Competition, Aid, and Violence against Civilians

Abstract

How do donor governments respond to recipient government violence against civilians? Violence against civilians undermines a common goal of aid_ to reduce the risk and impact of instability or civil conflict. We show that donors care about recipient violence against civilians, under certain circumstances. We argue that government use of violence against civilians reduces aid allocations to recipient governments. Competition with other donors, especially rivals, however, will reduce donor sensitivity to government behavior. Testing these expectations on aid from 32 donors to 157 recipients between 1990 and 2013, we find that donors do respond to government violence against civilians but that this effect is conditioned by donor competition. Furthermore, this paper advances foreign aid scholarship by connecting the civil war literature to the strategic provision of aid literature and looking at an understudied form of government behavior in the aid and human rights literature: violence against civilians.