Mercenaries in civil wars, 1950-2000

This paper investigates the determinants of mercenary participation in civil wars during the second half of the 20th century. We present a new dataset on mercenary activities and use it to test hypotheses derived from a simple gametheoretic model of demand and supply in the market for force. We find that higher GDP and diamond deposits in a country increase the probability that mercenaries fight in an internal war. Military interventions also increase the risk of mercenary involvement, with the exception of UN interventions.