Foreign military intervention and post-colonial state-building: An actor-centric analysis

Abstract

In an era where state borders are relatively fixed and interstate wars are uncommon, it seems wise to begin to look beyond full-scale war when examining the relationship between military force and state-building. We thus examine the impact that a low-scale form of armed force, foreign military intervention, has on state-building in post-colonial countries. Using selectorate theory within an actor-centric framework, we hypothesize that certain democratic interveners tend to have a positive impact on post-colonial state-building efforts, while non-democratic and intergovernmental organization interveners have little if any impact. We test our theory using interrupted time series methodology in panel corrected standard error estimates of 80 countries from 1972 to 2002. While our empirical results are somewhat mixed, they demonstrate that different sets of interveners do have different state-building impacts.