Abstract
I begin my book Development, Security, and Aid with a photo and anecdote about the long-term stability of ‘one-half of 1%’ as the US government’s budget allocation for foreign aid and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). So ostensibly routine had this outlay become that USAID emblazoned its public information center’s lobby in Washington, DC, with these words, which I encountered on three separate occasions while undertaking research that went into the book. Just a few months after the book was published in March 2013, I returned to Washington and stopped at USAID’s offices to carry out a preliminary interview with staff on the agency’s urban strategies in the developing world. Much to my surprise (and chagrin), the long-standing wall motif of one-half of 1% was gone, the entire lobby space now replaced by cubicles and several agency employees. This should not perhaps have been much of a surprise. Wholesale acceptance of USAID’s role as a frontline agent of US foreign policy, a sort of humanitarian force exercising ‘soft power’ and ‘smart power’ alongside, or (even better) prior to, the deployment of military ‘hard power’ resources, has meant a reinvigorated agency with a potentially larger claim to budgetary resources. With the ongoing adoption of whole-of-government strategies, the youthful enthusiasm of recently departed Administrator Dr Rajiv Shah, and the cultivation of closer ties with the Departments of State and Defense, as well as partnerships with several large nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), transnational corporations (TNCs), and private philanthropic foundations, policy makers and foreign policy strategists have made aid and development work of the sort USAID performs a fashionable accessory to armed intervention.
Yet as Lisa Bhungalia notes in her critique and comments on the book, a deeper and more fundamental link has always existed between USAID’s development and humanitarian programs and goals and the aggressive, often covert, forms of counterinsurgency (COIN) underwritten and undertaken as part of US military and foreign policy. Indeed, I have not covered in much depth the intricate and intimate overlaps between the economic, political, and emergency aid USAID provides, and the kinds of military assistance funded through a multitude of other official aid accounts, as lawmakers sought to explicitly separate such forms of assistance, in budget lines at least, in the original Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. USAID’s role in developing and executing COIN strategies remains a key point of contention for the agency, and for aid in general, in places such as Pakistan, particularly if whole-of-government approaches are to be taken seriously. Much more work needs to be done on this, especially looking at how USAID and other nonmilitary field staff are used in (potential) conflict zones, as well as how exactly USAID efforts contribute to COIN and covert operations. This may be difficult to uncover, but it is also vital for developing what Bhungalia identifies as ‘insight into how the “objects” of development negotiate, contest, and/or co-opt American aid interventions’, and for a more ‘nuanced analysis of how USAID programs and practices articulate in specific sites and contexts’. As historian Bradley Simpson (2008) has shown in his own exquisitely researched examination of American military and development assistance in 1960s Indonesia, development aid, military aid, and COIN were often indistinguishable in practice. In the context of Cold War relations with Indonesia, USAID, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, US-based capitalists, and a host of other official and private actors tacitly and even overtly supported the violent purge of Communists and ouster of Sukarno in favor of General Suharto’s New Order military dictatorship. Simpson (2008: 80) argues that aid directed, for example, to the training and support of domestic police forces in Indonesia as well as ‘civic action programs’ supporting military-led construction of rural infrastructure, ‘fudged the line between COIN and civic action’, with USAID and the CIA working closely to provide training. Such examples demonstrate clearly how the messy realities of American aid and, more particularly, USAID developed from and advanced both geopolitical and geoeconomic objectives and ideals while also reshaping the balance of political and economic forces and institutional actors in developing state structures, the US state, and the international system. While such on-the-ground historical detail from developing states is marshaled sparingly in my own book, I share Bhungalia’s hope that my take on USAID will provide the basis for such further detailed research on specific contexts and cases.
