Private Military Organizations, Resource Concessions, and Conflict Termination: How Private Military Organizations Impact Conflict Duration in African Civil Wars

This paper attempts to address the lingering question about the impact that private military organizations have in conflicts they engage in. This paper focuses on civil conflicts in Africa which have had private military presence and limits the time frame to the years between 1990 and 2008. Specifically, I seek to analyze the relationship between resource concessions made to a private military organization and the likelihood of conflict termination. I utilize both case study analysis and survival analysis to address the research question. In the survival model, I find a trend that indicates that a conflict in which the private military organization is awarded a resource concession is less likely to terminate at a given year y, but was unable to reject the null hypothesis due to insignificant models. The case study analysis demonstrates that private military organizations that have been awarded resource concessions are more likely to impact the conflict on multiple levels, being politically and militarily.