Chapter 10 analyses the Marxist development model favoured by Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos until about 1990. The chapter examines collective agriculture and assesses the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.

In this chapter, we outline how foreign aid and migration management practices impact governance. To do so, we set out to define a new category of aid – migration management aid – and estimate its size, distribution, and impact. We begin by taking a global picture – examining the trends, challenges, and opportunities that migration management aid presents in the twenty-first century – and then narrow our analysis to the EUTF and recipient countries in Africa. We identify three pathways for how migration management aid impacts authoritarianism and repression and explain how we explore these pathways through four case studies: Kenya, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Finally, we preview the lessons that can be learned if policymakers continue to intertwine aid and migration management.

Chapter 9 revisits our central contributions and considers the scope conditions of our argument. While the underlying governance conditions of a recipient state matter for the impact of migration management aid, we argue that it is migration management aid itself, rather than the regime type of recipient states, that carries the risk of increased repression or worsening authoritarian practices. We argue that reform of migration management aid is possible but that it requires decoupling its focus on building the migration state capacity of recipient countries from more “traditional” development or humanitarian aid, and that it must be accompanied by stronger accountability measures. Finally, we consider the impacts of continuing migration management aid not only for recipient countries, but also for donor countries, particularly those in Europe. The EU’s willingness to forego normal procedures to quickly implement the EUTF has not only undermined its commitment to democracy but has also yielded ground to the political maneuvering of far-right parties, spelling disaster for its own citizens as well as noncitizens within and beyond its borders.

Chapter 5 explores how migration management aid impacts a democratic state like Kenya, in the context of its colonial legacy and contentious regional politics. While there have been two significant revisions of the Refugee Act (2006/2021), Kenyan refugee policy relies on a compromise: the government agreed to host thousands of refugees in camps in exchange for billions in aid and a shirking of responsibility for managing the camps. Within this context, the EUTF is the latest package of funding in which Europeans condition aid on reforms by the Kenyan government. The chapter traces the long history of migration and international meddling in Kenya from formal colonialism to independence, examining the role of migration aid in the de facto encampment policy and in the 2006 and 2021 reforms. Through various interventions supported by the EUTF, Kenyan elites gained important political and financial capital, while pushing unpopular migration policies. Despite some democratic progress, we document specific projects related to counterterrorism and peacebuilding that securitized migration in Kenya, justifying more repression and restrictive policies (pathways I, II, III).

Chapter 8 examines Sudan, which was engulfed in civil war at the time of writing. Sudan’s current and previous conflicts stem in part from British and Egyptian colonial policies that promoted competing Arab versus African identities within the country, and after independence the country fought two civil wars that stemmed from entrenched racial divisions. In 2014, Sudan became a key player in the EU’s externalization of migration control via the Khartoum Process, and then President Omar al-Bashir selected the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as the central security force responsible for patrolling borders and building the enforcement capacity of the Sudanese state. Beginning in 2016, the EUTF allocated more than €200 million to Sudan, in addition to regional funding, to draft national legislation on migration management and human trafficking, to manage “return and reintegration” programs, and to further build the state’s capacity to address irregular migration. Sudan represents an extreme cautionary tale when it comes to migration management aid – EU funds increased the state’s capacity for repression (pathway I) – both toward migrants and its own citizens.

Chapter 7 explores Egypt, a consolidated autocracy. Historically colonized by the French and British, Egypt also received substantial financial support from the United States. Egypt was initially less involved with Europe’s external migration approach throughout the 1990s and 2000s in comparison to neighboring countries, but in 2017 the EU and Egypt signed an agreement under the EUTF worth €60 million. The funding was divided among seven projects, ranging from institutional capacity building to job generation and entrepreneurship. The majority of EUTF funding went toward infrastructure improvement in line with the current President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s domestic priorities. In this way, migration management aid reinforced Egypt’s authoritarian rule through substitution (pathway II) and by channeling funding through patronage networks (pathway III). The EUTF’s predominant spending on local infrastructure projects tied beneficiaries to government networks, and also allowed the government to redirect its funding toward mega infrastructure projects built through military contracts, thereby further capacitating the regime’s repressive apparatus.

In this chapter, we define what migration management aid is and is not. We argue that migration management aid is a specialized kind of foreign aid because it aims to transform domestic migration institutions of recipient states, advocates for restrictive migration policies, and is ideologically motivated by the “root causes” of migration. The chapter also describes a brief history of foreign aid and migration, connecting the history of colonialism, imperialism, development, and migration controls.

