ABSTRACT
What lights do International Relations (IR) theories shed on determining the nature of the politics of aid? The study of foreign aid as an avenue of foreign policy, albeit significant and not entirely new, has been less widely documented. Some of the most prominent and influential IR scholars have produced knowledge on the ways that states and other actors seek to shape aid politics and policies, adapting their explanations to different theoretical perspectives. However, the boundaries of what could be called the study of development cooperation from IR remain somewhat opaque, fragmented, and not clearly marked.
Drawing on an extensive literature review, this chapter aims to systematise and assess the IR knowledge on the politics of aid by depicting and classifying the main lines of research on the basis of the criteria of core concepts, research questions, levels and units of analysis, and foreign aid conceptualisations. According to the proposed roadmap, the debates around the nature of aid policy in IR reveal at least six contrasting groups of academic works, namely (i) realism and neo-realism; (ii) liberalism, neoliberal institutionalism, and the cosmopolitan perspective; (iii) constructivism; (iv) international political economy; (v) structuralism and critical theories; and (vi) foreign policy analysis. Each contains the same interest of explaining the politics of foreign aid, albeit using a variety of research questions and goals, levels and units of analysis, and concepts of aid.
