Author: Charlie Carter · Working paper; undated
The United Nations has not agreed on a single comprehensive definition of terrorism despite decades of debate, and existing accounts generally attribute this stalemate to either cynical posturing or genuine contestation over meaning. Yet we still lack broad, text‑sensitive evidence showing how states actually use the term and which mechanisms, particularly those concerning material and strategic factors, structure variation in rhetoric across time and place. I assemble every identifiable English‑language use of “terrorism” in United Nations General Debate speeches from 1947–2022 (20,109 instances) and extend conText embedding regression with multiple imputation, fixed‑effect removal in embedding space, and projection onto three spatial dimensions that capture states positions on salient issues in the international politics of terrorism—dimensions pertaining to terrorism’s ‘Causes’, ‘Responses’, and ‘Perpetrators’. Between countries, state attributes and politico‑geographic regions strongly predict terrorism rhetoric; within countries, changes explain little movement, with the operation of a legislature the only robust signal in baseline models, and with higher democracy associated with movement toward terrorism rhetoric invoking “root causes” and state violence, and higher domestic terrorism associated with movement toward state perpetrators. These patterns imply that international rhetoric on terrorism is highly structured between countries but its evolution within countries finds limited explanations in state-level covariates. The findings refine debates over ambiguity versus contestation in the international politics of terrorism and provide an adaptable measurement framework for inference on meaning in large political text corpora.
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Author: Charlie Carter · Working paper; undated
Can foreign aid shape how states publicly frame terrorism? Foreign aid is a well-established instrument of statecraft, and growing evidence ties material assistance to changes in recipients’ public positions. Yet recent public criticism casts doubt on whether foreign aid advances donors’ counterterrorism interests, and we know little about whether conflict aid shapes how recipient governments frame terrorism in multilateral politics. I measure states’ terrorism rhetoric in the United Nations General Assembly from 1990 to 2012 by combining transformer-based embeddings of the local text around mentions of ‘terrorism’ and related terms with Bayesian dynamic latent-variable models, then estimate its co-evolution with conflict-aid networks using stochastic actor-oriented models. Joint tests support influence through aid ties across all three contested dimensions: recipients move toward donors’ positions on terrorism’s “root causes”, while larger inflows predict subsequent movement toward non-state-actor frames and more legalistic counterterrorism rhetoric, the latter largely irrespective of donor positions. The models support influence through established aid ties but not selection of partners based on rhetorical similarity. As major donors curtail conflict assistance, retrenchment may weaken one channel through which they shape multilateral counterterrorism debates.
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Author: Charlie Carter · Working paper; undated
Under what conditions could a state secure policy concessions on terrorism from another state in exchange for foreign aid? Foreign aid is utilised by donor states in ways that support and facilitate the realisation of their national interests and foreign policy goals, including those related to terrorism. For instance, aid provision can secure donor states from international terrorism and its second-order effects; their associated risks stand to be ameliorated by improvements to recipients’ counterterrorism efficacy which might, in turn, come about through aid’s capacity to facilitate improved domestic institutions, material wherewithal, and human capital in recipients. Beyond these instrumental aims, however, foreign aid may serve more expansive political ambitions, i.e., of donor-recipient political alignment, programmatic counterterrorism coherency, or specific changes to recipients’ terrorism policies. Political conditionalities are known to be attached to aid offers to motivate policy change in aid recipients. But it is unclear whether conditionalities with respect to terrorism would require too costly a concession to see such aid-for-policy deals made in practice, or how these would be evaluated against other aid offer features. In this paper, I conduct a preregistered conjoint experiment with a foreign policy elite and expert sample to identify how an aid offer’s features, including any political conditionalities, affect perceptions of its desirability relative to alternatives. The findings confirm that adding political conditionalities regarding terrorism policy to aid offers adversely affects aid offer desirability. However, political conditionality effects are substantively modest relative to other features and do not vary by the type of demand made, i.e., either changes to domestic legislation or changes to one’s public political positions on issues of terrorism. Overall, expert attitudes towards hypothetical aid offers suggest states’ terrorism rhetoric and/or domestic legislation could be shaped by foreign aid with political conditionalities.
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