Likewise, Pablo Bose’s account of his own recent brush with USAID, tied to grants offered through the Feed the Future program, which I discuss in Chapter 5 of Development, Security, and Aid, demonstrates the continued evolution of the agency’s mandate and role in a competitive and dynamic approach to geostrategic positioning and action. This often places the agency at odds with would-be collaborators and reinforces that the objective of any particular aid program typically remains inextricably tied to American national interests, themselves complicated by the balance of class-relevant and political forces that constitute, enable, and institutionalize state action. But Bose also clearly and correctly identifies that programs like Feed the Future, fixated on metrics of development progress and a reporting regimen that often have precious little to do with ensuring qualitative improvement in the lives of aid’s objects, continue a long tradition of ‘interagency struggles over turf, profile and agenda setting that doom many a project to eventual failure and leave USAID focused on short term domestic political positioning at the expense of longer-term development goals’. The challenge he poses in his conclusion—namely, to ‘place the agency within the wider assemblage of the development industries that collectively articulate American “informal imperialism”’—becomes vital if we are to understand the possibilities and contradictions of the broader global aid system, itself increasingly structured around discourses of effectiveness and ‘country ownership’. In moving into a new phase of research on this question and interviewing a wide range of development professionals and practitioners from several different global development actors (including USAID), all working on development interventions in urban Indonesia, I saw these tensions between institutional and developmental objectives and between collaboration and competition. The development industry is crowded. Major players like USAID compete with other national agencies, NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, and other smaller scale development agencies for human capital, political leverage, and economic backing while simultaneously seeking new partnerships, all in a strategic context shaped strongly by geopolitical fears mixed with geoeconomic hopes (Sparke, 2007). More research, especially like that in the recent studies Bose highlights as well as detailed institutional ethnographies like those called for by Gillian Hart (2004), is required to identify where and how these tensions are articulated and to what ends, both for the institutions involved and for those meant to benefit from the work they do.
Bose also favorably compares my work to recent trends in post-developmentalism, which, he argues, fails to adequately move beyond deconstructing development interventions to account for the myriad ways in which seemingly monolithic actors in the global development industry articulate their goals with specific local and national contexts. Ed Carr’s critical but charitable analysis develops this point further, arguing that postdevelopment and critical development studies have become something of a ‘cul-de-sac’ and that ‘in many cases critical work in development studies has very little understanding of its object, and often fails to inform even the most basic processes in the world of policy and implementation’. My own analysis of USAID, Carr suggests, ambitiously and deftly interrogates precisely what critical development studies and postdevelopmentalism too often take for granted in the operations, structures, and contexts of agencies such as USAID. On the other hand, he notes the tensions and unevenness in how I examine the agency as I move, sometimes abruptly, between treating it as a unitary actor in broader state projects of developmentalism and neoliberalization, and as a heterogeneous set of shifting, competing, and complementary interests, personnel, and institutional materialities.
While Carr presents this as uneven and perhaps contradictory, I would counter that this stems less from inconsistent access to data, especially interviews with agency staff and insiders, and uneven application of theoretical insights from critical development studies and other subfields, than from the strategic relational approach I adopt in my understanding of state structure, strategy, and action. Indeed, it is quite possible for USAID to be simultaneously a site for the enactment and resolution of ideological, institutional, and geostrategic struggles and thus heterogeneous and conflicted, and a strategy or generator of strategies itself, in which case it might very well appear as a monolithic actor with a singular purpose and endogenous set of rationalized institutional interests. One condition does not necessarily preclude the other, but identifying which USAID matters more in a given moment, how USAID’s different facets interact and produce and resolve internal tensions, and under what circumstances this all shifts in another direction, becomes a matter of theoretically informed empirical investigation. As Carr discusses, based in part on his own experience in and with USAID, such investigation is not particularly easy and there are significant gaps in the data I collected. I have left untouched numerous questions I wanted to ask and could perhaps have answered, given more time and greater access. Some of these have already been detailed above (e.g. USAID-military relations and COIN, or the relationship with other institutions in the global aid industry), but other examples abound. For example, how have personnel recruitment, training, and turnover changed in the agency over time and in relation to broad geostrategic shifts? How has the gendered character of USAID’s development work mattered for the agency’s ability to act as a geostrategic actor in the global development industry and as part of American foreign policy? How exactly do agency staff see USAID’s future in the context of an expanding war on terror and the articulation of a muscular liberal internationalism that increasingly centers humanitarian intervention as a way to resolve tensions between geopolitical and geoeconomic interests and aims? These are difficult questions that require more and better access to the agency’s inner workings, but answering them might help critical development studies, as Carr argues, move beyond its current malaise.
