National Security
Data and research for tomorrow's global challenges
Overview
Amid a changing international order, AidData generates myth-busting evidence to inform national security policy. We conduct primary data collection operations where there are major evidentiary blind spots, using cutting-edge geospatial and satellite imagery analysis, surveys and snap polls of leaders in 149 countries, and employ other open-source methods.
For more than a decade, AidData has also served as an early warning system for shifts in Beijing's geoeconomic and geostrategic priorities. We've done so by monitoring China's vast overseas portfolio of loans and grants, including investments in high-income countries and sensitive sectors; maritime infrastructure; and critical minerals supply chains.
Our national security research activities are increasingly focused on the strategic risks and opportunities related to international migration; military and security assistance; sanctions and tools of economic statecraft; U.S. investments and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific; and the soft power influence of the U.S., China and Russia.
Priority Areas
China's global lending and grant-giving portfolio—including in high-income countries
Our data on cross-border aid and credit from Chinese entities is a go-to source for governments, international organizations, and the media
We have a team of more than 140 fact finders and financial analysts who meticulously map China's overseas loans and grants, following the flow of money in to sensitive sectors — such as microprocessing technology, robotics, defense production, quantum computing, and biotechnology—and identifying potential points of strategic leverage. We're also planning to launch a new effort to track the full range of China's military lending and grant-giving operations around the globe.
Beijing's massive lending and grant-giving portfolio remains shrouded in secrecy, with questions swirling about its true scale, purpose, and impact. Our recent report Chasing China provides a uniquely comprehensive and granular source of evidence: a dataset tracking 33,580 aid- and credit-financed projects from 1,193 Chinese state-owned entities worth $2.2 trillion across 217 countries from 2000 to 2023. It traces the circuitous routing of funds through offshore shell companies and international bank syndicates, while also revealing the ways in which Beijing uses the power of the purse to take possession of critical technology assets—such as the semiconductors that are used in fighter jets, submarines, precision-guided munitions, radar systems, and 6G telecom networks.
We also maintain a searchable online repository of unredacted contracts between 20 Chinese creditors and 155 borrowers from 60 developed and developing countries. AidData is able to make this large and rapidly expanding trove of transactional documentation—including loan agreements, debt restructuring agreements, debt cancellation agreements, mortgage agreements, escrow account agreements, deeds of covenant, deeds of security, share pledge agreements, and commodity offtake contracts, among other types of transactional documentation—accessible to the public because of its continued implementation of the Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF) methodology. Our analysis of the terms and conditions in these contracts has helped governments and multilateral institutions understand how China is seeking to gain a competitive advantage over its rivals. Recent publications include How China Lends, How China Lends 2.0, How China Collateralizes, Bargaining with Beijing, and Is Beijing a Predatory Lender?
china.aiddata.org
China's global investments in critical minerals
We're studying China's playbook for dominance of critical minerals and the implications for the U.S., its allies, and third-party countries
China is a major source of financing for projects around the globe that involve critical minerals. The building blocks of modern technology, these minerals are key for defense, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, and renewable energy technologies.
Our Power Playbook report helps policymakers understand how Beijing is using financial instruments to bankroll critical mineral operations in developing countries. We separate fact from fiction to decode China’s strategy and document how Beijing is leveraging a massive stockpile of foreign exchange reserves to expand its control over key segments of the global supply chain for critical minerals. We're also publishing in-depth mining site profiles to help policymakers gain greater insight into how these extraction and processing operations play out on the ground.
We began this work by systematically tracking China’s official sector financial commitments for copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium, and rare earth element extraction and processing operations across developing countries. We’re now expanding the scope parameters of our investigation to developed countries, all 32 critical minerals listed by the International Energy Agency, and a broader array of financial instruments (including equity investments and private sector commitments).
Maritime connectivity and security
We're tracing the impact of Chinese investments in ports, shipbuilding, containers, scanners, and related infrastructure
Based in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, home to the world’s largest naval base and the largest U.S. shipyard, AidData leans into its maritime connections through innovative work that includes data-driven reports and mapping to comprehensively identify China’s global portfolio of overseas ports and harbors and the potential for dual use. The depth and breadth of our data is unmatched.
We're studying U.S. and rival nation shipbuilding efforts; the security implications of China's stakes in shoreside infrastructure like cranes and customs scanners; and the key sea lanes for critical commodities and resources that might serve a military purpose or establish commercial dominance. Our latest publications include Harboring Global Ambitions, Anchoring Global Ambitions, and China’s Global Scanner Dissemination.
AidData will work closely with William & Mary’s new AUKUS Center of Excellence. The AUKUS trilateral security partnership is centered on nuclear-powered attack submarines, and the new Center will work with key stakeholders in Australia, the UK, and the U.S., including from the military, industry and academia.
Migration and security
We're creating a one-stop-shop to advance migration scholarship to inform policymaking
The number of people forced from their homes by conflict and disaster is at an all-time high. Driven by economic push-and-pull factors, this unprecedented global migration presents unique security challenges. But as global migration climbs, policy-relevant research on migration's causes and consequences has struggled to keep up.
AidData, in collaboration with Aptima and with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, is filling the gap with an online migration research platform that leverages advanced AI. Designed to centralize resources and facilitate collaboration, the platform's development is being informed by a survey of nearly 2,000 migration researchers worldwide.
Research on U.S. policy priorities—from reputational security to security assistance
We've partnered with the Gates Global Policy Center to inform bipartisan decision-making on U.S. security issues
We've worked to monitor the influence operations of Russia and China in critical regions—quantifying the Kremlin's influence on civic space, energy security and media resilience in 17 post-Soviet countries in Europe and Eurasia, and analyzing China's public diplomacy and media influence efforts in East and Southeast Asia. We've studied how in backsliding democracies, governments are emulating Chinese and Russian digital censorship tactics.
Our research helps informs U.S. strategy and foreign policy by showing how the U.S. can restructure its global development investments, strategic communications efforts, and sanctions and economic statecraft to compete more strategically in the global arena.
We've worked with the Gates Global Policy Center to conduct rigorous analysis that has informed three annual forums convening U.S. policymakers and national security officials across the partisan divide for closed-door discussion on U.S. strategy.
Predicting the likelihood of conflict deaths using neural networks
We developed a low-cost solution to forecast conflict fatalities from satellite imagery
Humanitarian aid organizations need better forecasts of conflict risks, so they can allocate resources effectively and know when it's safe to send in workers. AidData is working to improve how existing data can be used to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to make accurate predictions of the likelihood of conflict deaths at a given location.
Using Nigeria as a case study, AidData researchers developed an algorithm that used satellite imagery from the previous year to predict the risk of conflict fatalities for a given location in the following year, achieving ~80% accuracy.
Read the research: Spatiotemporal Prediction of Conflict Fatality Risk Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Satellite Imagery
Download the data: Nigeria Predicted Surface
Featured Reports
Research Team
For technical or research inquires, contact:
For partnership and media inquiries, contact:
Alex Wooley
Director of Partnerships and Communications
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