Speaker
Description
Coercion is a central strategy for states in an increasingly competitive and hostile international environment, and there are several military means or tools they can use to coerce an opponent into submission, such as, air power, invasions and land grabs, or even nuclear threats. Military assistance, i.e. the training, equipping and advising of foreign state and non-state armed forces to enhance their capability to fight wars, is usually not understood as one of these tools. Instead, research on military assistance tends to focus on the utility of military assistance for the receiving actor, for example, if it contributes to peace, or if it increases the strength of armed forces in the receiving state. Despite the quite extensive use of military assistance in contemporary international relations, we know precariously little about the strategic utility of military assistance for the sponsor state. Do the strengthening of friendly foreign state and non-state armed forces contribute to the coercive power of the sponsor state? Is it a waste of resources? Or could it in fact, contribute to a higher level of threats against the sponsor state?
By understanding military assistance as a tool in the strategic toolbox, we can begin to tease out the strategic logic and scrutinize the utility of military assistance for increasing the coercive power as well as security of the sponsor state. In this paper, I will develop the logic of military assistance as a coercive tool and use a plausibility probe to study these dynamics through empirical case studies. In addition to the conceptual elaborations, the paper will demonstrate the general logic of military assistance as a coercive tool as well as the particular mechanisms of its individual subtypes in a number of short empirical case studies.
| What discipline or branch of humanities or social sciences do you identify yourself with? | War Studies |
|---|---|
| If you are submitting an Open Panel proposal, have you included all four abstracts in attachment? | No, I am submitting a Closed Panel abstract |
| Are you a PhD student or early-career researcher? | No |
