Paper short abstract:

Recurring civil conflicts have become the dominant form of armed conflict in the world today. It is useful to investigate the factors compromising peace sustainability in countries emerging from conflict. The goal of this paper is to investigate the role of military resources in conflict relapse.

Paper long abstract:

After a civil conflict, when a peace agreement is signed between the government and the rebels, peace is highly fragile. Military spending is a key issue often used as a guarantee of stability.

The aim of this paper is to show that when a country emerges from civil conflict, military resources are an important factor leading to conflict relapse. Military spending may be viewed as an indicator of government military strength. Thus after the conflict, if the government increases the level of military resource, it may be interpreted as a revealing signal of the government's ability to credibly commit to a peace deal during the post-conflict period, and then conflict may recur. The larger the post-conflict government's army, the more costly renewed rebellion is likely to be and the lower the aspiring rebels' estimate of the probability of victory.

Our study uses data on a sample of 80 developing countries estimating survival models over the period 1960-2010. We examine both the case of democratic governments and of autocratic governments. The paper suggests that military spending is particularly associated with an increasing risk of renewed conflict. We demonstrate the adverse consequences of the use of military spending to sustain peace, particularly on case of civil conflict. We also show that the risk of renewed conflict in highly democratic governments drops rapidly after the conflict has ended; rather than in starkly autocratic regimes, where the process is much longer.