Material Influence and Terrorism Rhetoric: State Behaviour, Foreign Aid, and Strategic Position-Taking

This thesis examines how material incentives, particularly foreign aid, influence how states talk about terrorism in international politics. Through three interconnected studies using novel quantitative methods, I investigate the relationship between material, political, and strategic factors on rhetorical positions on terrorism that states adopt in the UNGA. The first study analyses how domestic political, economic, and security factors shape state rhetoric on terrorism. Using word embeddings and text analysis of UN speeches, I demonstrate how state-level characteristics predict different rhetorical approaches, establishing a baseline understanding of how material and strategic conditions influence terrorism rhetoric. The second study investigates whether foreign aid can influence recipient states' positions. Using longitudinal network models that track aid relationships and rhetorical positions over time, I show that recipients tend to align with donor positions, particularly regarding terrorism's "root causes." However, this influence is limited, suggesting that material incentives work differently across dimensions of the terrorism debate. The final study uses a conjoint experiment with policymakers and foreign policy elites to examine how they evaluate different types of aid conditionality. The results show that while unconditional aid is most preferred, aid conditioned on rhetorical or legislative changes is viewed almost as favourably. Moreover, the penalties to an aid offer's perceived attractiveness by conditionality over rhetoric and legislation are statistically indistinguishable. I conclude that rhetoric is not as "cheap" as theories of "cheap talk" would suggest. Together, these studies demonstrate that international debates over "terrorism" have a significant material, strategic component. More broadly, the findings contribute to our understanding of how states use material resources to shape international political discourse.