Untitled

Geopolitics and
Development
Geopolitics and Development examines the historical emergence of devel-

opment as a form of governmentality, from the end of empire to the Cold
War and the War on Terror. It illustrates the various ways in which the
meanings and relations of development as a discourse, an apparatus and an
aspiration, have been geopolitically imagined and enframed.
The book traces some of the multiple historical associations between
development and diplomacy and seeks to underline the centrality of questions
of territory, security, statehood and sovereignty to the pursuit of development,
along with its enrolment in various (b)ordering practices. In making a case for
greater attention to the evolving nexus between geopolitics and development
and with particular reference to Africa, the book explores the historical and
contemporary geopolitics of foreign aid, the interconnections between devel-
opment and counterinsurgency, the role of the state and social movements in
(re)imagining development, the rise of (re)emerging donors like China, India
and Brazil, and the growing significance of South–South flows of investment,
trade and development cooperation. Drawing on post-colonial and post-
development approaches and on some of the author’s own original empirical
research, this is an essential, critical and interdisciplinary analysis of the
complex and dynamic political geographies of global development.
Primarily intended for scholars and post-graduate students in development
studies, human geography, African studies and international relations, this
book provides an engaging, invaluable and up-to-date resource for making
sense of the complex entanglement between geopolitics and development,
past and present.
Marcus Power is a Professor of Human Geography at Durham Univer-

sity. His research interests include critical geopolitics and the spatialities of
(post)development; visuality and popular geopolitics; energy geographies and
low-carbon transitions in the global South; and China–Africa relations and the
role of (re)emerging development donors in South–South cooperation. He is
author of Rethinking Development Geographies (2003) and co-author of
China’s Resource Diplomacy in Africa: Powering Development? (2012).
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Geopolitics
and
Development
Marcus Power
First published 2019
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Marcus Power
The right of Marcus Power to be identified as author of this work has been asserted
by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
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trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Power, Marcus, 1971- author.
Title: Geopolitics and development / Marcus Power.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018043343| ISBN 9780415519564 (hardback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780415519571 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780203494424 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Geopolitics--History--20th century. | Geopolitics--History--21st
century. | Economic development--History--20th century. | Economic
development--History--21st century. | Postcolonialism.
Classification: LCC JC319 .P68 2019 | DDC 338.9--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043343
ISBN: 978-0-415-51956-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-51957-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-49442-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman

by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
For Conor Ciarán Power
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
List of figures x
Acknowledgements xvii
List of abbreviations xix
1 INTRODUCTION: GEOPOLITICS AND THE

ASSEMBLAGE OF DEVELOPMENT 1
• Introduction: the anti-politics of development 1
• Theorising (post-)development 6
• Critical geopolitics and development 18
• Situating development historically 22
• An Afrocentric focus 34
• The structure of the book 38
2 POST-COLONIALISM, GEOPOLITICS AND

THE PERIPHERY 40
• Introduction: the changing metageographies of
development 40
• Tropicality and Orientalism 44
• The rise of the Area Studies complex 54
• IR, Political Geography and Development 59
• Placing Africa in IR and Political Geography 67
• Conclusions: towards a subaltern geopolitics of
development 73
viii Contents
3 MODERNISING THE “THIRD WORLD” 80

• Introduction: a global history of modernisation 80
• The Third World as ideological project 83
• The Soviet Union and the “romance” of economic
development 92
• The US and the Third World 99
• Arresting the communist “contagion”:
theorising modernisation in the US 105
• JFK, the “decade of development” and the rise of
“developmentese” 108
• Conclusions: the ghosts of Cold War modernisation 118
4 COLD WAR GEOPOLITICS AND

FOREIGN AID 124
• Introduction: Cold War foreign aid and the battle
for the Third World 124
• From the periphery to the periphery: the USSR
and foreign aid 128
• China in Africa: advancing a “subaltern
globalism”? 141
• US foreign aid and the countering of insurgency 148
• Conclusions: an emerging governmental
rationality of development 160
5 THE STATE AND DEVELOPMENT 168

• Introduction: the state is dead, long live
the state 168
• Theorising the state 175
• States, infrastructures and resource geographies 180
• The state and insurgency 186
• Contesting state power: social movements 196
• Conclusions: spaces of subaltern struggle 204
6 THE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF

CONTEMPORARY US FOREIGN ASSISTANCE 211
• Introduction: reconstruction as war 211
• The securitisation of development 220
• Reinventing USAID: the security–economy nexus 224
• The revival of development-based counter-
insurgency 230
• The US and counter-insurgency in Africa:
draining the “swamp of terror” 237
• Conclusions: (re)militarising development 247
Contents ix
7 THE RISE OF THE SOUTH 254

• Introduction: the revival of South–South development
cooperation 254
• Brazil as a “conduit for pan-Southern action” 261
• China as emerging global development hegemon 267
• South Korea: exporting a story of developmental
“success” 280
• India–Africa development cooperation 284
• Conclusions: the “emancipatory” potential of
(re-)emerging donors? 288
8 CONCLUSIONS: DEVELOPMENT AND

(COUNTER-)INSURGENCY 296
• The excess of development 296
• Post-development, state power and insurgency 300
• Re-centring Africa and development in Political
Geography and IR 306
• Modernisation and Cold War geopolitics 309
• Development and Pacification 311
• SSDC and the changing dynamics of development
diplomacy 316
• The shifting spatialities of contemporary
development 323
Bibliography 327
Index 390
Figures
1.1 Map of China’s “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR)

initiative showing the Silk Road Economic Belt and
Maritime Silk Road. 23
1.2 Labourers lay shark fillets out to dry in the sun at the
Colonial Development Corporation’s Atlantic
Fisheries Shore Station in The Gambia during the early
1950s. 28
1.3 “Redefining the power III”, part of a series of images
depicting post-colonial performances and futures by
Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda. The series shows
Angolan fashion designer Shunnoz Fiel dos Santos
standing atop various vacated pedestals on colonial
monuments across Luanda, Angola. Here Fiel stands
in place of Portuguese colonial Governor-General
Pedro Alexandrino near Largo Rainha Ginga in
Luanda. The image poses questions about Angola’s
historical memory whilst seeking to introduce into
public dialogue more inventive and imaginative
notions of the nation’s future (Cobb, 2014.). 31
1.4 A mural at Largo da Independência in Luanda,
Angola, beneath a statue of Agostinho Neto,
symbolises the break from the chains of empire. 32
2.1 Akin Mabogunje presents a paper on the theme
“Geography and the Challenges of Development in
Africa: A Personal Odyssey” at the Festival
international de géographie (FIG), at Saint-Dié-des-
Vosges, in France on September 30th, 2017. 51
Figures xi
2.2 Yves Lacoste at a congress on Vietnam held in

Nijmegen in October 1972. 52
2.3 The front cover of the inaugural issue of the Hérodote
journal gives an aerial view of an American B-52
bomber traversing a pockmarked Vietnamese
landscape. 54
2.4 Front cover of the Hérodote journal for a themed issue
on Geopolitics in Africa. 55
3.1 Chinese propaganda poster (1964) entitled “Resolutely
support the anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of
Asia, Africa and Latin America”. 85
3.2 Chinese propaganda poster (April 1968) entitled
“Chairman Mao is the great liberator of the world’s
revolutionary people”. 86
3.3 President Sukarno of Indonesia addresses the Bandung
Afro-Asian conference in 1955. 88
3.4 A roadside billboard advertises the Tricontinental
conference in Havana, Cuba in 1966. The message
reads “This great mass of humanity has said enough!
and is already on the march”. 91
3.5 Chinese propaganda poster (1953) entitled “Study the
Soviet Union’s advanced economy to build up our
nation”. 97
3.6 Soviet pilot and cosmonaut Gherman Titov (second
right) at the construction site of the Naghlu
hydropower station in Kabul province, Afghanistan.
The project was financed and supervised by the Soviet
Union between 1960 and 1968. 98
3.7 A projection of ‘Point IV around the world’ prepared
by the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA) in
1953 maps out the global extent of the programme's
interventions. 101
3.8 A comprehensive planning chart from the Tennessee
Valley Authority in 1940 maps out the construction
benefits from several hydroelectric dams. 102
3.9 In the situation room at the White House in
Washington, DC, George Christian, President Lyndon
B Johnson, General Robert Ginsburgh and Walt
Rostow look at a relief map of the Khe Sanh area in
Vietnam on February 15th, 1968. 110
3.10 President John F Kennedy introduces the First Lady
at La Morita, Venezuela, accompanied by President
xii Figures
Romulo Betancourt of Venezuela and others on

December 16th, 1961. 111
3.11 President John F Kennedy, accompanied by Deputy
Special Assistant for National Security Affairs Walt
Rostow (fourth from the left, behind two men), meets
with members of the Parliament of Ceylon at the Oval
Office in the White House, Washington, DC on June
14th, 1961. 114
3.12 USAID agronomist Emory Howard stops to talk with
an Afghan farmer during work on irrigation and
hydroelectric power facilities in the Helmand Valley in
the 1960s. 115
3.13 Peace Corps Volunteer Jane Keiser, 26, of
Minneapolis, works as part of a tuberculosis team
training Afghan counterparts in Baghlan hospital. 115
3.14 Peace Corps volunteer Mary Jean Grubber administers
a tuberculosis skin test to a villager in Nsanje, Malawi
in 1965. 116
4.1 Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos (first from
left) and his Cuban counterpart Fidel Castro (second
from left) pay their respects to the mortal remains of
Cuban soldiers who fell in combat in Angola, at the
Cacahual Mausoleum in Havana on December 7th, 1989. 127
4.2 Soviet propaganda artwork entitled “Human rights”
(1977) by Kukryniksy Art Group. 129
4.3 “Africa is Fighting, Africa Will Win!” Soviet
propaganda poster by Viktor Koretsky (1971). 129
4.4 “Great Lenin showed us the way!” Soviet propaganda
poster by V. Boldyrev (1969). 130
4.5 Russian propaganda poster entitled “Long Live the
World October” (1933) by Gustav Klutsis. 132
4.6 Soviet propaganda poster entitled “For Solidarity of
Women of the World” (1973) by V Rybakov. 133
4.7 Angolan President Eduardo dos Santos (fifth from left)
visits the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate
in East Berlin on August 14th, 1981. 137
4.8 Skilled workers from Angola receive vocational
training in communist East Germany on May 16th,
1983. The Angolan participants were taking part in a
six-month course at the Central Institute for Industrial
Safety in Dresden. 138
4.9 A Soviet military expert poses with Angolan officers
in Lucusse, Angola in the spring of 1986. 140
Figures xiii
4.10 Chinese propaganda poster (1963) entitled “Awakened

