Security Assistance and Respect for Human Rights in Developing Militaries

• In Event: Paramilitaries, Praetorians, Police: Designing & Deploying State Security Forces

Abstract

How does international security assistance affect developing militaries’ respect for human rights? On the one hand, great powers typically offer security assistance (i.e., arms, money, and training) where they have strategic interests, which may mean turning a blind eye to abuses. On the other hand, liberal democratic assistance providers frequently worry about how recipient militaries behave at home. Any U.S. efforts to build partner military capacity, for example, must now by law include training on respect for human rights. Most scholarly work on security assistance is pessimistic, pointing to a seemingly poor empirical record. In this paper, I hypothesize that even if assistance providers successfully impart liberal norms, we may not see improvements at the country level if political leaders respond to increased norm-abiding behavior in the military by shifting repression tasks to parallel security forces. Leaders may choose this substitutionary strategy both to avoid jeopardizing assistance resource flows, which are often conditional on unit-level behavior, and because they become less able to coopt their own militaries. I test these propositions using novel data on U.S. security assistance and human rights violations in Africa from 1999-2017 that disaggregates the military from other elements of the security forces. Preliminary findings suggest that militaries receiving U.S. security assistance become less likely to abuse human rights over time. However, country-level human rights records often do not improve because leaders substitute alternative instruments for repression.

Author

• Renanah Miles Joyce, Columbia University