Research Overview

My dissertation research examines the relationship between violence committed by government forces against civilians in developing countries and the composition of western donors' foreign aid to associated regimes. These donors have committed to withholding aid that would benefit exceptionally violent regimes, but face a dilemma when choosing whether to withhold aid and what types of aid to withhold. Foreign aid is not typically intended to benefit or further empower elites. Rather, aid is intended to provide economic, social, and political benefits to non-elites, who are often also the targets of violence. However, recipient governments and elites can siphon off aid and use the aid to increase their capacity for violence and to strengthen their control over dissident groups.

Donors that choose to respond to violence by altering their foreign aid have to navigate this dilemma. My argument, in brief, is that donors respond to violence primarily by increasing aid to projects that would improve government-societal relations and that donors shift to withholding aid that would benefit leaders and elites only when the probability of successful reform is low or the cost of reform is exceptionally high.

I examine these relationships between 2003 and 2018 using the full set of OECD donor countries and all recipient countries with sufficient data (a few small island countries, North Korea, and South Sudan had insufficient data for the analyses).

I then turn to the changing geopolitical landscape in which China has become a prominent provider of foreign development finance without human rights or governance conditions attached to its funding. I analyze how the act of signing a BRI agreement affects western donors' response to human rights violations, finding that donors double down on supporting governance sector projects after a recipient signs a BRI. This is a significant departure from Cold War dynamics, in which Western donors often abandoned their pressures to improve human rights in the face of increased Soviet activities in a country.

Associated Projects

Rather than presenting the dissertation as a single massive project, I break my dissertation project down here into a series of three associated projects:

1. The first project describes the data preparation process that went into the dissertation.
2. The second project covers the first half of the dissertation. In it, I use Tobit models and OLS robustness checks to examine the relationship between state violence and two types of foreign aid. In doing so, I demonstrate how donors are using foreign aid to address recipient government violence. I then examine whether and how political, economic, and security factors moderate these relationships by including interaction terms and examining the marginal effects.
3. The third project covers the second half of the dissertation and is summarized in "The effect of Belt and Road Initiative agreements on western foreign aid" project.