Abstract
What is the connection between international aid organizations (IAOs) and the transnationalization of capitalism? This article diverges from neo-Gramscian accounts of international organizations by focusing on the distinctive material and relational aspects of the practice in which IAOs engage: the solicitation and extension of gifts. This perspective opens the inquiry to insights from theories of gift exchange and virtue ethics, which allow further specification of IAOs as a means of what Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer call moral regulation, or the disciplining and conforming of recipients to the new transnational capitalist order. More specifically, this article argues that the extension and acceptance of the gifts of multilateral and non-governmental IAOs is a mechanism of consent to the capitalist order. That amounts to what neo-Gramscians call ethical hegemony because it allows donors to ethically judge recipients and compels recipients to accept responsibility for their own plight.
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