Chapter 6 examines migration management aid in Ethiopia – a semi-democracy. Ethiopia’s history of foreign aid and migration is intertwined with intra-regional conflicts, the politicization of famine, and forced resettlement in service of centralizing control and statebuilding. The EU and its member states built on shifting alliances throughout the 1990s and 2000s to become the largest humanitarian and development donors in Ethiopia, all while pushing European interests in the region and overlooking the government’s human rights record. The EUTF grants fit within this pattern of conditional aid in which the EU dangled the carrot of €281 million, in exchange for ambitious promises to reform refugee protection. By the end of 2023, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, had fought a devastating war in the Tigray region, relocated refugee camps, blocked aid to displaced people in Tigray, and redirected economic investments toward his allies. In the case of Ethiopia, migration management aid was used to tie domestic actors to central authorities in the refugee agency (pathway III), and ultimately to redirect aid away from Tigray (pathway II).

This chapter looks at the global picture of migration management and aid. We present the first-ever global estimate of migration management aid from 2002 to 2022. Based on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data on official development aid, we find that states of the Global North spent more than $73 billion on development aid to manage migration within developing countries, increasing from $718 million in 2002 to $8.71 billion in 2022. The United States and EU donated similar levels of migration management aid before 2015, but after 2016 the EU contributed more than 50 percent of all migration management aid every year – reflecting the importance of the EUTF. The top recipients of migration aid were Turkey, Iraq, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza, and Lebanon, which all represent key hosting states for refugees during this twenty-year period. This chapter shows how migration management aid has emerged as a global trend, despite variation in implementation, purpose, and region.

The concluding chapter synthesizes the book’s core findings and situates them within debates on foreign aid and economic development, the political economy of development in Africa, and China’s global economic strategy. Overall, the allocation of finance in all three country case studies, Ethiopia, Zambia, and Ghana, serves to secure political support and sustain incumbents in power. However, the strategies employed to achieve these goals differ based on each country’s unique political history and ethnic dynamics. In Ethiopia’s authoritarian context, the central challenge is maintaining loyalty and support from non-coethnics within the state. The EPRDF established ethnic federalism and justified centralized control through economic growth. In Zambia, the focus is on allocating finance to maintain the support of coethnics, prioritizing loyalty within the ethnic group. In Ghana, on the other hand, preserving power involves attracting swing voters through nonethnic coalitions, resulting in the distribution of finance aimed at broad-based support. The chapter concludes by drawing policy implications for financiers and governments, emphasizing designs that account for political incentives and strengthen transparency and oversight.

This chapter provides a broad overview of academic and policy research, which explores the efficacy of external assistance to states in diminishing the threat of terrorism. In general, external economic and military aid seeks to mitigate the threat and intensity of terrorism by enhancing recipient states’ coercive and non-coercive capacity, and by incentivizing them to meet donors’ demands. As this chapter shows, the effectiveness of aid depends on a number of factors, which includes the type, magnitude, conditions, and modality of aid as well as recipient states’ governance capacity, and the alignment of donor-recipient priorities. Moreover, aid can often result in negative unintended consequences such as human rights violations and repression by recipient states, or anti-American terrorism and discriminate violence by targeted groups. Yet, research suggests that aid can indeed reduce terrorism levels in some environments, especially if donors devise effective mechanisms to circumnavigate highlighted challenges.

High US inequality has supported having a strong-man government that appears to be above the law. Policies supprting increasing inequality and lack of support for a healthy early life will likely worsen our health. World Wars have worked in the past but may not be effective today. The challenge is creating awareness of the predicament to build people power

This chapter introduces and operationalizes the Economic Weight Index to measure China’s and the United States’s economic influence in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) from 2001 to 2020. The index, comprising trade, aid, investment, and loans data, reveals China’s dramatic rise in economic weight across all world regions, with LAC experiencing the most pronounced growth. Conversely, the US saw a significant contraction in its economic weight in LAC during this period. The analysis highlights regional variations, with South America experiencing the most substantial increase in Chinese economic weight and decrease in US influence. This quantitative approach provides a nuanced understanding of the shifting economic dynamics between China, the US, and LAC, laying the groundwork for exploring the causes and consequences of these changes.

This chapter describes the changes in beliefs about human rights that occurred in the 1970s and the new forms of enforcement that this encouraged and enabled. This included the use of economic pressure to enforce human rights. Beginning at this time, enforcing human rights through international interference came to be understood as not just permissible, but as the duty of the international community. In the context of these changing beliefs, Western governments began to use economic pressure to enforce human rights in the Global South. However, as this chapter demonstrates, these governments systematically enforced human rights in regions where enforcement was relatively cheap and easy. They did so in Latin America and Africa, while at the same time subsuming human rights to other strategic priorities in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. These enforcement policies clashed with understandings of self-determination held by actors throughout the Global South, and they were regarded as an illegitimate imposition. However, in the context of changing beliefs about human rights, appealing to the norm of non-interference was no longer effective at deterring Western interference.