Bachelorarbeit / Domestic Terrorism and its Impact on Development Aid. An Empirical Analysis

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Chapter 2 The Aid-Terrorism Nexus:
While the current academic literature discusses aid and terror through several approaches, the effects of terrorism on development aid have not been studied extensively. Since September 11, 2001, the available literature predominantly aims to answer the question of whether aid is a suitable anti-terrorist instrument rather than whether terror incidents affect aid assistance.
The existing literature on development aid as a counterterrorism instrument does not represent consensus thus far as to whether assistance reduces the appearance of terrorism. Particularly questionable is whether the basic wisdom, that terrorism arises in countries where poverty and a lack of education prevail, is true, as intellectuals and donor countries claim. Former U.S. president George W. Bush declared in 2002 on the International Conference on Financing for Development in Mexico, that the United States of America are "fight[ing] against poverty because hope is an answer to terror" (Bush 2002, paragraph 3). This argumentation seems to be widely accepted, as confirmed by further statements by many world leaders (Young and Findley 2011).
However, the scholarly community is skeptical on the issue of directly connecting poverty and education to terrorism. In their study, Krueger and Meleckova (2003) refute the direct linkage between a reduction in poverty and a decrease in terrorism on a cross-country level. According to their studies, even an increase in education has no conspicuous effect on the occurrence of terrorism. Additionally, current evidences reveal that terrorist leaders favor recruiting more highly educated individuals, especially when it comes to expanding cells within the country or abroad. In a more recent study that distinguishes between primary and university education, Brockhoff et al. (2014) find that higher rates of primary education in states with low human or economic rights actually lead to an increase in terrorism,

Fabian Rindfleisch was born in 1992 in Bensheim. He successfully completed his studies in economics with a focus on political economy at the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg in 2019 with the academic degree of Bachelor of Science.
During his studies he gained practical experience in political organizations and associations from which he derived his interest for the topic of this book.