Renanah Miles Joyce

Book Project

Exporting Might and Right: Security Assistance and Liberal International Order

My book project examines the growth of security assistance as a tool of influence. The United States and its allies, like all major powers, use security assistance in the form of military training and advising to influence recipient militaries, seeking to create like-minded partners who share the provider’s interests and values. Social strategies of influence that draw on socialization-based processes thus serve as a soft power engine of international order. For liberal powers, goals of influence include, among other things, the recipient military’s compliance with liberal norms such as respect for human rights and civilian control of the military, and policy alignment with the provider against its rivals. Yet norm-abiding behavior and alignment often do not follow from liberal security assistance. The book asks: when do social strategies of influence succeed or fail, and why, even when they fail, do providers persist in using them?

I demonstrate that social strategies can be effective at the individual and organizational levels, yet still fail to produce durable shifts in behavior or policy. I begin by examining the conditions for influencing partner forces through military training and advising, which requires sustained interaction over time. To evaluate these conditions, I draw on over 100 elite interviews with government and military officials and other novel evidence including a representative survey of the Liberian military. My findings show that while training and advising can have lasting impacts on partner militaries—fostering ties between officers and influencing organizational practices—they often do not translate into sustained influence over higher-level outcomes. This apparent success at one level, coupled with the appeal of influence at low cost, entices policymakers to believe in the promise of success at the policy level and persist in using these strategies.

The book then identifies three factors that, when present individually or jointly, explain why even “successful” social strategies of influence can fail to produce policy shifts: conflicting political incentives of local elites, competition with autocratic providers, and contradictions among the liberal norms that the United States exports. First, to show that the effects of military training and advising are mediated by domestic political incentives, I employ cross-national evidence on global security assistance and outcomes including human rights abuses and military intervention in politics. Second, to examine the effects of competition with autocratic providers, I use archival data on the Tanzanian military, which Canada and China both attempted to train in the 1960s (China prevailed). Third, contradictions between the norms of respect for human rights and civilian control of the military weaken their influence on military decision-making, a problem that I explore using experimental evidence from Liberia. Finally, I examine two cases where training and advising contributed to the desired policy outcomes, demonstrating that policy alignment depended on a permissive political environment and the absence of the factors that contribute to influence loss: NATO expansion in Poland and post-war army building in Liberia.

The book thus illuminates a set of state strategies often overlooked in security assistance scholarship, which focuses on material strategies aimed at structuring incentives rather than transforming preferences. The book also has implications for policy, suggesting that liberal powers should rethink their approach to influencing other militaries, particularly when it comes to exporting liberal norms and securing policy alignment.

The Political Economy of Power Projection

In another line of research, I study the political economy of power projection. In an article published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Brian Blankenship and I introduce a dataset of global US defense spending and demonstrate how the United States uses procurement to buy access, pacify insurgencies, and promote development in strategically important countries. We build on this research in a second article published in Security Studies that examines variation in the material costs of foreign military basing. The paper identifies mechanisms by which third-party competition can shape the price of access and uses new data on US compensation and basing to show that Chinese economic incentives systematically escalate the costs that the United States pays to maintain bases in host countries in Africa. 

We are building on this research in a coauthored book project that uses the procurement data to examine bargaining dynamics between states seeking to deploy forces and states that share use of their territory. We will extend our empirical analyses to the Middle East and Asia, leveraging automated content analysis of the contract records to map global US military presence. The project will explore what it costs states to acquire access, the sources of bargaining leverage, and the effects of access on host societies. Another freestanding project will examine how US and Chinese military and economic engagement strategies affect public and elite perceptions of these countries and support for hosting their military forces.