Foreign aid donors, domestic actors, and human rights violations: the politics and diplomacy of opposing Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act

How should aid donors respond to human rights violations in ‘recipient’ countries? Much of the literature on this topic focuses on whether donors use aid conditionality rather than the effectiveness of different donor responses in preventing rights abuses. This article argues that to better understand the effectiveness of conditionality, and donor responses to rights violations more generally, it is necessary to consider the role of domestic actors and processes in recipient and donor countries. Drawing on the concept of ‘two-level games’, it develops a framework for donor responses to rights abuses that incorporates international- and domestic-level processes. This article examines these dynamics with a case study of donor responses to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill/Act in Uganda between 2009 and 2014. The analysis shows how different donor responses impacted the struggle against the repressive legislation—positively and negatively—through their effects on domestic actors. More broadly, the article shows that engaging with domestic actors and processes can shed light on how aid donors can most effectively respond to human rights violations in different political contexts.