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2016 | Buch

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The Securitization of Foreign Aid

herausgegeben von: Stephen Brown, Jörn Grävingholt

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Buchreihe : Rethinking International Development series

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" , Springer Professional "Technik"

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Über dieses Buch

Security concerns increasingly influence foreign aid: how Western countries give aid, to whom and why. With contributions from experts in the field, this book examines the impact of security issues on six of the world's largest aid donors, as well as on key crosscutting issues such as gender equality and climate change.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

1. Security, Development and the Securitization of Foreign Aid

Abstract

In recent years, the foreign aid industry has undergone an important shift. Whereas development workers until the late 1980s were mainly perceived — and often perceived themselves — as a rare species of internationalist idealists, the emergence of ‘failed and fragile states’, such as Afghanistan and Somalia, and ‘new wars’ in the Balkans and elsewhere contributed to the blurring of lines between the ‘neat’ world of development and the ‘murky’ field of national and international security. Although governments used development assistance throughout the Cold War to further their own interests in the context of superpower rivalry, aid workers generally agreed that these were regrettable circumstances. The end of the Cold War nurtured hopes that foreign aid would finally be free to focus solely on fighting poverty and inequality.

Stephen Brown, Jörn Grävingholt

2. The Militarization of United States Foreign Aid

Abstract

United States foreign aid has always been securitized, that is, explicitly used in support of geostrategic goals. However, the first decade of the 21st century saw the temporary return of a past trend, the militarization of United States (US) aid; where official development assistance (ODA) is used to serve battlefield goals. The Department of Defense (DOD) became both a major aid donor and an important implementing agent for ODA projects in the field. This chapter examines how and why US ODA has been consistently securitized and, on occasions, militarized, and assesses the consequences of both. The most recent militarization was due to the chronic bureaucratic weakness of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which meant it could not respond swiftly to the Bush administration’s demands that it play a prominent role in national security strategy after the 11 September 2001 attacks (9/11 attacks) on the US (Atwood et al. 2008). This incapacity of USAID led to the DOD proactively taking on these roles. When aid has been militarized to serve specific and time-bound US military goals — as it was in the Vietnam conflict and again in the recent fight against terrorism and insurgency — it has failed to meet instrumental military goals and ultimately served neither security nor development well.

Joanna Spear

3. The UK’s Approach to Linking Development and Security: Assessing Policy and Practice

Abstract

Security and development are increasingly recognized as intertwined. As a result, the notion that ‘there can be no development without security and no security without development’ has pervaded much of the United Kingdom’s development discourse since the mid- to late 1990s. The concept has been at the heart of the Department for International Development’s (DFID) engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq. The 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review stressed the importance of tackling conflict and instability and emphasized the centrality of development assistance in this effort. In addition, several of the countries selected for an increase in development aid from 2011 — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen — are sites of actual or potential conflict and security threats.

Leni Wild, Samir Elhawary

4. The Securitization of Aid: The Case of France

Abstract

France’s official development assistance (ODA) clearly has an important economic purpose, namely ensuring foreign markets for French companies — a tendency exacerbated under the ‘economic diplomacy’ promoted by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, appointed in 2012. It also has a security component that has grown over the years and aid oscillates between the two. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the use of French ODA for security purposes.

Philippe Marchesin

5. Peacebuilding and the ‘Human Securitization’ of Japan’s Foreign Aid

Abstract

This chapter analyses the evolution of Japan’s international security cooperation since the 1990s, based on the expansion of a security perspective within the official development assistance (ODA) programme and the parallel dispatch of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) overseas. It asks why the securitization of aid in Japan occurred the way it did and how security thinking has affected aid allocations. It assesses whether the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) have used this new security thinking to expand aid activities and secure budgetary resources.

Pedro Amakasu Raposo Carvalho, David M. Potter

6. From Ottawa to Kandahar and Back: The Securitization of Canadian Foreign Aid

Abstract

Since the mid-2000s, national and international security has played an increasingly important role in Canadian foreign aid, as it did in other donor countries examined in this volume. The increased focus on security-related issues privileged certain aid recipients and modified how the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the main purveyor of Canada’s official development assistance (ODA), operated in relation to other Canadian government bodies in those countries.¹ Nowhere was this more evident than in the Canadian government’s involvement in Afghanistan, but the trend has declined since Canada scaled back its involvement there.

