Employing Force: The Decision to Use Extra-State Actors in Inter-State Wars.

Blackwater Worldwide’s contemporary rise to infamy and its misdeeds in the Iraq War have historical precedents. That is, it is not unheard of for a state to employ non-state actors as means to achieve a goal. In this paper, we build a game theoretic model that determines the prospects for using extra-state actors in combat on behalf of the state. From this model, we hypothesize that despite the risk of agency loss by these private combatants, certain conditions increases the likelihood of their use. Specifically, democracy and non-territoriality of the conflict are predicted to have a positive influence on the decision to employ of extra-state combatants. We test these hypotheses using a censored probit model for all wars from 1816-2002. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]