Per una (nuova) storia politica degli aiuti internazionali

Abstract

For decades International Relations have seen an uninterrupted increase in the weight of aid policies in defining the number and quality of bilateral and multilateral relations between sovereign States, increasingly replacing the traditional instruments of war and trade. Although aid is an ever-increasing component of States’ foreign policies and conditions not only their reciprocal relations but the entire International System, it is struggling to establish itself as an object of historical and political study in its own right. The conceptual definition of aid, which has remained rather vague, charged with a prescriptive and a-political moralising scope, has suffered.The article is dedicated to a (re)-operationalization of the concept of State Aid in the international dimension so as to make it a useful practical tool for historical- political research on the subject. This leads to the definition of a new concept of International Aid Public Policy (IAPP), which goes beyond the traditional concept of Foreign Policy to support a History of International Relations and Institutions that includes the analysis of aid policies between sovereign states, both outgoing (if donors) and incoming (if recipients).