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Home > Open Access Journals > JSS > Vol. 17 > No. 2 (2024)

 

Author Biography

Lt Col Randell Yi is a Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He served as an Air Advisor to Iraqi Air Force and Ministry of Defense senior leaders in 2017 and holds an MPhil in Military Strategy from the U.S. Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies.

LtCol Edward O’Connell, USMC, is a doctoral student at the University of Notre Dame. He is an Air Defense officer and an Operational Planner. He holds Masters degrees from the University of Maryland, Marine Corps Command and Staff College, and the Marine Corps School of Advanced Warfighting.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.17.2.2175

Subject Area Keywords

Corruption, Development and security, Foreign aid, Governance and rule of law, Security policy

Abstract

The article examine how materiel and non-materiel organizational capital, as conveyed by military aid, differ in their effects on recipient nations with respect to governance. The authors analyze the Varieties of Democracy (vDem) dataset’s Regime Corruption Index alongside Security Sector Assistance expenditures as reported by the US Aid to Security Sector Actors (USASSA) dataset. They find that non-materiel forms of investment toward building partner nation capacity create generally better governance outcomes than materiel ones that involve transfers of weapons systems or supplies. They further contend that investments toward social cohesion and norms transmission “build the capacity to have capacity built.” In other words, they work to mitigate the negative externalities associated with the transfer of technical skills and materiel aid on recipient nation governance. As such, this work suggests that investment in social capital is a decisive factor in determining success versus failure. This research calls attention to a common blind spot among policymakers and practitioners, which is the near complete omission of social capital as an explicit security cooperation design consideration.

Disclaimer

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Prof. Patricia Sullivan at UNC - Chapel Hill for providing early access to the US Security Sector Actors dataset and making this research possible.

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