peoples, you will certainly attain the ultimate victory!” 143
4.11 Chinese propaganda poster (1972) entitled “The
feelings of friendship between the peoples of China
and Africa are deep”. 146
4.12 Troops of A Company, 3rd (Kenya) Battalion, King’s
African Rifles, search an abandoned hut in Malaya for
signs of terrorists during the Malayan Emergency
(1948–60). 150
4.13 A mocked-up Vietnamese hamlet at the US Army
Training Camp at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Viet Cong
suspects are rounded up for questioning during a
simulated search and destroy operation in 1966. 151
4.14 Afghan Ambassador Mohammed Kabir Ludin signs an
agreement in 1954 providing US$18.5 million of
credit with Glen E Edgerton, President of the US
Export-Import Bank. The money was used primarily
for investment in irrigation and power projects in
Helmand Valley. 158
4.15 Afghans view photographs of Helmand Valley
Authority (HVA) initiatives at the 1956 Jeshyn Fair. 159
5.1 A Brazilian police pacification unit (Força de
Pacificação) on patrol in Favela Mare in Rio de
Janeiro on July 12th, 2014. 178
5.2 Electricity infrastructures overloaded with illegal and
informal connections in Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh,
India. 182
5.3 An image from Christina de Middel’s project “The
Afronauts” which blends fact and fiction in
remembering some of Zambia’s early post-colonial
dreams. In 1964 (the year of Zambia independence) a
Zambian science teacher named Edward Makuka
decided to train the first African crew to travel to the
moon and then Mars using an aluminium rocket to put
a woman, two cats and a missionary into space using a
catapult system. Makuka founded the Zambia National
Academy of Science, Space Research and
Astronomical Research to train his “Afronauts” near
Lusaka. 183
5.4 Medha Patkar (leader of the Narmada Bachao Andolan
movement, NBA) and Indian writer Arundhati Roy
visit Bhil communities at Domkhedi village along the
Narmada river in Madhya Pradesh in September 2000.
xiv Figures
The village was submerged as part of the construction

of the Sardar Sarovar dam project. 184
5.5 Rohingya refugees fleeing a military operation in
Myanmar’s Rakhine state take shelter in Cox’s Bazar,
Bangladesh on September 7th, 2017. 194
5.6 Nepalese troops from the Armed Police Force pause
for a break by a school building during counter-
insurgency operations in Kathmandu, Nepal on
December 19th, 2013. 195
5.7 Portuguese protesters participating in the global
“Occupy” protests knock down police barriers and
take the marble staircase in front of the Portuguese
parliament building in Lisbon on October 15th, 2011. 196
5.8 Social movements protest at Paulista Avenue in Sao
Paulo, Brazil on April 1st, 2016 against corruption
within the country’s political parties. 200
5.9 Residents of Hout Bay, South Africa protest on March
3rd, 2017 about their living conditions after broken
promises to provide adequate housing and sanitation. 203
5.10 Thousands of protesters flock to Cairo’s Tahrir Square,
Egypt on November 22nd, 2011 to protest against the
military junta that took power following the toppling
of President Mubarak. 209
6.1 “How neocolonialism works” by Andy Singer. 216
6.2 American Marines guarding food aid distribution in
Mogadishu during “Operation Restore Hope”. In
December 1992 US Marines landed near Mogadishu
ahead of a UN peacekeeping force sent to restore order
and safeguard relief supplies. The US forces withdrew
in 1993 following the debacle of the infamous “Black
Hawk Down” battle. 225
6.3 Activist graffiti adorns the Israeli separation wall in the
West Bank town of Bethlehem in July 2010. 234
6.4 A 2012 poster by Hafez Omar from the Palestine
Poster Project depicts the bloody aims of USAID. 235
6.5 A man walks past graffiti, on a wall in Sanaa (Yemen),
denouncing at Libala, Angola US drone strikes on
November 13th, 2014. 239
6.6 Nigerian soldiers hold up a Boko Haram flag that they
had seized in the recently retaken town of Damasak,
Nigeria, March 18th, 2015. 241
6.7 A Somali soldier holds a mortar gun at Sanguuni
military base on June 13th, 2018, where an American
Figures xv
special operations soldier was killed by a mortar attack

five days previously, about 450 km south of
Mogadishu, Somalia. More than 500 American troops
have been working with the African Union Mission to
Somalia (AMISOM) and Somali national security
forces in counterterrorism operations and have
conducted frequent raids and drone strikes on Al-
Shabaab training camps throughout Somalia. 241
6.8 US Marines and sailors work with Cameroon’s
Fusiliers Marins and Compagnie des Palmeurs de
Combat to increase their capabilities to combat illicit
activity and increase security in the waterways and
borders of Cameroon. 243
6.9 A US Marine instructor teaches Mauritian Fusilier
Marin soldiers how to fire an AK-47 automatic rifle
during light infantry training on February 26th, 2015 in
Nouadhibou, Mauritania. 244
6.10 US Navy Lieutenant Cory Cole from the Maritime
Civil Affairs team helps Kenyan students plant
casuarina trees at Mjanaheri primary school in June
2012. Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa
(CJTF-HoA) planted 600 tree seedlings at the school
as part of World Environment Day. 246
7.1 Chinese Premier Li Keqiang delivers a speech at the
African Union Conference Centre in Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia on May 5th, 2014. 269
7.2 Chinese and African workers on the construction site
of a station and railway at Libala, Angola in 2011. 271
7.3 A Chinese supervisor working for China
GEO-Engineering Corporation gives instructions to
Zambian workers who dig trenches for water pipes on
March 23rd, 2007 in Kabwe, Zambia. 272
7.4 Chinese workers stand in front of the Merowe dam in
Sudan. The main construction work was undertaken by
a Chinese joint venture company established between
China International Water & Electric Corp, and China
National Water Resources and Hydropower
Engineering Corporation. 272
7.5 Chinese military personnel associated with the former
United Nations Organization Mission in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (now MONUSCO)
work on a road rehabilitation project to allow greater
access to a power plant in the east of the country. 278
xvi Figures
7.6 A Chinese businesswoman talks on her mobile phone

outside a shop at the Chinese market in Luanda,
Angola on March 31st, 2007. 280
7.7 The African Renaissance Monument in Dakar,
Senegal, completed in 2010 and built by Mansudae
Overseas Projects from North Korea. 284
7.8 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Chinese
President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama
stand together at the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China
on September 3rd, 2016. 289
7.9 A Chinese warship docks in the port of Djibouti in the
Gulf of Aden on February 6th, 2016. 293
7.10 Chinese People’s Liberation Army personnel attend
the opening ceremony of China’s new military base in
Djibouti on August 1st, 2017. 294
Acknowledgements
T HERE are a number of people I would like to thank for the help and
support they provided to me in writing this book. For their helpful
comments, advice and feedback I would like to thank Joe Painter,
Padraig Carmody and Andrew Brooks. Thanks also to James Sid-
away, whose own work has been a huge inspiration to me, for his
encouragement and support throughout my academic career but also
for the insightful comments and helpful reading suggestions that he
made as I wrote this book. I would also like to express my sincere
gratitude to Andrew Mould at Routledge for all his continued
patience, understanding and support throughout the writing process.
This book has taken much longer to write than anticipated but
Andrew’s support for the project was consistent and unwavering
throughout. I’d also like to thank Alaina Christensen, Faye Leerink
and Egle Zigaite at Routledge for their help, support and editorial
assistance and Drew Stanley for all his help with the copyediting
process. Many thanks also to Chris Orton in the Design and Imaging
Unit at Durham University for his help in preparing the map for
figure 1.1.
There are also a number of people and organisations that I
would like to thank for their help in securing permissions to use
the images included within the book. Thanks to Yevgeniy Fiks for
his help in accessing Soviet propaganda posters from the Wayland
Rudd Collection and to Sergey Sheremet for his assistance with
accessing photographic archives of Soviet military experts in
Angola. Thanks also to the International Institute of Social History
in Amsterdam for their help with access to Chinese propaganda
posters held in the Stefan R Landsberger collection. I would also
xviii Acknowledgements
like to thank Kiluanji Kia Henda for permission to use the artwork
included as figure 1.3 and Andy Singer for the permission to use
the cartoon that appears as figure 6.1. Thanks also to the Imperial
War Museum, the UN Photo Library, the US Peace Corps, the
German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) and the Netherlands
National Archive for helping with access to archival images. I
would also like to thank staff at the John F Kennedy Presidential
Library and Museum, at the US National Archives Still Picture
Unit and at the Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library for their
assistance with accessing and reproducing a variety of archival
images.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without the
support of my friends and family. I would like to thank my mother
Ann and my father Maurice for the inspiration and encouragement
they have given me throughout my career. I would also like to
thank my son Conor who has been a constant source of inspiration
to me.
Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Leanne
Cornelius for all her love, patience, support and understanding. I
could not have done this without you sweetheart and love you to
the moon and back.
Abbreviations
AAPSO Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation

AAS Association for Asian Studies
ACOTA Africa Contingency Operations Training and
Assistance
AfP Alliance for Progress
AFRICOM United States Africa Comnmand
AQIM Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb
AU African Union
CCP Communist Party of China
CERP Commander’s Emergency Response Program
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CIS Center for International Studies
CJTF-HoA Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa
CL Contingency locations
CMO Civil–military operations
COMECON Council for Mutual Economic Assistance
Comintern Communist International
CORDS Civil Operations and Revolutionary [later Rural]
Development Support
CSL Cooperative security locations
CIVETs Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey
and South Africa
DAC Development Assistance Committee
DoD Department of Defence
DRC Democratic Republic of the Congo
EAGLES Emerging and growth-leading economies
ECA Economic Cooperation Administration
ECOSOC Economic and Social Council
xx Abbreviations
FAF Foreign Assistance Framework

