Ethiopia and the Politics of Foreign Aid During Conflict

Abstract

This study investigates the divergence between bilateral and multilateral donors' foreign aid allocation in response to conflict intensity in strategically important recipient states. Focusing in on Ethiopia from 2013 through 2024, a period encompassing three civil conflicts of varying international visibility and intensity, this thesis analyzes how bilateral aid from the U.S., U.K., and Germany, and multilateral humanitarian aid from the U.N. and EU DG ECHO responded to escalating violence. I argue that bilateral donors resolve the tension between maintaining geopolitical alliances and political accountability through composition shifts, maintaining total aid flows while reducing military and development aid, and surging humanitarian relief. Conversely, mandate-driven multilateral donors respond directly to objective human suffering. This thesis employs longitudinal descriptive analysis and visual inspection of time series figures to examine bilateral aid composition across sectors, and Pearson correlation coefficients to measure how closely humanitarian aid disbursements track conflict fatalities across donor types. The findings support the composition shift for two of the three bilateral donors, the United States and the United Kingdom, whereas Germany exhibited no shift, and from all donors, the U.N. demonstrated the strongest correlation with conflict fatalities. These findings mostly support the hypotheses and contribute to a broader understanding of how donor type shapes both the volume of aid during conflict and the mechanism through which aid responds.