Terrorists or Troublemakers? Regime Survival and Inflating the al-Qaeda Threat

Literature discussing counterterrorism, and, more broadly, military assistance, argues that this aid is unconditionally helpful to recipient states. Yet, in this paper I contend that military assistance puts recipients in a dilemma. Whereas literature has established that donors are constrained in their ability to punish recipients who refuse to comply with their foreign policy objectives, I argue that recipients must strike a balance between complying with the donor's policy objectives and insulating themselves from domestic opposition. This paper focuses on how this dynamic is reflected in the recipient's willingness to employ public diplomacy to attract counterterrorism assistance. I argue that while public diplomacy can signal compliance with international donor objectives, it can also signal to domestic audiences that the incumbent may be weak and not responsive to its constituents. Through a mixed-methods research design that includes quantitative and qualitative analyses of Arabic and English language data from the Yemeni Arab Republic, I find some support for the argument that recipients are limited in their willingness to attract military assistance through public diplomacy by the activity of domestic opposition groups. Greater attention to the recipients' domestic level calculations and dilemmas may thus be warranted in the foreign aid literature.Master of Art