The Geo-Politics of Foreign Aid and Transnational Terrorism

This paper reviews some findings by Azam and Thelen (2008, 2010, 2012) that illustrate how foreign aid is used by rich countries to purchase the services of recipient governments with a view to protect or promote their economic and political interests. In particular, these findings show that foreign aid is effective at controlling the number of transnational terrorist attacks coming from the recipient countries, while it is not so regarding the number of attacks in the host countries. In contrast, they show that military intervention, as captured by the presence of US soldiers on the ground is counter-productive, as it increases the number of terrorist attacks both by source country and by host country.