The Co-Evolution of Conflict Aid and Terrorism Rhetoric

Abstract

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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