Aid Imperium

Regilme's book investigates the puzzle of how US foreign aid impacts the state of human rights in Southeast Asian recipient countries. He specifically explores and explains the correlation between US aid and physical integrity rights (such as extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture) in the Philippines and Thailand during the 1990s and the post-9/11 war on terror operations. The book is organized in three parts—the first two chapters contextualize the literature on human rights and foreign aid and set out Regilme's investigative puzzle and empirical methodology; chapters 3 to 7 discuss the ebb and flow of human rights protection and violations in the Philippines and Thailand respectively vis-à-vis the change in Philippine and Thai administrations and their intricate relationships with the US foreign policy and foreign aid agendas; and the concluding chapter summarizes the book and posits that the Philippine and Thai experiences may be more generalizable to the rest of the Global South.The topic and Regilme's expository finesse have garnered his book multiple commendatory blurbs and substantive reviews as well as a 2023 paperback edition. One can understand the warm reception of Regilme's book. Borne out of personal experience as “a third-generation family member involved in the military . . . working as a civilian analyst for a top government intelligence agency in the Philippines” (13), Regilme's work is comprehensively researched and meticulously detailed. His central thesis contends that the then-incumbent administrations of the Philippines and Thailand were not passive US aid recipients. Instead, they exercised political agency to strategically align some of their agendas with those of the United States, thereby enabling the pursuit of national interests while strengthening their governance structures. Consequently, his thesis also pointedly seeks to debunk the two core opposing perceptions regarding foreign aid—the “Western-centric” view that foreign aid from the Global North always benefits the Global South recipients and, conversely, the “Eastern-centric” criticism that Global North foreign aid is an imperialistic intervention upon the Global South (15).While this book offers something for all its readers—one assumes they include scholars researching on the Global South, Southeast Asia, human rights, governance, and political science—what is perhaps most interesting and useful for me coming from a Southeast Asia, human rights, and international law background is how Regilme systematically and compellingly explains the political-strategic alignment between aid donor and recipient that has often been suggested but never proven.For the US-Philippine and US-Thai foreign aid and human rights nexus, such strategic interest alignment has evinced two pathways. On one hand, the pro-democracy and pro–human rights policy preferences shared by the US-Philippine and US-Thai administrations in the 1990s improved the human rights situations in the Philippines and Thailand, respectively. Notably, the Clinton administration's human rights and democracy conditionalities in its foreign aid aligned with the Philippine and Thai governments’ own national agendas focusing on socioeconomic and development rights. It is, furthermore, interesting that the Philippine and Thai governments’ outward support for human rights in turn boosted their domestic legitimacy. Such strong domestic support meant that the Philippine and Thai governments did not feel the need to resort to forceful or repressive measures to deal with their political opponents’ verbal criticisms.On the other hand, the subsequent post-9/11 war on terror advocated by the Bush administration demonstrated how the Al Qaeda terror threat to the United States was linked (by the Philippine and Thai governments) to Islamic fundamentalist armed groups causing insurgencies in Mindanao in the Philippines and southern Thailand, respectively. This strategic alignment enabled the then-incumbent Philippine and Thai administrations to receive US counterterror assistance to suppress the militias that constantly threatened to destabilize their regimes. This, in turn, led to an increase in state violence and disproportionately repressive tactics against an expanded range of political opponents that even included unarmed opposition members and civil society activists.In concluding his thesis on strategic interest alignment, Regilme reiterates the importance of the recipient state's political agency: that domestic conditions influence how it utilizes foreign aid to propel its own national agendas, especially in the upholding or abuse of physical integrity rights against armed and unarmed political opponents. To properly respect human rights, Regilme advises that donor governments should only provide foreign aid to recipient governments that enjoy strong domestic legitimacy and that also prioritize the human rights of their citizens (this could be evidenced by state institutions such as independent courts and well-trained military and police officers). Otherwise, a culture of impunity and gross abuses of physical integrity rights might arise.Regilme's book offers an interesting and illuminating read. While it arguably does not fully supply a generalizable theory to the wider Global South regarding US aid and human rights, it does proffer useful concepts to begin thinking more deeply and more diversely about the Global North–Global South foreign aid and human rights relationship. Last, one drawback—stylistic rather than substantive—is that every chapter contains considerable repetition of the core thesis using a slightly different selection of the thesis's component parts and terminology. This frequent repetition with varying modifications interrupted the flow of the book, and as reading progressed I found myself having to reread certain chapters to fully understand the content and claims in light of the core thesis set out in the first two chapters. That said, this repetition would likely not pose a problem for readers who dip into a discrete chapter to learn more about a certain period of US-Philippine or US-Thailand relations, as they can easily match the specific thesis articulated in that chapter to the corresponding content of interest

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