Coercive and catalytic strategies for human rights promotion: State violence and foreign assistance

There is tremendous variation in whether and how donors respond to severe human rights violations using foreign aid. Donors that respond choose between two strategic options: coercion, which uses aid and the threat of withdrawal as material leverage to influence recipient leaders’ behaviors, and catalysis, which uses aid for developing political systems in the recipient country to limit state violence from within. Once a donor decides to respond, what determines its strategic choices? I argue that two factors help to answer this question: how exposed the donor’s interests are to problems stemming from human rights violations, and how costly each strategy would be to the donor. I use Tobit models to estimate how donor interests moderate the relationship between state violence and aid to economic and governance sectors from all OECD donors to all eligible recipients from 2003 to 2018. I find that donors typically prioritize catalytic strategies during this time period, but substitute coercive strategies when political liberalization would be difficult to achieve or undesirable from the donor’s perspective.