Does Foreign Development Aid Trigger Ethnic War in Developing States?

Abstract

Can foreign aid trigger ethnic war? The quantitative conflict literature has produced mixed findings on the effect of foreign aid on civil war in developing states. One reason for the mixed results is that a subset of civil wars, ethnic wars, are more likely than other kinds of civil wars to be triggered by foreign aid. This is because large amounts of foreign aid can cause the state to become a prize worth fighting over, mobilizing ethnic identity and group-related rebellion. This article investigates this question by testing the separate impacts of total, bilateral, and multilateral aid given by state and nonstate actors on the onset of ethnic war, using a cross-national time-series dataset of 147 countries from 1961 to 2008. The findings show a very strong association of foreign aid with ethnic war, whether measured as total aid, bilateral aid, or multilateral aid.