Aid imperium: United States foreign policy and human rights in post-Cold War southeast Asia

Abstract

In recent decades, scholars from various disciplines have begun to pay considerable attention to the effects of foreign aid on human rights. In this highly engaging book, Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr makes an important contribution to this research, by examining the relationship between US foreign assistance and human rights––specifically physical integrity rights––in the Philippines and Thailand in the post-Cold War period. Regilme's approach differs from much of the existing literature in two ways. First, it emphasizes the wider political and ideational aspects of aid rather than treating it as just a material resource. This is done by focusing on the notion of foreign strategic support (rather than foreign aid), which ‘constitutes all forms of US foreign military and economic disbursements and [emphasis in original] the strategic political discourses and diplomacy that underpin them’ (p. 3). Second, it avoids treating states in the global South as passive recipients of aid, and instead highlights the agency of these governments and how political outcomes result from the interactions between donor and recipient governments. The book, therefore, contributes to a growing literature that emphasizes the agency of states receiving aid and the politics of donor–recipient interactions. The book is organized into three parts. The first provides the background and the theoretical framework. In moving beyond the simplistic arguments that often dominate the literature on aid and human rights, Regilme's approach highlights the complexity of the relationship between foreign strategic support and human rights. Drawing on interest convergence theory, he argues that the interaction of ideational factors and the strategic considerations of donor and recipient governments influences how foreign strategic support is used in recipient countries. The framework focuses on three explanatory variables in particular: interest convergence of donor and recipient governments (which may occur around a broader set of security issues or a narrower militaristic agenda); foreign strategic support; and the domestic legitimacy of the recipient government (p. 25). Regilme argues that the interaction of these factors shapes the types and magnitude of human rights violations. The second part of the book consists of the five case-studies of US foreign strategic support to the Philippines and Thailand. The first three focus on distinct periods of human rights outcomes in the Philippines––the pre-9/11 period (1992–2000), after 9/11 (2001–2009), and the period following the ‘war on terror’ (2010–16). The first and last periods are associated with fewer rights violations, while the second saw a sharp rise in rights violations. The second set of case-studies looks at US foreign strategic support to Thailand in the pre- and post-9/11 periods. The former witnessed the emergence of greater human rights protection, while during the latter the Thaksin Shinawatra administration used the US-led ‘war on terror’ to target domestic political dissidents, leading to increasing rights abuses. These case-studies provide detailed and engaging evidence on how the convergence of ideational and strategic interests between the US and the various governments in the Philippines and Thailand––partly the result of these governments' efforts to attract foreign strategic assistance––together with the domestic political context in the two countries shaped human rights outcomes. If the book has a shortcoming, it is perhaps the attempt to establish a broader causal framework linking foreign aid (or foreign strategic support) and human rights violations through empirical analysis––particularly due to the range of factors considered. For example, while domestic legitimacy is posited as a key explanatory variable, it is not entirely clear why the government of Thaksin Shinawatra is deemed to have weak legitimacy despite coming to power through a landslide election win, while the Thai governments in the 1990s are characterized as having strong legitimacy. Furthermore, two cases in which donor and recipient interests converge over narrow militaristic aims occur after 9/11. So the US-led ‘war on terror’ coincided with the rise to power of governments with weak domestic legitimacy in the Philippines and Thailand. Hence, it is unclear how human rights in the two countries would have been impacted had governments with strong legitimacy emerged during this period, or if governments with weak domestic legitimacy had come to power at a time outside the US-led ‘war on terror’. The book's strength, however, is in presenting an in-depth, empirically rich analysis of how US foreign assistance and the domestic political context in the Philippines and Thailand together shaped human rights outcomes. In doing so, it highlights the limitations of efforts to generate general causal explanations of the effect of foreign aid on human rights, and instead demonstrates the need to consider the interplay of international and domestic factors in specific political contexts. The book will be valuable to scholars of foreign policy, human rights and international development.

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