The Merits of Military Aid An Examination of the Interactions between US Military Aid and Terrorism in the East African Community

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, the United States has been increasingly involved in combatting terrorism across the globe. To combat terrorism, the United States has made billions of dollars in disbursements of both developmental and military aid to foreign states. Extant literature suggests that there is a strong interaction between, developmental aid and terrorist incidences, where increased levels of developmental aid disbursements, reduce the number of terrorism incidences. However, the potential relationship between military aid disbursements and the frequency of terrorism incidences is less understood. Therefore, this article seeks to further nuance our understanding of this potential relationship, by analyzing the potential impacts that United States military aid disbursement has had on the frequency of terrorist attacks in East African Community (EAC) member-states. During the twenty years between 1998 and 2018, the United States disbursed over one billion dollars of military aid to the East African Community member states. Members of this bloc including Kenya and Uganda have also become key partners in the United States in combatting terrorism in Africa. Moreover, this regional bloc has endured over 2,6000 terrorist attacks during the same twenty-year period. As such key insights into the relationship between US military aid disbursements and terrorist incidences can be gained by analyzing the available data about disbursements and terrorist incidences in the East African Community during this period. As such the EAC is an ideal unit of analysis to track this potential relationship because member states of this political union have a long-shared history and have seen different levels of terrorist events and US military aid disbursements during this period.