Haley J. Swedlund

I am an Assistant Professor at the Centre for International Conflict Analysis and Management (CICAM) at the Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. I am also a visiting scholar at the The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University.

My research is situated at the intersection of international political economy, development and conflict studies. I am currently finalizing a large, cross-national research project on foreign aid diplomacy and donor-government relations. Through extensive fieldwork and surveys of development practitioners, I investigate how donor agencies and recipient governments negotiate the delivery of foreign aid. In a subsequent project, which is already in preparation, I theorize the logic of international engagement with transitional governments following social or political upheaval.

My book, The Development Dance: How Donors and Recipients Negotiate the Delivery of Foreign Aid, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press. In the book, I point to a fundamental problem in foreign aid: the delivery of development aid is based on negotiated compromises between donor agencies and recipient governments that are rarely politically sustainable. The book explains how apparent fads and fashions in development aid are in reality attempts to overcome particular types of commitment problems and why political compromises between international donors and recipient governments remain so vulnerable to changing circumstances.

I have field experience in Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana and Burkina Faso.