Date of Award

Spring 2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Program/Concentration

Graduate Program in International Studies

Committee Director

Richard Maass

Committee Member

Victoria Time

Committee Member

Jesse Richman

Abstract

US foreign policy toward Africa was minimal during the Cold War. US engagement in the continent was centered on spheres of influence politics, and compared to other regions in the global system, the continent was viewed as a backwater and neglected for several decades despite historical relations between the country and the continent. Scholars of political science, international studies, international relations, and history also relegated the study of US foreign policy toward Africa to a low-level status, instead prioritizing scholarship that focused on traditional security, particularly states in Western and Eastern Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). US foreign policy toward Africa changed abruptly after the 9/11 attacks, and the continent has since been incorporated into the US national security strategy. This renewed strategic interest in the continent has generated much attention in recent academic literature. This dissertation investigates how US foreign policy militarization has affected political stability in Africa. In particular, it illuminates the role of US foreign policy in contributing to political stability or instability in four African countries, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, and Uganda as well as the continent more broadly. The findings of this study, with their potential to significantly contribute to academic knowledge and guide future US policy toward the chosen countries, underscore the importance and timeliness of my research.

To understand the effect of US foreign policy militarization on the sampled countries, I used a mixed-method research design including panel data analysis of fifty-four African countries between 1995 and 2020 and in-depth case studies of the four countries listed above. The panel data analysis examines the relationship between explanatory variables including US military assistance, US troops deployed in African countries, US training of security forces, and intervention, and response variables, including terrorist attacks, civil wars, coups, and anti-government demonstrations, controlling for other variables such as total oil imports, GDP annual growth rate, GDP per capita, total population, maternal mortality, and regime type. The statistical analysis provided a range of statistically significant and insignificant results. Based on these empirical findings, the case studies focused on military aid and US training of security forces in the selected countries to determine their effect on the response variables. In contrast to previous literature that either blamed US foreign policy for causing instability in Africa or praising it for generating stability. The four case studies found that US foreign policy militarization in the selected countries can promote both stability and instability in several ways.

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DOI

10.25777/e14c-pf62

ISBN

9798384444220

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