FAO Food and Agriculture Organization
FLN Front de Libération National
FNLA National Liberation Front of Angola
FOCAC Forum on China–Africa Cooperation
FOL Forward Operating Locations
FTA Free Trade Area
GDP Gross Domestic Product
GDR German Democratic Republic
HCA Humanitarian and Civic Assistance
HDI The Human Development Index
HTS Human Terrain System
HVP Helmand Valley Project
IBSA India–Brazil–South Africa Dialogue Forum
IFI International Financial Institutions
ILO International Labour Organization
IR International Relations
ISGS Islamic State in the Greater Sahel
ITEC Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation
scheme
Komsomol All-Union Leninist Young Communist League
LDC Less developed country
LPRP Laotian People’s Revolutionary Party
LRA Lord’s Resistance Army
MDG Millennium Development Goals
Mercosur Mercado Común del Sur
MINT Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey
MIST Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey
MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MPLA People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola
MSA Mutual Security Agency
MST Landless Rural Workers Movement (Brazil)
NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement
NAM Non-Aligned Movement
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NGO Non-governmental organisation
NIEO New International Economic Order
NLF National Liberation Front
OBOR One Belt, One Road
ODA Overseas Development Assistance
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development
OEEC Organisation for European Economic
Co-operation
Abbreviations xxi
OPS Office of Public Safety

OPSAAAL Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of
Africa, Asia and Latin America
OSS Office of Strategic Services
PEPFAR President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief
PMSC Private Military and Security Contractor
PRSP Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
RIDP Rapti Integrated Development Project
SAP Structural Adjustment Programme
SDC Save Darfur Coalition
SDG Sustainable Development Goals
SEZ Special Economic Zone
SKSSAA Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee
SOCAFRICA Special Operations Command, Africa
SORO Special Operations Research Office
SSDC South–South Development Cooperation
SSRC Social Science Research Council
SWAPO South West African People’s Organisation
TAZARA Tanzania–Zambia Railway Authority
TCA Technical Cooperation Administration
TCT Three Cups of Tea
TPP Trans-Pacific Partnership
TSCTP Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Partnership
TVA Tennessee Valley Authority
UAE United Arab Emirates
UCI University College Ibadan
UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade
and Development
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organisation
UNFPA United Nations Population Fund
UNICEF United Nations International Children’s
Emergency Fund
UNITA National Union for the Total Independence
of Angola
UNSC United Nations Security Council
UK United Kingdom
US United States
USAF United States Air Force
USAID United States Agency for International
Development
USDA United States Department of Agriculture
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
xxii Abbreviations
WHO World Health Organization

WTO World Trade Organization
ZAPU Zimbabwe African People’s Union
Chapter 1
Introduction:
geopolitics and the
assemblage of
development
INTRODUCTION: THE ANTI-POLITICS OF
DEVELOPMENT
“development” has beyond doubt been widely used as a hard
drug, addiction to which, legally tolerated or encouraged, may
stimulate the blissful feelings that typify artificial paradises.
(Rist, 2010: 19)
A LTHOUGH it has consistently been imagined and represented as a

neutral and depoliticised technical or managerialist domain, ques-
tions of international relations, geopolitics and foreign policy have
always been at the very centre of the theory and practice of
development. With its in-built sense of design, development has
always represented forms of mobilisation associated with order and
security (Duffield, 2002) and has various “strategic” effects: in its
depoliticisation of poverty, for example, or in the (inconsistent)
expansion of state bureaucratic power (Ferguson, 1990). While
different strategies and technologies have come and gone, develop-
ment has consistently served as a kind of antidote to the unruly
material politics created by the challenges of governing fluid and
changeable spaces, attempting to reconcile the inevitable disrup-
tions of progress with the need for order (Cowen and Shenton,
1995: 27–43) – an objective it has consistently failed to achieve (Li,
2007). This book seeks to further interrogate this sense of develop-
ment as a set of ameliorative and compensatory technologies of
security and argues that what has consistently been central to the
very logic and fabric of development is a desire to counter crises of
2 Geopolitics and the Development Assemblage
disorder, insecurity and insurgency. In particular, the book explores

the repeated enrolment of development in projects of counterinsur-
gency and the long-standing idea of development as a form of
(violent) pacification. To fully understand the interface between
security and development, or its uses as a form of countering
insurgency, it is necessary to understand the wider nexus between
geopolitics and development. In particular, the book argues that
development is fundamentally a form of governmentality, is very
much about diplomacy and has historically had multiple associa-
tions with questions of territory, governance and sovereignty or
been implicated in various (b)ordering practices. (In)security and
insurgency are not incidental to theories and practices of develop-
ment and neither is development’s obsession with questions of order
and security somehow “new” or a recent rediscovery – they have
always been at the very heart of (and are constitutive of) the
development enterprise and imaginary.
As an arena of theory and state practice, development came to
prominence in an era when the legitimacy of colonial rule was in
rapid decline, such that it quickly became a mechanism for trying
to shape, manage and control socio-economic and political change
in an era of formal sovereignty and to create particular kinds of
states in the process. The primary threats development was meant
to “neutralise” included decolonisation, communism and various
crises within industrial capitalism and, most recently, terrorist
insurgencies in the global war on terror. This book will argue
that geopolitical knowledges, discourses and practices have always
played a key role both in the construction of development and in
its contestation and seeks to build on Slater’s (1993) contention
that all conceptualisations of development contain and express a
geopolitical imagination which conditions and enframes its mean-
ings and relations. Development is conceptualised here as simul-
taneously a discourse, an apparatus and an aspiration (Sidaway,
2011: 2792) and in what follows I argue that the political geogra-
phy of development requires and rewards much further critical
scrutiny. Development Studies has tended to avoid a direct and
sustained engagement with questions of (geo)politics in the global
South whilst much of the literature in (sub)disciplines like IR and
Political Geography has ignored or misrepresented questions of
development in the non-Western world and has been characterised
by a certain degree of parochialism (Power, 2010). Seeking to adopt
a more interdisciplinary approach to transcend sub-disciplinary
boundaries in Geography, the book provides a synthesis of scholar-
ship in critical geopolitics, critical IR and critical development
Geopolitics and the Development Assemblage 3
studies and seeks both to re-theorise development as an apparatus or

assemblage and to make the case for a post-colonial approach to
understanding its complex and dynamic geopolitics.
The focus of the book is both historical and contemporary,
exploring the geopolitical enframing and imagination of development
at key historical junctures such as the end of empire, the Cold War
and the War on Terror. In a variety of ways however, the landscape of
international development has shifted quite dramatically in the last
three decades and thus in addition to attending to the historical role of
global hegemons like the US and the USSR in shaping international
development theory and practice, the book seeks to make an original
contribution by exploring what the rise of “new” state donors from
the global South (such as China, Brazil and India) means for
established modes of development cooperation and for the theory
and practice of development more generally. In doing so, my analysis
is informed by some of my own recent research on China–Africa
relations and South–South development cooperation (SSDC). For
much of the post-war period the drivers of the global economy and
the trustees of international development were unproblematically
seen as the wealthy countries of Europe and North America whilst
historically much of the theory and practice of development has been
focused around North–South relations and interactions. Yet over the
past few decades the order of international development has funda-
mentally changed with (re)emerging or “rising” powers from the
global South taking a greater role in the global economy and interna-
tional politics. The ontological hierarchy of Northern donors and
Southern recipients has been upset by the rise of the South and the
growth of SSDC, by the global financial crisis and by wider changes
in global geographies of poverty and wealth, which have collectively
contributed to decentring the field of international development, in
terms of both the agents authorised to play and the practices con-
sidered legitimate (Mawdsley, 2017). The book charts this gradual
disintegration of established ways of categorising global develop-
ment and the meta-geographies and geopolitical divides that have
previously structured North–South relations. As the world is experi-
encing rapid geo-economic transformations, marked by a downturn
of European and American hegemony and the rise of Southern
economies, the book argues the case for a renewed approach to
unpacking the emerging dynamics of accumulation, dispossession
and poverty, one that puts questions of international relations and
geopolitics front and centre in the study of development.
In addition to tracing the rise and fall of the “Third World” as
a geopolitical category and the rise of the South and SSDC, the
book examines the growing articulation between security policies

and aid dynamics, or the creeping “securitisation of development”
(and “developmentalisation of security”). Driven by the security
imperatives of the post 9/11 era and the ensuing War on Terror,
underdevelopment has once again been framed as highly “danger-
ous”. This has been marked by a wave of Western humanitarian
and peace interventionism that “empowers international institu-
tions and actors to individuate, group and act upon Southern
populations” (Duffield, 2006b: 16) but also by a growing collusion
between military and humanitarian actors around the idea of
development. As an assemblage of practices that connect “vio-
lence to order, force to persuasion, civil to military power” (Bell,
2015: 18), counterinsurgency has experienced a renaissance in
recent years following military setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan,
placing human social and economic development, the protection
of civilians, political solutions and the reform of state security
sectors at the forefront of military doctrine and practice, further
blurring the line between security and development. This incarna-
tion of security seeks to reprioritise development criteria in rela-
tion to supporting intervention, reconstructing crisis states and, in
order to stem terrorist recruitment, protecting livelihoods and
promoting opportunity within strategically important areas of
instability (Duffield, 2002). In the “security–development nexus”,
fragile statehood and concerns about unstable or stateless regions
have been linked to a range of threats to international security,
shifting the Western emphasis to the containment of risks emanat-
ing from “undergoverned” spaces. Along with important geogra-
phical shifts in aid disbursements and allocations, the War on
Terror has fundamentally altered the nature of donor cooperation
with developing countries as the subordination of foreign aid to
military, foreign policy and economic interests has increasingly
altered the context in which development aid is framed and
implemented.
Any claim to be able to change the lives of others is ulti-
mately a claim to power (Li, 2007), as is the wider idea of the
“makeability” of society which has long been a feature of the
theory and practice of development. Whether they seek to move
people from one place to another, to better provide for their needs,
to rationalise their use of land, or to educate and to modernise,
programmes for development are all, as Li (2007: 1) points out,
“implicated in contemporary sites of struggle”. The book exam-
ines the ways in which development has enabled a series of
projects that seek to govern, to control, to bring order, along with
its long-standing obsession with (re)modelling states in the per-

