Dissertation Defense: Erin Lemons

Candidate: Erin Michelle Lemons

Major: Government

Advisor: Daniel Nexon, Ph.D.

Title: The Effect of Foreign Military Education Competition on Foreign Policy Influence in Postcolonial Africa

Foreign military education (FME) is education or training that a sponsoring state provides to military service members of a recipient state. Since World War II, most states in the international system participate in FME as recipients, sponsors, or both. While most scholars and practitioners believe that the main reason states sponsor FME is to gain foreign policy influence in recipient states, the ability of sponsors to achieve this goal is more assumed than interrogated. To move beyond anecdotal evidence, I construct new datasets of the FME African states received from World War II to 2022 as well as the personal FME experiences of African military leaders during the same time period. These datasets allow me to take competition within the FME domain into account. I analyze the data using a mix of social network analysis and quantitative models that I complement with case studies and interviews with sponsoring and recipient state government officials and military officers.

I find that even when aggressively controlling for current military and economic capabilities and diplomatic relationships, the personal FME experiences of a state’s leaders are a statistically significant determinant of a state’s foreign policy decisions: its UN General voting behavior and its likelihood to participate in and contribute to a sponsor-led military coalition. The results show that competition affects FME at every step of the process: (1) sponsoring and recipient states establish an FME relationship, (2) graduates from a sponsoring state’s FME program rise to positions of influence in the recipient state’s military and government, and (3) recipient state leaders’ personal FME experiences impact their state’s foreign policy decisions. This project highlights the importance of diplomacy and the extent to which it resides in the military domain. It emphasizes that the value of any instrument of foreign policy cannot be ascertained based on its employment by a single state in isolation from all others. Instead, the entire network of states that make use of the same practice sometimes amplifies and sometimes attenuates the benefits that any one state derives from it.