Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Political Science
Since the end of the Cold War, the international community has dealt with problems of state fragility in the developing world, partly as their own "security" issue. Their approaches to address it have been varied, and more direct interventions such as external state-building has drawn more attention, but this dissertation focuses on a less "direct" form of assistance: foreign aid and its different modalities. Particularly, I theorize that general budget support (GBS), which is most fungible and gives the recipient the largest financial discretion, will have positive effects on the recipient state capacity when the latter also perceives terrorist threats on their own, because then donors can engage its local willingness to counter such threats by building institutional capacity.
I test the implications of my theoretical argument both quantitatively and qualitatively. In Chapter 3, I explore how OECD donors as a donor community and the major donors among them have allocated their aid, depending on terrorist threats posed to either or both of the international community and the recipient. Then, in Chapter 4, I examine at how foreign aid and terrorist threats interact in their effects on state capacity of recipient countries, using an annual dataset as well as one divided into five-year periods.
In order to examine the mechanisms specified in my theoretical argument, in Chapter 5 I conduct case studies with three countries in East Africa -- Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. There, I try to verify the following mechanisms: (1) does presence of domestic terrorist threats lead to willingness on the part of the government to build institutional capacity to counter these threats?; (2) when the government is willing to build its institutional capacity, does it face a problem of signaling -- communicating its intention behind its effort -- vis-a-vis its domestic audience?; and (3) is donor involvement in the form of GBS provision helpful in overcoming such signaling problem (open full item for complete abstract)
Committee: Christopher Gelpi (Committee Chair); Daniel Verdier (Committee Member); Alexander Thompson (Committee Member)
Subjects: International Relations; Political Science