iphery. In reference to “high-modernist” approaches to develop-
ment in the South, Scott (1998) writes of the “blindness” of the
state and about legibility as a central problem of statecraft, the
gradual resolution of which enables the state to get a better handle
on its subjects and their environment through a more permanent
visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. The
book explores this idea of development as a resolution to pro-
blems of statecraft and as enabling particular forms of state power
and the “capturing” of populations by increasing the legibility of
citizens and territories and considers the changing historical role
of the state in development. It also examines the continuing
hegemony of neoliberalism in development theory and practice
and explores the role of agencies like USAID in its diffusion,
along with the various spaces of insurgency that state-led neolib-
eral models of development have created in their wake across the
South.
Neoliberalism is often depicted as a kind of “tidal wave”,
emanating from the dominant metropoles, that rolls across all
places, but although it is clear that development has long played
a role in “strategies of social and cultural domination” (Escobar,
2012: vii), it is important to recognise the various ways in which it
has been contested and resisted. Neoliberalism is best understood
“as an assemblage of technologies, techniques and practices that
are appropriated selectively, that come into uncomfortable encoun-
ters with ‘local’ politics and cultures, and that are mobile and
connective (rather than ‘global’)” (Clarke, 2008: 138, emphasis
added). The book traces these “selective” appropriations of neoli-
beralism in development along with its “uncomfortable” encoun-
ters with local cultural and political spaces. Development can of
course operate as much as a discourse of entitlement as a dis-
course of control (Cooper and Packard, 1997; Nilsen, 2016) and
the global South has given rise to some of the world’s most
intense and advanced popular struggles against neoliberalism as
across Latin America, Africa and Asia movements of indigenous
peoples, workers, peasants, women and shanty-town dwellers have
challenged the dispossession, exclusion and poverty that have
followed in the wake of neoliberalisation. Through practices of
resistance, these movements are beginning to transform the direc-
tion and meanings of post-colonial development and to reshape
conceptions of politics, participation, statehood and citizenship.
A relational view of development is key because neoliberal
forms of capitalism did not simply arise in the “core” and spread
from there to the “periphery” (Hart, 2010) but are the products of
processes of spatial interconnection and it is thus important to hold
North and South in a relational view when thinking about the
complex and shifting territories of poverty and development (Roy
and Crane, 2015). Along with geopolitics, development also needs to
be situated in relation to the larger nexus of relations within which it
is embedded (e.g. social, economic, cultural and racial) and it is
important to examine the different discourses, institutions, forms of
management and circuits of capital that have shaped them (Roy and
Crane, 2015). The significance of questions of “race” in devel-
opment, in particular, has often been neglected (White, 2002)
yet biopolitics is inherently about race, acquiring its powers as a
form of governance by securing a population’s “purity” and
“safety” within the context of an imagined, alien, raced, internal
or external threat (Foucault et al., 2003 [1975–76]; Macey,
2009). Expressions of biopolitical forms of power always con-
tain within them racialised anxieties and fears (Domosh, 2018)
and as Mitchell (2017: 358) has shown, “race was and remains
central” to liberal, humanitarian forms of aid.
THEORISING (POST-)DEVELOPMENT
The postdevelopment agenda is not, as we see it, anti-devel-
opment. The challenge of postdevelopment is not to give up
on development, nor to see all development practice – past,
present and future, in wealthy and poor countries – as tainted,
failed, retrograde; as though there were something necessarily
problematic and destructive about deliberate attempts to
increase social wellbeing through economic intervention; as
though there were a space of purity beyond or outside devel-
opment that we could access through renunciation. The chal-
lenge is to imagine and practice development differently.
(Gibson-Graham, 2005: 6)
postdevelopment was meant to convey the sense of an era in

which development would no longer be a central organising
principle of social life. This did not mean that postdevelop-
ment was seen as a new historical period to which its
proponents believed we had arrived. (Escobar, 2012: xiii)
A “toxic” word (Rist, 2010: 24) fraught with a Faustian ambiguity,

development is regarded as something which happens simultaneously
to individuals, communities, nations and regions but ultimately as a

cumulative, organic, natural and inherently progressive process that is
somehow above and beyond the realm of the political. The word
development itself, Rist (2010: 22) observes, has become a “modern
shibboleth, an unavoidable password”, which comes to be used “to
convey the idea that tomorrow things will be better, or that more is
necessarily better”. In this sense “development” has taken on a “quasi-
mystical connotation” (Munck, 1999: 198). Yet the very taken-for-
granted quality of “development” (and indeed much of the lexicon of
development discourse) leaves much of what is actually done in its
name unquestioned. Although its failures as a socio-economic endea-
vour have now been widely recognised, “development discourse still
contaminates social reality” and “remains at the centre of a powerful
but fragile semantic constellation” (Esteva, 2009: 1). The language of
development essentially defines worlds-in-the making (Cornwall,
2010), animating and justifying intervention with fulsome promises
of the possible. As Sachs (2010: 1) contends, “development is much
more than just a socio-economic endeavour; it is a perception which
models reality, a myth which comforts societies, and a fantasy which
unleashes passions.”
Development is also very much an “anti-politics machine”
(Ferguson, 1990: 270) that “insistently repos[es] political ques-
tions of land, resources, jobs or wages as technical ‘problems’
responsive to the technical ‘development’ intervention”. Lummis
(1996: 46) even argues that economic development is essentially
politics camouflaged or a way of concealing power arrangements.
The anti-politics of development ensures that political issues are
“rendered technical” (Li, 2007) or as best addressed by experts
and hence the terms of any public debate are limited to trivial or
technical matters, constituting the boundary between those posi-
tioned as trustees, with the capacity to diagnose deficiencies in
others, and those subject to expert direction. Anti-politics is often
subliminal and routine as the structure of political-economic rela-
tions is written out of the diagnoses and prescriptions produced by
development “experts” and as the process of development is
perpetually depoliticised. Here, the contestability of many of the
words in its lexicon (e.g. civil society) is “flattened” (Chandhoke,
2010) and they become “consensual hurrah-words” that have
warmly persuasive qualities (much like “development” itself),
gaining their purchase and power through their vague and euphe-
mistic qualities, their capacity to embrace a multitude of possible
meanings and also their normative resonance, all of which places
the sanctity of its goals beyond reproach and disables any possible
critique of “development”, since it was equated “almost with life

itself” (Rist, 2010: 20). The related idea of poverty reduction
similarly has a luminous obviousness to it, defying mere mortals
to challenge its status as a moral imperative (Toye, 2010: 45). The
moral unassailability of the development enterprise is similarly
secured by copious references to that nebulous, but emotive,
category: “the poor” (Cornwall and Brock, 2005). The very con-
cept of “poverty” however “covers up the inequality wrought by
capitalism” (Kapoor, 2012: 34) and tends to assume that being
poor is a question of unfortunate circumstances, mystifying its
structural causes wherein wealth in some parts of the world “is the
historical result of the pauperization of others” (34).
Development has often been depicted by some of its critics
as a singular and monolithic “project” in a common failure to
recognise its multiplicities. In an attempt to move past this,
Hart (2010: 10) differentiates between “Big D” Development or
“the multiply scaled projects of intervention in the ‘Third
World’ that emerged in the context of decolonisation struggles
and the Cold War” and “Little d” development which refers “to
the development of capitalism as geographically uneven but
spatially interconnected processes of creation and destruction,
dialectically interconnected with discourses and practices of
Development” (Hart, 2010: 119). This also includes a recognition
that D/development has historically come to be defined by a
multiplicity of “developers” entrusted with the task (Cowen and
Shenton, 1996: 4) but also that geographically D/development
has been played out in a multiplicity of places and localities such
that its geopolitical significance cannot simply be “read off” from
any one vantage point or set of coordinates. This useful recogni-
tion that development is both a project and a process has also
been accompanied by a growing recognition of the plural origins
of development discourses: Chinese intellectuals used the lan-
guage of modernity in the 1920s (Cullather, 2000) and for
decades before independence Indian nationalists sought to articu-
late their own rival visions of national development (long before
they had been debated by modernisation theorists in the US in
the 1950s) in order to seize the development process and fashion
a uniquely Indian modernity (Bose, 1997; Prakash, 1999). Simi-
larly, there is a growing recognition of the need for more global
histories of key ideas and projects within development thinking,
such as modernisation (Engerman and Unger, 2009), and a refusal
of the idea that modernisation was purely or even predominantly
an American “export”.
Although Hart (2010) does recognise the dialectical nature of

D/development in practice these distinctions are far messier and
more complex, particularly in relation to the contemporary
dynamics of South–South cooperation. As a dynamic “field of
meaning” (Williams, 1976) development is conceptualised in this
book as operating simultaneously across three dimensions: as an
immanent process of politico-economic change; as an intentional
project of amelioration led by international and other aid agencies;
and as a set of social experiences and outcomes (Cowen and
Shenton, 1996). Alongside this, the book seeks to trace some of
the ways in which development has historically served as a
“dominant problematic or interpretive grid through which the
impoverished regions of the world are known” (Ferguson, 1990:
xiii). It is this sense that through development, as a problematic or
an “interpretive grid”, the cultures, peoples, places and geopolitics
of the Third World or Global South become more “knowable” and
intelligible that the book seeks to examine along with the inter-
ventions that this then gives rise to. “Development thinking” has
various strands of course (Hettne, 1995) and this includes devel-
opment theories (logical propositions about how the world is
structured which explain past and future developments), develop-
ment strategies (the practical paths adopted by actors and agents,
ranging from communities to central states and international
institutions) and development ideologies (the different economic
goals and political agendas associated with its pursuit). This book
seeks to engage with all three of these elements but before doing
so it is necessary to map out my own approach to theorising
“development”.
In particular the book seeks to conceptualise development as a
form of governmentality and to (re)engage with and enhance
theorisations of post-development. Development practices can
usefully be understood as forms of government “structured
through a variety of technics and micropolitics of power (from
the map, to the national statistics, to forms of surveillance), to
accomplish or attempt to accomplish, stable rule through certain
sorts of governable subjects and governable objects” (Watts, 2003:
12). Foucault’s concept of governmentality provides a valuable
framework through which to analyze the contemporary govern-
ance of development and how it functions not solely through
states but through multiple tactics and means that regulate the
conduct of individuals and institutions by setting up standards of
behaviour according to certain rationalities or by producing “gov-
ernable spaces”. Although the various instruments and procedures
of development programmes typically refer themselves to the