Finally, Matthew Sparke’s critiques, like those of the other commenters both generous and incisive, center on the question of what exactly is geoeconomics? Sparke’s critique of Cowen and Smith (2009) suggests that their reading of geopolitics and geoeconomics and the way these become the basis for a broader socialization renders them superorganic, above the messy flux and compromise of institutional development and part of a broader historical pattern, almost ineluctably and inevitably, tied to the rise of American imperial power. Cowen and Smith’s concepts of the geopolitical social and geoeconomic social, which I have tried to put into practice in a limited way to examine USAID’s dynamic capacity for shaping the conditions and progress of capitalist development, are, Sparke asserts, ‘asked to explain too much and end up explaining too little’ about the nexus of relations that shape actually existing geostrategic thought and practice. While my assessment of these discourses in the operation and development of a state institution like USAID brings this out of the superorganic and into the complex realities of day-to-day bureaucratic and strategic evolution and practice, Sparke’s comments and more recent work nonetheless point more concretely at the question of overdetermination. How should scholars and, hopefully, development practitioners understand overlaps and tensions between geopolitical and geoeconomic discourses without ignoring, downplaying, or obfuscating other factors that shape the exact form these take in practice? Similarly, how do we advance a theoretically informed but empirically rich analysis with something to say about the real uses and impacts of contemporary geostrategic logics without focusing too narrowly on a specific set of institutionalized interests and relations, missing exactly those forces, ideas, and processes that overdetermine how such logic plays out? Sparke points, for example, to how ‘gender, race, sexuality, and the cultural legacies of empire continue to inform geostrategic thought-feeling-and-action’. These are valid points, and, much like Carr’s comments discussed above, which highlight the wide range of actors, processes, and forces that shape the complicated forms of Development intervention that seek to enact a more general process of development.
If we are to understand geopolitics and geoeconomics as discourses, we should emphasize in our analyses that these discourses have material meaning, use, and impact in their application in specific power-laden institutional settings. Again this points to the utility of a strategic relational approach, which concentrates on the state’s multifaceted role as a site, strategy, and generator of strategies, all shaped by a wider environment and a variety of social forces, including a particular balance of class-relevant forces. Today, these are conditioned primarily by the overlap and tensions between the territorial nation-state, which must advance the ‘national interest’ and social cohesion while also pursuing capital internationalization, and transnational capital, itself not able to guarantee social harmony but deeply involved in the contingent processes of development and increasingly in the specific forms of Development intervention USAID undertakes. Thus, even as these two geostrategic discourses and their interplay become socially and politically hegemonic, this only happens through widespread adoption and use in institutions that matter, institutions which are in turn built on the balance of class and political forces and relations that structure and animate the state. USAID is definitely one of those institutions, though I clearly have not captured every way that this matters or all the relations that might be relevant. I would note here that gender and environmental aspects of what USAID does are vital to dealing with the issue of overdetermination that Sparke so usefully highlights and deserve much more focused critical attention than what has been possible in this book.
Sparke’s argument that we must consider USAID’s place in millennial development and whether these are forming a new Washington Consensus (see also Sparke, 2013) points to how debate and contingency in institutions like USAID are curtailed or bent to particular ends (e.g. support for US military operations, or partnerships with TNCs like Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart) and not others (e.g. land reform, food sovereignty, or gender equity). As I state in the book’s conclusion, it is not clear that there is much room to move within USAID, as it continues to build on its links to private capital, the State Department, and the US military, and as it practices and embodies statecraft as a form of geostrategic intervention on behalf of US capitalist and national security interests. The global context again also matters, especially as the agency participates in the construction of a global consensus on aid effectiveness in a rapidly changing development industry. This does not always sit well with the intensive focus on supporting American foreign policy objectives and the interests of development-minded capital fractions. Recent revelations about USAID’s disastrous role in a fake social media platform and the use of health and civic programs to ‘foment rebellion’, both in Cuba (Barbash, 2014; Butler et al., 2014), whistle-blower allegations that the agency’s Office of the Inspector General routinely strips negative findings from internal audits (Higham and Rich, 2014), and the generally robust and deeply entrenched relationship between USAID and private development contractors in the Beltway (Roberts, 2014), all serve as examples of this dynamic and contradictory tension. As with everything, further research is needed to more fully articulate how the geopolitical and the geoeconomic are formed, enacted, and institutionalized in the contemporary state as well as the development industry and, in turn, how these continue to evolve in the shifting terrain of austerity-driven neoliberalization, global climate change, and intensive economic and social connectivity. I am hopeful that my analysis, especially what Carr identifies as my ‘vision of the donor as polyglot’, can serve as a useful first step for this research agenda. The contributors to this discussion signal that the book does indeed do that, and I thank them for their comments and critiques.