This book examines the role played by human rights in foreign policy and the determinants of foreign aid, documenting patterns in the relationships between trade, domestic politics and aid.

Populations for the sins of their rulers.

How US foreign policy affects state repression

One major dilemma regarding US foreign policy is when and how the US should address human rights around the globe and what responsibility exists for the US to promote human rights in the countries that receive US aid. Does US policy for foreign assistance really address human rights or is it merely another instrument in the US foreign policy toolbox? This insightful book addresses several key themes and questions revolving around the complex nature of US foreign policy and human rights. It examines US foreign policy and human rights, as well as the evolution of US assistance, and includes empirical evidence and case studies of Plan Colombia, Turkey and the war on terror, India and Pakistan. It closes with a look at the future of foreign aid.

How do different types of human rights violations -- physical, political and economic -- shape the extent to which donors restrict foreign aid to recipient countries? Foreign aid restriction is seen as an enforcement tool for countries to behave in specific ways as dictated by bilateral and multilateral donors. Therefore, I broadly hypothesize that if a government or a regime is engaging in a certain type of violation, the international community has the potential to use foreign aid restriction to manipulate the actions of the aid recipient government. Specifically, I theorize that when certain types of human rights violations are increasing, then states will incur restrictions from either one type of donor group or both donor groups. I test this argument by running two-way fixed effect regressions of physical integrity rights repression, civil liberties repression, private liberties repression, and social and economic rights repression on bilateral and multilateral aid restrictions from 25 OECD development assistance committee Western Democracies on 147 lower-to-middle income countries from 2007 to 2017. I find support for my theories, as the models demonstrate, that physical integrity rights violations and political and civil rights violations have an effect on both bilateral and multilateral aid restriction, but only in lower-income countries. This signifies that the international community is more willing to punish lower-income countries when there is an increase in physical integrity rights and political and civil rights repression.

The United States is the world's leading foreign aid donor. Yet there has been little inquiry into how such assistance affects the politics and societies of recipient nations. Drawing on four decades of data on U.S. economic and military aid, Aiding and Abetting explores whether foreign aid does more harm than good. Jessica Trisko Darden challenges long-standing ideas about aid and its consequences, and highlights key patterns in the relationship between assistance and violence. She persuasively demonstrates that many of the foreign aid policy challenges the U.S. faced in the Cold War era, such as the propping up of dictators friendly to U.S. interests, remain salient today. Historical case studies of Indonesia, El Salvador, and South Korea illustrate how aid can uphold human freedoms or propagate human rights abuses. Aiding and Abetting encourages both advocates and critics of foreign assistance to reconsider its political and social consequences by focusing international aid efforts on the expansion of human freedom.

Political conditionality involves the linking of development aid to certain standards of observance of human rights and (liberal) democracy in recipient countries. Although this may seem to be an innocent policy, it has the potential to bring about a dramatic change in the basic principles of the international system: putting human rights first means putting respect for individuals and rights before respect for the sovereignty of states.