state, they cannot be reduced to it (Brigg, 2002: 428). Transna-
tional forms of governmentality (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002) are
also significant here since agencies like the IMF and World Bank
have a disciplinary power over development, rendering nation-
states visible though processes of surveillance, evaluation and
judgement regularly carried out by personnel and consultants
during missions and consultancies.
Rather than question what development is “really doing”,
post-development scholarship tends to focus instead upon how
development functions as a discourse: how it was imagined into
being, how it has enabled the wishes and worldviews of some
groups and societies to become universalised or “imperialised”
(Escobar, 1995; Ireland and McKinnon, 2013) and how it became
a “thing” that people did, with its own set of rhetoric, practices,
literatures and interventions, all taking shape around the proble-
matisation of poverty. Many of its proponents express disenchant-
ment with the term “development” as being simply a “deceitful
mirage” (Rahnema, 1997a: x), a “malignant myth” (Esteva, 1985:
78) or “a poisonous gift to the populations it set out to help”
(Rahnema, 1997b: 381). For some, post-development is “a set of
thinking and doing practices that are guided by a distinctive
ethical stance” (Gibson-Graham, 2005: 4); for others, it represents
“a field of debate rather than a cohesive body of work with core
principles and approaches” (Ireland and McKinnon, 2013: 160).
One of the best and most influential works in this corpus of
scholarship is Encountering Development by Colombian anthro-
pologist Arturo Escobar (1995) which traces the discursive crea-
tion in the immediate post-war period of the “third world” as both
the needy object of international development intervention and the
excuse for the expansion of a new world power’s mode of global
governmentality. Escobar critiques the idea of modernity as a great
singularity in D/development or the “path to be trodden by all
trajectories leading to an inevitable steady state” (Escobar, 2004:
225). Escobar’s work attempts to imagine a “post-development
era” (Escobar, 1992) and seeks to decentre development and dis-
place its “centrality from the discursive imaginary” (Escobar,
2012: xiii), but also to think about the end(s) of development, the
emergence of alternatives and the need to transform develop-
ment’s order of expert knowledge and power (Escobar, 1995).
Similarly, post-development scholars like Gustavo Esteva and
Wolfgang Sachs have noted how “development has evaporated”
(Esteva, 1992: 22), how as a field of study/knowledge, it “is a
mined, unexplorable land” (22) and how it stands as an “outdated

monument to an immodest era” (Sachs, 1999: 1–2), or “a ruin in
the intellectual landscape” whose shadows continue to obscure our
vision (Sachs, 1992: 1).
Whilst acknowledging there may be common features and
lessons for particular development issues, post-development does
not aim to “scale up” these examples to a universal model for
development practice (Ireland and McKinnon, 2013) and this has
been the focus of critique for most of its detractors who argue that
the absence of a universalising tendency “can lead only to self-
defeating localism, incapable of creating or enacting the kind of
global change that development is all about” (164). Such critiques
however demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of post-
development scholarship – it never set out to “replace” develop-
ment with a new utopia, nor to engage in scripting scenarios for an
alternative future but rather to think beyond a paradigm (Escobar,
2000). Geographers have widely criticised post-development, dis-
missing it as essentialist and reactionary, as relying implicitly on
concepts of conspiracy, as insufficiently dialectical (Watts, 1995)
and as failing to engage with the institutional practices and
processes that (re)produce the discourses of development it
sought to critique (Essex, 2013). Wainwright (2008: 10) contends
that what is needed is not post-developmentalism but a critique of
development and its power through a post-colonial Marxist lens,
arguing that writers like Escobar, who begin from a deconstruction
of development, end up reifying it as a totalising structure. Citing
Spivak’s articulation of a concept that “we cannot not desire”,
Wainwright (2008: 1) argues “we cannot not desire development”
(emphasis in original).
Of course, there is the trap of setting out to tell yet another
story of predatory Northern actors victimising uniquely defence-
less Southern actors (Li, 2007) when “predation is worldwide”
(Sogge, 2002: 36) and when historically development “seldom
pitted North against South or indigenous against foreign; instead,
transnational coalitions of expertise, wealth, and political power
vied against each other to assert rival ‘models’ of the future”
(Cullather, 2009: 510). This assumption that “development” and
the programmes for “improvement” that it promotes always have
some hidden agenda or that they are merely a tactic to maintain
the dominance of certain classes or to assert control by the global
North over the South is, as Li (2007) points out, a problematic
interpretation common to dependency theory and its variants.
Post-development has also been rather fond of the “colonising
metaphor” that appears common “through the employment of inap-

propriate hyperbolic rhetorical devices linking the operation of power
through development to notions of colonisation” (Brigg, 2002: 422).
As Foucault’s work acknowledges, nothing happens as laid down in
the schemes of “programmers” (Li, 2007) yet he insisted they are not
simply utopias “in the heads of a few projectors”, nor “abortive
schemes for the creation of a reality” but are” fragments of a reality”
that “induce a whole series of effects in the real”, since they “crystal-
lize into institutions, they inform individual behaviour, they act as
grids for the perception and evaluation of things” (Foucault, 1991b:
81-82; Li, 2007: 28). The programmers’ schemes of development are
never just words then, nor are they ever just about a one-way
colonisation of life-worlds; they are always subject to contestation.
One of the main problems here has been that post-development
writers have often used a rather impoverished version of Foucault’s
discourse analysis and employed a “somewhat vulgar use of Fou-
cauldian concepts” (Ziai, 2004: 1048) which sometimes miss both
the nuances and profundity of a Foucauldian understanding, often
using a sovereign, repressive concept of power, for example, rather
than recognising the operation of “bio-power” (the management of
life and population) or Foucault’s relational conceptualisation of it
(Brigg, 2002). Foucault understood liberal “government” power as
organised around the “conduct of conduct” whereby actions are
shaped at a distance by calculated means (in contrast to more direct,
disciplinary forms of power that characterised the age of empire).
Sovereign power (as in the colonial period) operated by deduction,
by taking away and appropriation, by seizing things, time, bodies
and life itself whereas biopower fosters, organises, incites and
optimises life, redefining and administering life in order to manage
it in a more calculated way (Brigg, 2002). Foucault’s distinction
between sovereign and bio-power suggests a similar distinction
between the colonial and development eras but of course this was
never so clear-cut since many colonial regimes pursued forms of
development as governmentality. Synthetically bound with bio-
power, D/development operates by bringing forth and promoting,
rather than repressing, the forces and energies of human subjects
(Brigg, 2002). With the progress of decolonisation and the coming
end of empire, colonial officials, along with anticolonial nationalist
leaders, began to promote the welfare and benefit of the colonies as
the operation of a different modality of power in relation to the
decolonising countries started to emerge, “one which relied not
predominantly on force, but on the mobilisation (including self-
mobilisation) of human subjects and nation-states” (Brigg, 2002:
424). It is thus important to recognise that development repre-

sented a liberating possibility in the early post-war period for
many Third World nationalists (Cooper, 1997: 64; Cooper and
Packard, 1997: 9).
Post-development has also perhaps held a problematic notion
that power operates through a singular intentional historical force
such as “The West”. Esteva (1992: 6) states that in the early post-
war era, the US “was the master”, that “Americans wanted some-
thing more”, and that they “conceived a political campaign on a
global scale that clearly bore their seal”. As Brigg (2002: 424) has
argued, “Such ascription of agency and intention, regardless of its
parsimony, is not adequate to understanding the multidimension-
ality of social and political relations, including the role of con-
tingency, which led to the formation of the development project.”
The famous Point Four programme for “underdeveloped” areas
launched in President Harry Truman’s inaugural speech, rendered
by Esteva as a carefully chosen point in the extension of US
hegemony, is instructive in this regard. Rist (1997: 70) has shown
that Truman’s Point Four programme was in fact an afterthought
in the scheme of Truman’s overall speech suggested by a civil
servant and that the idea was taken up as a public relations
exercise (and even then, only after some hesitation). Viewing the
notion of development solely as a Western imposition or hege-
mony (e.g. Sachs, 1992: 4–5) elides the fact that many Third
World governments and subjects have actively embraced develop-
ment (Brigg, 2002). If development is, as Gupta (1998: 45) has
argued, “Orientalism transformed into a science for action”, then it
will invariably constitute hybrid formations in its encounter with
different peoples and places and with incommensurable meanings.
Many of its critics treat post-development as a coherent
school of thought, however, failing to differentiate between the
heterogeneous positions subsumed under its heading, and have
accordingly not fully grasped their political implications (Ziai,
2004: 1058). It is my contention that the literature on “post-
development”, though much-maligned, has a great deal to offer
any exploration of the nexus between geopolitics and development
and that, as Brigg (2002: 433) has noted, “while in some need of
rescuing, post-development should not be dismissed because it
lacks a programme for development.” In many ways, post-devel-
opment perspectives usefully seek a transfer of power – the power
to define the problems and goals of a society – away from the
hands of outside “experts” towards the members of the society
itself, which, at least for some, adds up to a radical democratic
position (Ziai, 2004). For others, post-development thought opens

up “plural possibilities of the political beyond the grammar of
development” (Nakano, 2007: 65) not only by rejecting the post-
World War II development project but also by providing a chal-
lenge to (and a critique of) the role of the modern state and in
envisioning the possibility of a political community that can be
explored beyond the state system (Nakano, 2007). Further, the
critical politics of post-development ensures that what Li (2007: 7)
calls the “subliminal and routine” anti-politics of technical devel-
opment is replaced with a more politically acute alternative. It
could also be argued that critique remains the prime contribution
of critical development studies, rather than a search for alterna-
tives tout court (Radcliffe, 2015: 856). Interestingly, programmatic
alternatives that have emerged in Latin America’s “post-neolib-
eral” countries, such as Buen Vivir/Vivir Bien (living well), have
been lauded in many circles as the realisation of post-development
agendas although the reality, as Radcliffe (2015) notes, is more
complex (see also chapter 5). Some have even argued that an
emerging “South–South” dialogue on development in the twenty-
first century could potentially be based on, or at least influenced
by, post-development thinking (Andreasson, 2007).
Perhaps one of the most significant and valuable critiques of
post-development is that informed by psychoanalytic approaches
(De Vries, 2007; Kapoor, 2014a, 2014b, 2017), which have
suggested that in maintaining that development politics and
power are produced discursively in an impersonal way (as an
“anti-politics machine” in Ferguson’s terms), post-development
ignores the fact that such power only takes hold, expands and
persists through libidinal attachments:
it is not enough to critically deconstruct discourses, to point

out their gaps, discontinuities and contradictions; it is also
vital to identify and come to terms with our libidinal attach-
ments to, and unconscious investments in, these discourses.
(Kapoor, 2014a: 1119)
More generally, international development has tended to ignore – or,

