.3 Theory of Conflict for Duration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.4 Theory of Conflict for Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 3 Humanitarian Aid and its Role in Conflict 17 3.1 The Basics of Humanitarian Aid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 3.2 The Determinants of Humanitarian Aid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 3.3 Strategic Decisions by Governments and Aid Providers around Humanitarian Aid . 22 3.4 The Impacts of Humanitarian Aid on Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 3.4.1 Humanitarian Aid in Grievance Conflicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 3.4.2 Humanitarian Aid in Greed Conflicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 4 Hypotheses 29 5 Operationalization and Data 30 5.1 Civil War and Rebel Group Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 5.2 Greed and Grievance Rebel Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 5.3 Humanitarian Aid Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 5.4 Control Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 5.5 Descriptive Statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 6 Empirical Analysis on the Duration of Civil Wars 39 6.1 Determinants of Humanitarian Aid and Instrumental Variable . . . . . . . . 41 6.2 Instrumental Variable Probit for Duration Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 6.2.1 Cubic Time Polynomials in Probit Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 6.2.2 Results of Instrumental Variable Probit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 7 Analysis of Civil War Outcomes Using Competing Risks 58 7.1 Modeling Civil Wars Using Competing Risks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 7.2 Competing Risks Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 7.3 Hypotheses, Data, and Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 7.4 Results and Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 8 Conclusion 71 9 Appendix 78 9.1 Aid and Rainfall Relationship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 9.2 Extended Results of Instrumental Variable Probit Models with Interaction Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 10 Works Cited 81