Aid Securitization and Violence Against Aid Workers

Recent decades have witnessed a shift in development practice whereby donors increasingly provide aid to support security-related programming in the Global South. Over this same period, there has also been an increase in violence committed against aid workers. This paper explores whether these two phenomena are correlated by analysing aggregate data on securitized foreign aid flows and data on violence against aid workers from the Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD) for the period 1997 to 2019 using cross-national multivariate analysis. Our findings reveal that, regardless of all other contextual and opportunistic control variables, there is a direct correlation between the increased inflow of securitized forms of aid to recipient countries and a sharp rise in violence against humanitarian workers in those countries. We hypothesise that this is because this form of aid alters the environment for aid work in three key ways: (1) it introduces aid to a changing and more complex political context; (2) it prompts increasingly risky aid worker behaviour; and (3) it provides opportunity to those groups and individuals who might attempt to benefit from violent acts against aid workers and organisations. As securitized aid continues to increase, attacks on aid workers will likely also rise, which should be a policy concern for humanitarian agencies.