tellingly, repress – human/social passions (Kapoor, 2014a) despite
being:
replete with disavowed memories (racism, (neo)colonialism,

gender discrimination) and traumatic prohibitions (economic
recession, poverty), which show up in dreams and fantasies
(the exoticised Third World, structural adjustment as universal

panacea), obsessions (economic growth, “wars” against pov-
erty or terror), or stereotypes (denigration, infantilisation,
sexualisation or feminisation of the Third World Other).
(Kapoor, 2014a: 1117)
This important question of the unconscious fantasies of devel-

opment, its gaps, dislocations and blind spots but also the various
desires embedded in D/development and its potential to seduce, is
very valuable. People’s desires for development must be taken
seriously and its promises should not be forsaken (De Vries,
2007). Fantasies of and desires for development also motivate
many of the volunteers, charity workers and religious actors that
get involved in its pursuit and who also become its governable
subjects. Development generates the kinds of desires that it neces-
sitates to perpetuate itself and is an autonomous, self-propelling
apparatus that produces its own motivational drives (De Vries,
2007). Paradoxically however, the idea of development relies on
the production of desires which it cannot fulfil. In other words,
“there is a certain ‘excess’ in the concept of development that is
central to its functioning” (De Vries, 2007: 30). Rather than viewing
post-development and psychoanalytic approaches as being diame-
trically opposed, my contention is that the two approaches can very
productively complement and offset one another. Both approaches
acknowledge the significance of the “development apparatus” (see
below) but in some of the earliest post-development interventions
(e.g. Ferguson, 1990) the set of institutions, agencies and ideologies
that structure development thinking and practice are depicted as a
machine-like kind of entity that reproduces itself by virtue of the
unintended, unplanned, yet systematic side effects it brings about.
De Vries (2007), however, usefully draws attention to the idea of
the development apparatus as a “desiring machine”, a social body
constituted by the assembling of heterogeneous desires. Rather than
being depicted as a rational, legal-bureaucratic and hierarchical
order (and only an apparatus of governmentality that produces the
development subject as a contingent side effect), the development
apparatus is instead understood here:
as a crazy, expansive machine, driven by its capacity to incor-

porate, refigure and re-invent all sorts of desires for devel-
opment. . .. The desiring development subject is a response to
the lack in the development apparatus. It is the failure to satisfy
the desire for development and the impossibility of bringing
about the promises of development that produce a subject that

always already eludes the grasp of power. (De Vries, 2007:
37–38)
Such approaches acknowledge not only that “all sorts of

desires” are part of the workings of the development apparatus
but also the “excess” that is central to its functioning and the ways
in which subjects elude the grasp of power/knowledge. The claim
to expertise in optimising the lives of others is a claim to power
and collectively the activities of supposedly “enlightened” and
“civilised” trustees and experts have played a key role in structur-
ing a field of possible actions around “development” (Li, 2007).
The “will to improve” is situated in the field of power that
Foucault termed “government” where the concern is the well-
being of the population at large and it operates by educating
desires and configuring habits, aspirations and beliefs, represent-
ing an attempt to shape human conduct by calculated means
(Foucault, 1991a). The will to govern for Foucault (1991a: 93) is
concerned with “men in their relations, their links, their imbrica-
tion with. . . wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the terri-
tory. . .”. Development intervenes in these relations in order to
adjust them and the desire to improve populations requires the
exercise of what Foucault identified as a distinct governmental
rationality – a way of thinking about government as the “right
manner of disposing things” – for only then can specific inter-
ventions be devised. An explicit, calculated programme of inter-
vention is not the product of a singular intention or will but
rather draws upon and is situated within a heterogeneous assem-
blage or dispositif (Li, 2007) that combines “forms of practical
knowledge, with modes of perception, practices of calculation,
vocabularies, types of authority, forms of judgement, architec-
tural forms, human capacities, non-human objects and devices,
inscription techniques and so forth” (Rose, 1999: 52).
Foucault’s notion of a dispositif (or apparatus) that has overall
governing effects and that seeks to normalise, refers to a “thor-
oughly heterogeneous ensemble” of discursive and material ele-
ments (Foucault, 1980a: 194) that may consist of “discourses,
institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, admin-
istrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and
philanthropic propositions” and so on (Foucault, 1980a: 194). It is
particularly useful for capturing both the fluidity and heterogeneity
of the development project and for considering relations of knowl-
edge (discourse), power and subjectivity alongside the economic
(Brigg, 2002). Deleuze similarly conceptualises the dispositif as a

concrete social apparatus and a “tangle, a multilinear ensemble”
(Deleuze, 1992: 159). As Foucault (1980a: 194) noted, the dis-
positif is not simply the collection of elements per se but also the
“system of relations. . . established between these elements”. In
this sense the idea of a dispositif is particularly apposite in
considering post-war development as it emerged and continues to
operate as a complex ensemble of institutions, discourses, resource
flows, programmes, projects and practices. Since such a multitude
of subjects clearly cannot operate entirely in concert, this concep-
tualisation avoids the tendency to view development and its
effects as monolithic and uniform (Brigg, 2001) and “while a
dispositif exhibits a certain level of coherence and density, the
multiplicity of relations that make up the development ensemble
are continually renegotiated and open to contestation, reaffirma-
tion or consolidation” (Brigg, 2004: 60). Such ensembles operate
to achieve overall effects, however, thereby serving a dominant
strategic function (Foucault, 1980a: 195). In foregrounding the
strategic functions and consequences of development, this
approach enables us to get closer to a critical appreciation and
understanding of the nexus between geopolitics and development.
While the pyramidal organisation of relations of power gives a
dispositif a “head”, “it is the apparatus as a whole that produces
‘power’” (Foucault, 1979: 177).
It is useful to think of the concepts of assemblage and
apparatus, as articulated in the work of Deleuze and Foucault,
relationally as they “emerge as one and part of each other, but
in a continual dialectic” (Legg, 2011: 131). This dialectical
approach is also useful in bringing post-development and psy-
choanalytic approaches together. Alongside the notion of a
development dispositif it is also useful to think development
relationally through an assemblage approach, which can produc-
tively be used to capture the more material, embodied nature of
geopolitics and to dissolve macro/micro scalar binaries (Dittmer,
2014). In relation to development Li (2007) conceptualises
assemblage as an active process which aims to direct social
conduct and manage contestation through political techniques of
consensus-building, rendering technical, performance and anti-
politics “to direct, conduct and intervene in social processes to
produce desired outcomes and avert undesirable ones” (Li, 2007:
264). Assemblage here is the continuous work of pulling dis-
parate elements together to “constitute a technical field fit to be
governed and improved” (Li, 2007: 286). The assemblage approach
suggests a different set of metaphors for the social world (e.g.

mosaic, patchwork, heterogeneity, fluidity) and this is ideal for
exploring the geopolitics of development since assemblage thinking
“foregrounds the ways in which social/political processes are gen-
erated through relations between sites, rather than configured
through ‘internal relations’ in sites” (Featherstone, 2011: 140).
Assemblages are constantly in process, contingent and fluid pro-
cesses of assembling, in which development–environment interven-
tions like, for example, a water aid project in India (Mosse, 2005)
are analysed as contingent projects held together by political,
discursive, embodied and technical practices.
CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS AND DEVELOPMENT

Critical geopolitics is one of many cultures of resistance to
geography as imperial truth, state-capitalized knowledge, and
military weapon. It is a small part of a much larger rainbow
struggle to decolonize our inherited geographical imagination
so that other geo-graphings and other worlds might be possible.
(Ó Tuathail, 1996a: 256)
The term geopolitics, which has different meanings in different

spatial and temporal contexts and within different kinds of net-
works of actors, is not only an academic theorising of politics in
sub-disciplinary fields like Political Geography, Political Science
and IR but also refers to the political action of a wide variety of
actors that have sought to write and shape political space. A
highly contested term, geopolitics “poses a question to us every
time it is knowingly evoked and used” (Ó Tuathail, 1996a: 66). It
both informs political practices across the global North/South
divide and is shaped by the political ruptures and political ration-
alities of a given time (Moisio, 2016). The approach taken in this
book is informed by the literature on critical geopolitics – a body
of scholarship that first emerged in the early 1990s and sought to
bridge the disciplines of Geography and International Relations
(IR). It was inspired in Geography by the pioneering work of
“dissident” scholars including Simon Dalby, John Agnew and
Gearoid Ó Tuathail. Its emergence was also coeval with the
development of critical theories of IR from the late 1980s
onwards, especially in the work of Richard Ashley, James Der
Derian, Michael Shapiro and Rob Walker (Campbell, 2009; Power
and Campbell, 2010). A key point of departure was a “recognition
of plurality, in linguistic terms, that geopolitics is a polysemic

sign” (Sidaway, Mamadouh and Power, 2013: 165).
Drawing inspiration from the work of Foucault and Derrida,
critical geopolitics did not seek to develop a theory of how space
and politics intersect but was concerned with developing a mode
of interrogating and exposing the grounds for knowledge produc-
tion and with seeking to analyse the articulation, objectivisation
and subversion of hegemony. It was thus “merely the starting
point for a different form of geopolitics” and as such offered “a
seductive promise, a putative claim that one can get beyond a
baleful geopolitics and recover the real beyond the categorical, the
ideological, the dogmatic, the imperialist and the hyperbolic” (Ó
Tuathail, 2010a: 316). Through Campbell’s (1992) Writing Secur-
ity and Ó Tuathail’s landmark text Critical Geopolitics common
approaches began to develop as an emerging corpus of scholarship
sought to radically reconceptualise “geopolitics” as a complex and
problematic set of discourses, representations and practices. Since
then critical geopolitics has come to encompass a diverse range of
academic challenges to the conventional ways in which political
space has been written, read and practiced. In reflecting on its
emergence Ó Tuathail argued that it is:
. . ..no more than a general gathering place for various critiques

of the multiple geopolitical discourses and practices that char-
acterize modernity. One important initial vector of critique was
the recovery of textuality within practices which are represented
as objective or practical, as “beyond the text.” Geopolitics is
inescapably cultural. A second was the displacement of state-
centric readings of world politics and the recovery of the many
messy practices that constitute the modern inter-state system.
Geopolitics is inescapably plural. A third was the development
of critical histories of geopolitical thinkers and discourses.
Geopolitics is inescapably traversed by relations of power and
gender. (Ó Tuathail, 2010a: 316).
The focus on the displacement of state-centric readings of

