UC San Diego

The provision of humanitarian assistance has rapidly become a core component of modern peacebuilding and post- conflict reconstruction. Yet, despite the normative appeal of providing humanitarian assistance to the victims of violent conflict, aid workers and analysts frequently claim that humanitarian assistance can inadvertently prolong war. If such claims are true, the very treatment that the international community has been employing to address the consequences of violent conflict may actually be prolonging war and increasing the amount of suffering over time. To date, however, the evidence to support these claims is mostly anecdotal, and a satisfying theoretical link between humanitarian aid and the duration of war has yet to be specified. This dissertation explores the link between humanitarian aid and the duration of war both theoretically and empirically through a series of four papers, with each paper serving as a chapter. I show how humanitarian aid can inadvertently prolong civil war when disbursed during conflict (Chapter 3) and how humanitarian aid can undermine peace when disbursed in the aftermath of civil conflict (Chapter 4). I also show that - as a result of these effects - combatants strategically respond to aid provisions by violently attacking aid workers (Chapter 5). In each paper, I test propositions econometrically using observational data to estimate the relationship between the level of aid and political violence at the macro and micro levels