Stephen Brown and Jörn Grävingholt have enlisted highly competent contributors to put together The Securitization of Foreign Aid, which documents and assesses the widespread trend of greater dominance of security issues in the foreign aid policies of selected Western countries, the European Union, and Japan. Its thematic foci are also on Afghanistan, gender inequality, and climate change. Most constructively, as reflected in the thoughtful introduction by the coeditors, the volume takes a balanced view of the rationales and implications of securitization, avoiding the broad condemnations that have often been associated with the trend.

All of the chapters confront the challenges to international security that pervade nearly every aspect of international relations, but the raison d’etre of foreign assistance is, after all, to assist in enhancing “the well-being of people in other countries” (p. 114). The foreign assistance agencies of each of the individual nations covered in the volume (Canada, France, Japan, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States) are committed to that goal, but security risks deeply penetrate both the priorities and policy processes of development assistance programs for all of the countries. The chapters covering specific countries provide sophisticated analysis on how the priority of security concerns has altered the power balance among agencies. For example, Joanna Spear notes that the inability of the U.S. Agency for International Development to adapt quickly to the post-9/11 shift to security-driven foreign assistance prompted the Pentagon (and the State Department) to take on much greater roles. For the United States, this is “back to the future,” but for other countries, this is largely a novel phenomenon. The concern over “fragile or failed states” plays a greater role in both the discourse and the distribution of assistance to countries regarded as being in that status; all but Japan more explicitly link defense, development, and diplomacy in the policy processes defining the foci of foreign assistance.

The chapters take a nuanced approach regarding the implications of securitization. They highlight the expansion of national security concerns to encompass issues ranging from economic weakness to environmental vulnerability. Yet they also emphasize security as individual vulnerability to a host of risks other than terrorism or other forms physical attacks. The chapter on Japanese foreign aid by Pedro Amakasu Raposo Carvalho and David Potter does this most explicitly in tracing Japan’s post-9/11 foreign assistance doctrine to the United Nations definition of human security as “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear.” Jaroslav Petrik’s chapter on “Provincial Reconstruction Teams” in Afghanistan demonstrates how military personnel engaged in foreign assistance as part of the counterinsurgency strategy (harkening back to the Vietnam War strategy), but it is also a chilling account of how making foreign assistance part of the “political project” of Western-backed President Hamid Karzai “rendered development actors adjournments an ongoing conflict” (p. 179). This was reflected in the high number of casualties among nongovernmental organization workers, as well as among military personnel.

The chapter by Liam Swiss about the ways that gender inequality fits in with securitized foreign aid notes the displacement of the gender-equality focus as securitization became more prominent in the foreign assistance doctrines of Canada and the United States, but not for Sweden. Swiss documents that although security did become an increasing concern of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the focus on gender equality was preserved by invoking the importance of women’s participation in peace processes. The chapter includes intriguing interpretations of the reactions of civil society and the development agencies to the placement of gender issues within a securitization framework.

In the final thematic chapter, Katie Peters and Lee Mayhew’s assessment of the securitization of climate change argues that invoking security, as evidenced by their case study of the United Kingdom, was a tactic for promoting greater attention and more foreign-assistance resources to climate change initiatives. The success in folding in climate change concerns with both development and security concerns in British foreign assistance doctrines provoked its share of criticism, reflecting the broad ambivalence about securitization in general. Environmentalists wish to have more resources devoted to conservation and pollution control, but it is reasonable for them to fear that declining environmental conditions could spur efforts by security forces to gain greater control. In the late 1990s, the Russian government, invoking the potential environmental damage to the Caspian Sea, threatened to use military force to prevent other littoral Caspian Sea nations from drilling for offshore oil. Although the Russian government later changed its position upon reaching a coproduction agreement with Kazakhstan, the point remains that securitizing the environment can strengthen the hand of security forces.

This is a very solid and insightful collection, though limited in the range of donor countries examined. It is rare to find a volume with a balanced treatment of both doctrines and the policy processes to execute those doctrines. One would like to see how the doctrines and institutional arrangements of these “Western countries” compare to those of China and Russia. They each have security concerns, and yet these concerns seem to play a very small role in their foreign assistance. At least until the invasion of Ukraine, the bulk of Russia’s modest bilateral aid went into international organizations, such as the United Nations agencies and the World Bank, in order to enhance its soft power; security-related aid was targeted for Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan where Russia maintains bases, through extremely modest means such as debt forgiveness and disaster relief. In 2012, the development assistance effort was placed under the Ministry of Finance. For China, foreign assistance has an overwhelmingly economic motive. Whereas the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-ordination and Development provide aid that is largely untied (i.e., donor governments cannot require project or program inputs to be purchased from the donor country), the Chinese aid approach—“foreign aid and government-sponsored investment activities,” or FAGIA (see Charles Wolf, Jr., Xiao Wang, and Eric Warner, China’s Foreign Aid and Government-Sponsored Investment Activities, 2013)—is an amalgam of foreign assistance and partially concessional investment, explicitly tied to Chinese companies and products, and is unabashedly driven by commercial objectives rather than security. Perhaps a broader comparison could be Brown and Grävingholt’s next project.