world politics and the recovery of the complex and prosaic
practices that constitute the modern inter-state system has opened
up the range of sites/texts/practices where “geopolitics” is seen to
take place. The development of critical histories of geopolitical
thinkers and discourses has also led to an interrogation of a
growing range of formal geopolitical traditions (Atkinson and
Dodds, 2000) which include Latin America (Sidaway, Mamadouh
and Power, 2013). Rather than assuming critical geopolitics to be

a single analytical or methodological endeavour, however, it is
important to recognise that this corpus of scholarship encompasses
various ways of unpacking the tropes and epistemologies of
dominant scriptings of political space. Indeed, for some observers
this may be one of its principal weaknesses; that as it has
expanded and developed its original concerns have been diluted
into the variety of meanings attributed to it. This has meant that
critical geopolitics has had something of an “identity problem”
(Mamadouh, 2010: 320) where its subject, key theoretical con-
tribution and core methodology become increasingly hard to
define as the field diversifies away from the hegemon (the US)
and the great powers to examine other states, or moves away from
formal and practical geopolitics to explore popular geopolitics or
as it shifts away from state-centric approaches to study non-state
actors, such as social movements and transnational organisations
and various forms of collective action. In this book, I seek to pick
up on many of these themes now emerging from a more diversi-
fied field but in particular to deepen the engagement between
critical geopolitics and development and to “postcolonialise” geo-
politics (Robinson, 2003a) in order to take political geography
further towards the global margins, the periphery. Interestingly, one
of the first explicit attempts to posit the scholarly agenda which
subsequently became known as critical geopolitics (Dalby, 2008:
414) was a paper on the “Language and Nature of the New
Geopolitics” (Ó Tuathail, 1986), which begins with El Salvador
and the culture that supported US “interventions” there. Non-
Western political geographies were therefore important to the very
foundations of what would later become known as “critical geopo-
litics” even if they were to become somewhat neglected in its
subsequent development and elaboration (see chapter 2).
Like post-development (with which it shares similar poststruc-
tural origins and a sense that other geo-graphings and other worlds
might be possible), critical geopolitics scholarship has certainly
had its critics. Although a diverse and disparate body of work, the
focus on the recovery of textuality was particularly popular in the
early years and this “mesmerised attention to texts and images”
meant that a focus on the practical, mundane and everyday “little
things” that actually enable the functioning of a broader sense of
geopolitical discourse was often missing (Thrift, 2000). Further,
the concept of discourse has often been relatively under-theorised
in critical geopolitics (Müller, 2008). Feminist scholars have also
noted the tendency towards an elite-centric view of agency as
constituted only at the largest scales and argued that the excessive
focus on textuality, representation and discourse has meant too
little attention to embodied practices and the materiality of geopo-
litics (Hyndman, 2004; Sharp, 2007). As Dittmer (2014: 394)
argues:
Critical geopolitics has done an excellent job of documenting

the role of academics, statespersons, and producers of popular
culture in disseminating narratives that produce geopolitical
subject positions. What it has not been very good at is tying
these subject positions, and the political cognition that they
enable, to political affect.
Some scholars have sought to challenge this elite-centric view

of agency by developing a concern with “intimacy-geopolitics”
(Pain and Staeheli, 2014; Brickell, 2014), which attempts to
dissolve the customary boundaries between global–local, famil-
ial–state and personal–political as objects of study. This required
more sensitive enquiry into the workings of geopower by attend-
ing to objects, the human body and matters of percept, affect and
emotion, as well as the most ordinary (“precognitive”) forms of
sociality (Thrift, 2000). One way to address these concerns, as
Dittmer (2014) advocates, is to adopt an assemblage approach to
geopolitics in order to better understand its embodiment and
materiality. Beyond an excessive textualism and (until recently) a
limited engagement with questions of affect, critical geopolitics
has also often struggled to negotiate the macro/micro scalar divide
(Dittmer, 2014), with recent work increasingly emphasising the
scale of everyday life in geopolitics. Several geographers have
also noted that critical geopolitics, in its quest to destabilise the
normative and to decentre the nation-state, “rarely engages in
transformative and embodied ways of knowing and seeing”
(Hyndman, 2010: 317), or that it has been too often restricted to
unpacking discourses and stopping short of a concern for transfor-
mation in its quest to develop a transgression of binary opposi-
tions (such as core/periphery, domestic/international etc.). Some
critics have also pointed to the presence of “geopolitical remote
sensing” (Paasi, 2000, 2006), or an emerging tendency to observe
and deconstruct discourses from a distance and out of context but
there have been attempts to develop more grounded accounts of
geopolitics using ethnographic methods (Megoran, 2006). Indeed,
Ó Tuathail (2010b) notes that any serious effort to develop a more
geographically responsible geopolitics requires the supplement of
regional expertise and fieldwork and argues that critical geopoli-

tics can deepen its critical practice by grounding itself in regional
research.
To date critical geopolitics has had very little engagement
with issues of global inequality, imperial desires and development,
issues it urgently needs to address if it is to become more
“radical” in orientation (Mercille, 2008) or if it seeks to be more
than “an academic niche chasing America-centric outrages that
does not matter much in the arena of global practice” (Ó Tuathail,
2010a: 317). This book seeks to address these lacunae and short-
comings and it does so in part by explicitly considering the
entanglement of geopolitics and geoeconomics (Cowen and
Smith, 2009; Sparke, 2016) since security relations and political
economy have always been inextricably linked. While the formal
distinction between the “geopolitical” and “geoeconomic” pro-
vides some methodological clarity and analytical purchase, ulti-
mately these logics of power must also be grasped dialectically
(Lee, Wainwright and Glassman, 2018). In contemporary Asia, for
example, the entwinement between geopolitics and geoeconomics
has been complicated by the competition and tension between the
US and China which has become more intense in recent years.
While China has formulated plans for a “Silk Road Economic
Belt” and “Maritime Silk Road” under the title of the “One Belt,
One Road” (OBOR) initiative, the US (at least until President
Trump took office) has promoted an advanced version of a
regional free trade agreement in the region in the form of the
“Trans-Pacific Partnership” (TPP) which has served as a discur-
sive, institutional and geopolitical frame to contain and counter
China in the Asia-Pacific region (Tsui et al., 2016). Both initia-
tives represent significant contemporary examples of the imbrica-
tion of the geopolitical and the geoeconomic whilst OBOR (see
Figure 1.1) in particular reveals a great deal about both the
contemporary configuration of development and its complex and
shifting spatialities (see chapters 5, 7 and 8).
SITUATING DEVELOPMENT HISTORICALLY

They talk to me about progress, about “achievements”, dis-
eases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about
societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot,
institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed,
magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary
FIGURE 1.1 Map of China’s “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) initiative showing the Silk Road Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road.
Map prepared by Chris Orton, Design and Imaging Unit, Department of Geography, Durham University.
possibilities wiped out. They throw facts at my head, statis-

tics, mileages of roads, canals and railroad tracks. . . I am
talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land,
their habits, their life. . . (Césaire, 1972: 21–23).
An archaeology of development demands a full grasp of

location, situating it historically (in tracing its complex gen-
ealogy and meanings, particularly in the eighteenth century),
geographically (in relation to sites of productions, routes of
movement and patterns of reception), and culturally (in rela-
tion to the West’s self-representation, of reason and the
Enlightenment). (Watts, 2003: 8, emphasis in original)
As noted above, many contemporary critiques of development

suffer from an inability to properly locate development in histor-
ical context (Wainwright, 2008). In many ways development is
primarily “forward looking”, imagining a better world (Crush,
1995) and as a result there has often been a tendency to dehistor-
icise development (Power, 2003). As Slater (2004: 224) has noted,
power and knowledge “cannot be adequately grasped if abstracted
from the gravity of imperial encounters and the geopolitical
history of West/non-West relations”. This book insists upon the
need to situate development historically as much as geographically
and culturally. In seeking to do this a post-colonial approach to
development is invaluable (McEwan, 2009) given its historical
focus, its concern with the subaltern and with key themes like
knowledge, power and agency. At the time of writing this book in
northern England (a country whose own wealth is very much the
historical result of the pauperisation of others), such an approach
seems particularly important, especially given the way that some
British officials have described plans for a post-Brexit trading
relationship with the Commonwealth as a kind of “Empire 2.0”.
Prior to Theresa May’s visit to South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya in
August 2018, no British Prime Minister had set foot in Africa for
over five years since David Cameron attended Nelson Mandela’s
funeral in 2013, yet Brexiteers have sought to mobilise the idea of
formerly colonial nations in Africa (and other parts of the Com-
monwealth) forming a dynamic, like-minded “Anglosphere” or
British global network for trade and prosperity. Such fanciful
visions of the future are clearly based on imperial nostalgia but
also on a rather distorted misremembering of the past (Kenny and
Pearce, 2018). In Geography there have been numerous calls in
recent years to decolonise the discipline and geographical
knowledges (see chapter 2) and this is occurring precisely at a

moment when Britain’s foreign relations are increasingly being
driven by the resurgence of white supremacy across Anglophone
contexts and by post-imperial nostalgia (Radcliffe, 2017; Roy,
2016a).
For many observers, development begins with the post-war
creation of ideas and discourses about “underdeveloped areas” (in
Truman’s “Point Four programme” for example) but its emergence
can be traced back much further still, to the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries of European enlightenment rationality
(Cowen and Shenton, 1996). During this time, new attitudes to
work and capital were formulated (Rist, 1997) in a period of
growing commitment to enquiry and criticism (Hampson, 1968)
marked by a concern for social reform and the idea of a progres-
sion and development of societies built around an increasing
secularism (Gay, 1973). The Enlightenment profoundly shaped
what development has come to mean – the idea of progress
forged during this time remains an article of faith in development
thinking today and the history of some of its key actors (like
NGOs) can be traced to this period when the societies of Europe
and North America were increasingly becoming entwined within
global networks of exchange and exploitation (Haskell, 1985a,
1985b). The beginnings of a governmental rationality of develop-
ment can be traced to the greedy extractivism of the British and
Dutch East India Companies (Li, 2007) whose doctors and scien-
tists were among the first to think systematically about the rela-
tions between “men and things” as an arena of intervention and
mobilised to persuade their employers to do likewise (Grove,
1995; Drayton, 2000; Li, 2007). Many of the voluntary or
church-based organisations that represent the birth of contempor-
ary NGOs, were also built through overseas missions during the
Enlightenment (Riddell, 2007) as humanitarians began “to formu-
late new antidotes, new ‘cures’ for the ills of the world” (Lester,
2002: 278). Indeed, Escobar (1995: 2–4) writes about the post-
1945 development “project” as “the last and failed attempt to
complete the Enlightenment in Asia, Africa and Latin America”.
Other key legacies of enlightenment rationality included a ten-
dency to measure progress against the yardstick of technology and
a drive to make human society legible (Adas, 1989; Scott, 1999).
By the 1880s Europeans regarded technical achievement as vir-
tually the sole measure of human worth (Adas, 1989) and this
obsession with technology and technical improvement was some-
thing that development would never quite shake off.
Cowen and Shenton (1996: 13) remind us that the beginnings of