Stephen Brown

7. The European Union’s Development Policy: A Balancing Act between ‘A More Comprehensive Approach’ and Creeping Securitization

Abstract

More than a decade after the release of the European Security Strategy (ESS) in 2003, its affirmation that development and security policy should work together is still one of its most discussed features. The vision of a more comprehensive — if not integrated — approach to security and development was underwritten by substantial changes to the EU’s external relations bureaucracy following the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. This ambition raises several important questions regarding the potential ‘securitization’ of EU development policy and foreign aid. Have security concerns had a growing influence on EU development policy and aid allocation? Do key concepts that have become prominent since the ESS was launched, such as ‘fragile states’ and ‘comprehensive approach’, reflect how European policymakers perceive the new reality of global development? Are resources that are supposed to support socioeconomic development being diverted for other purposes? This chapter addresses these questions by discussing the evolution of EU policies and aid practices at the interface of security and development since the turn of the 21st century. We are interested in how the EU manages tensions between security and development objectives, whether this can properly be understood as ‘securitization’ in the critical sense, or whether we should see it as a positive trend towards greater coherence.

Mark Furness, Stefan Gänzle

8. Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan: Securitizing Aid through Developmentalizing the Military

Abstract

Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) became to the development-security nexus what light bulbs were to electricity. Before Edison’s invention, many people would have heard of electricity, but few would have understood its meaning. Only by direct application of the abstract phenomenon to practice was the utility of electricity illuminated and explained. The notion of a direct relationship between security and development has been around for years (CBO 1994), culminating in the 2011 World Development Report entitled Conflict, Security and Development. But until the international engagement in Afghanistan in response to the 11 September 2001 attacks, and particularly NATO’s International Security Assistance Force operation, there were few tangible manifestations of the concept. PRTs were just that: a real-life application of the security-development nexus in the form of hybrid civil-military units deployed in a conflict zone. As such, they were a unique example of international and inter-agency efforts to implement a comprehensive approach to stabilization.

Jaroslav Petřík

9. Space for Gender Equality in the Security and Development Agenda? Insights from Three Donors

Abstract

In 2004, representatives of the 22 wealthiest foreign aid donor countries met under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and agreed to the above statement at a meeting that concretized the donor community’s views on the relationship between security and development. It is tempting to think that foreign aid’s recent alliance with security emerged primarily from renewed interest in national security in the wake of the September 2001 attacks on the United States. However, as the introductory chapter in this volume establishes, this assumption overlooks a lengthier dialogue between security and development communities that grew from the early-1990s turn towards human security as an organizing principle for some donors’ aid and their foreign policy objectives.

Liam Swiss

10. The Securitization of Climate Change: A Developmental Perspective

Abstract

Ever since climate change was discussed at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in 2007, the labelling of climate change as a security threat has proliferated. A growing body of literature champions this perspective (CNA 2007; Schwartz and Randall 2003). It stems largely from the United States, but more recently also from Europe and multilateral bodies such as the G7, and is heavily influenced by the politics and ‘speech acts’ of prominent leaders (see Romm 2011). Academic analysis of the ‘securitization’ of climate change has also emerged but falls short of moving beyond the realm of narrative. Nor has it considered the implications of a securitized climate change on foreign aid policies, programming priorities and fund allocation. This chapter seeks to fill this gap by analysing the example of the United Kingdom (UK). It demonstrates that climate change has become ‘securitized’ in some policy circles, if understood to mean the (re)framing of climate change from an environmental and/or developmental issue to a matter of security. However, full securitization has not occurred in the UK, if this is understood to mean treating climate change as an ‘existential threat’, widespread acceptance of this framing, and enacting ‘emergency action’ to deal with the threat (Buzan et al. 1997). Abrahamsen’s (2005: 59) conceptualization of securitization is particularly useful for understanding security framings of climate change: best understood as a gradual process through which political choices are made to conceptualize an issue in a particular way.

Katie Peters, Leigh Mayhew

11. The Securitization of Foreign Aid: Trends, Explanations and Prospects

Abstract

The terrorist attacks on the US in 2001 precipitated a new era of securitization of foreign aid. To differing extents, all of the country cases in this volume have increasingly linked their aid budgets with security concerns since then, albeit unevenly. Our goal has been to develop an enhanced understanding of this trend. However, as the contributors have individually and collectively demonstrated, nuance and context-specificity are vital. Even for a single donor government, generalizations can be difficult to make across institutions and programmes. Moreover, because of the variations between the cases, not all of our findings apply equally to all of them. Though we cannot offer facile assessments or easy answers, we hope to provide the reader with a broader perspective and heightened appreciation of the issues.

Stephen Brown, Jörn Grävingholt, Rosalind Raddatz

Backmatter

Titel: The Securitization of Foreign Aid
herausgegeben von: Stephen Brown
Jörn Grävingholt
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-56882-3
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57809-2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-56882-3