development are located not just in the work of Scottish enlight-
enment writers like Adam Smith but also in the “rough and tumble of
early industrialism” and the emerging need to intervene to confront
predations created by notions of “progress” and “improvement”.
Many enlightenment thinkers viewed the remedy for the disorder
brought on by industrialisation as related to the “capacity” to use
land, labour and capital in the interests of society as a whole and
argued that only certain kinds of individuals could be “entrusted”
with such a role (Cowen and Shenton, 1996). The changing social
orders brought about by the making of European modernity and the
transition from feudal to capitalist modes of social organisation could
thus be managed by “trustees” who had the power to harness these
capacities for societal good and to manage the “fallout from capital-
ism’s advance” (Li, 2007: 21).
As Westad (2006: 76) puts it, the “new slogans of imperialism
at around 1900 were progress and development”. With this came a
missionary zeal to “civilise” and modernise the colonised and their
ways of life. Trusteeship, defined as “the intent which is
expressed, by one source of agency, to develop the capacities of
another” (Cowen and Shenton, 1996: x), was central to that and
has since become one of the most enduring features of develop-
ment. Its objective was not necessarily to dominate others but to
enhance their capacity for action and to direct it (Li, 2007) as
development became linked with the imperative to intervene and
with the notion of active trusteeship. Trusteeship would be led by
“the few who possessed the knowledge to understand why devel-
opment could be constructive” (Cowen and Shenton, 1996: 117)
including a wide variety of actors such as colonial officials
and missionaries, politicians and bureaucrats, international aid
donors, specialists and “experts” in, for example, agriculture,
credit, conservation and hygiene, along with NGOs of various
kinds (Li, 2007). Trustees occupied a position defined by the
claim “to know how others should live, to know what is best
for them, to know what they need” (Li, 2007: 2). In this sense
it was a “culturally coded racism” that effectively decided the
boundary between the “included and excluded” (Duffield,
2007b: 227). Trusteeship does not however translate into any
permanent solution to problems of disorder and decay since, as
Cowen and Shenton stress, it cannot, as there cannot be security
for everyone caught in capitalism’s wake given that capitalism
and improvement are “locked in an awkward embrace”
(Li, 2007: 21).
Brooks (2017) traces one of the earliest attempts to spur

international development to a proposal put forward by Colonel
Edward M House (political advisor to US President Woodrow
Wilson) in 1913 for a US–European alliance to develop what
House termed the “waste places” of the world such as in Africa.
During the 1920s and 1930s European colonial powers subse-
quently sought to maximise the benefits they might accrue from
their African possessions, through state intervention and develop-
ment programmes, regarded by some as amounting to a kind of
“second colonial occupation” (cf. Low and Lonsdale, 1976).
Cooper (1997: 85) even locates the origins of development in the
imperial crisis of the late 1930s and 1940s, brought on by a series
of strikes and boycotts in the West Indies and different regions of
Africa, arguing that development “did not simply spring from the
brow of colonial leaders, but was to a significant extent thrust
upon them, by the collective action of workers located within
hundreds of local contexts as much as in an imperial economy”
(Cooper, 1997: 85). In an attempt to stave off the threat of impend-
ing anti-colonial insurrection, late-colonial states increasingly set
out to provide native populations with the benefits of improvement
and orderly rule through development programmes intended to
guarantee economic growth, social welfare and political stability,
thus reinvigorating colonialism (Cooper, 1997, 2004). The British
government, for example, administered grants for infrastructure
projects across poorer countries, passing the Colonial Development
Act in 1929 and the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of
1940, the latter releasing funds for spending on sanitation, educa-
tion, housing, infrastructure and a range of other social projects (see
Figure 1.2) designed to both raise living standards and produce a
more pacified, more efficient and healthier labour force (Hailey,
1957; Pearce, 1982). In France, the post-war equivalent was the
creation of the Investment Fund for Economic and Social Develop-
ment in 1946 (Cooper, 2002: 36). The interventionist economic
management which had begun to take shape in the 1930s proceeded
apace after 1945, as Britain, France and Belgium sought to invest in
and expand production using new agricultural technologies and
practices (and a flood of “experts”) in what were depicted as
“under-utilised” African territories (in terms of both natural and
human resources), involving goods like groundnuts in Tanganyika,
cotton in Niger and copper, gold and uranium in the Belgian
Congo. Colonial states also increasingly began to envision, plan
and implement more comprehensive schemes of public health that
included rural African populations (Coghe, 2017).
FIGURE 1.2 Labourers lay shark fillets out to dry in the sun at the Colonial
Development Corporation’s Atlantic Fisheries Shore Station
in The Gambia during the early 1950s. Central Office of
Information post-1945 colour transparency collection, cour-
tesy of Imperial War Museum.
The public health, settlement and agricultural development

schemes that appeared in Africa during the death throes of
empire between the 1930s and the 1970s are good loci from
which to observe both the role that science played in the building
of the “developmentalist state” (cf. Bonneuil, 2000) but also the
emerging role of development in countering disorder and insur-
gency. It was in these kinds of moments and encounters that we
can trace the “imperial DNA of modern development” (Mawdsley,
2017: 109) but also a deepening association between development
and the countering of social and political disorder and insurgency,
an association that has continued long after the formal end of
empire. Key terms in contemporary development parlance like
community and citizenship featured, for example, in the vocabul-
aries of the 1950s colonists in Kenya who sought to “rehabilitate”
errant anti-colonial activists through community development pro-
grammes that would teach them to become responsible “citizens”
(Presley, 1988). Debates about model villages and villagisation in
the interwar period were never simply about hygiene and agricul-
tural reform alone but were closely underpinned by anxieties over
the potential dangers of colonial “progress” and societal change.
Many colonial officials viewed the resettlement of the “native”
population, in model-like villages, as a means to better control
them and, with them, the way colonial society was changing
(Coghe, 2017).
Some of the development projects of the late colonial period
were undertaken on a vast scale, as in the cases of, for example,
the Cahora Bassa dam in Mozambique, the Suez and Panama
canals and the Gezira irrigation scheme in Sudan. Villagisation
projects in British, French and Portuguese colonies transformed
the conditions of life and modes of production in rural areas
(Castelo, 2016) but across them there was a kind of common
“quest for legibility”, as many of the villages were specifically
located in the vicinity of roads in an attempt to make them more
“visible” and accessible for tax collection, medical control, labour
recruitment and agricultural assistance. For obvious reasons, many
Africans did not want to live in the new villages close to roads or
administrative posts, where they would be under the constant
vigilance of the colonial administration. Portugal undertook a
vast villagisation campaign during the wars of decolonisation
(1961–75) and in Angola alone Portuguese military and civil
administrations forcibly resettled more than a million rural Afri-
cans into strategic and rural development villages (Bender, 1978).
By doing so, they followed a counterinsurgency strategy that had
already been applied by the British and the French in other wars
of decolonisation, aimed at preventing contact between guerrilla
forces and Angola’s rural masses and, simultaneously, at winning
the latter’s “hearts and minds” through accelerated rural develop-
ment efforts (Feichtinger, 2017). An embattled and impoverished
Portugal fought three insurgencies (in Guinea Bissau, Angola and
Mozambique) and by the end of the 1960s had, after Israel, the
highest proportion in the world of people in arms (Cann, 1997).
Portugal also invested significant public funding, science and
technology expertise and state support in a series of rural white
settlement schemes or colonatos aimed at Europeans and intending
to reproduce in Africa Portugal’s rural social and material land-
scape and to construct an imagined Portuguese pastoral way of life
that could serve as a model for Africans (Castelo, 2016). The
Portuguese brand of the “developmentalist” colonial state envi-
sioned the ideal type of white settler, “modest, rooted in the land,
earning only enough to get by” (Castelo, 2016: 267), being
emulated by the African peasant, ensuring both social peace and

colonial order. Using scientific and technical knowledges and
mobilising state resources, “development” (in this case as rural
mythology) could be mimicked, transplanted to another location
and enrolled in various political projects of bringing order and
countering anti-colonial insurgency whilst bolstering an endan-
gered settler colonialism.
Many debates took place in the colonies about which subgroups
were more or less “improvable” and about the suitability and readi-
ness of racial others to be governed in a liberal manner, with native
difference and deficiency supplying an important rationale for colo-
nial intervention (Li, 2007). Colonial powers were however caught
between “the impossibility and necessity of creating the other as the
other – the different, the alien – and incorporating the other within a
single social and cultural system of domination” (Sider, 1987: 7),
thus facing a significant contradiction between difference and
improvement. One strategy for dealing with this contradiction
adopted by colonial regimes was what Wilder (1999) calls the
“structure of permanent deferral” as native society was both “ratio-
nalised and racialised”, its subjects “destined to become rights-
bearing individuals, but always too immature to exercise those
rights” (45–47). Li (2007) argues that the structure of “permanent
deferral” continues to pervade contemporary development agendas, a
situation in which inclusion is accompanied by the continuous
production of reasons for exclusion. This has been a central feature
not just of the civilising project of colonialism but also of the logic of
post-colonial projects of societal improvement (Li, 2007: 15).
Planned development is premised on the improvement of the target
group but also posits a boundary that clearly separates those who
need to be developed from those who will do the developing.
Deficient subjects (often racial others) can be identified and improved
only from the outside (Li, 2007).
Many countries were just reaching independence in the 1960s
(see Figures 1.3 and 1.4), at the “zenith” of international develop-
ment and during a time of intense Cold War confrontation and as a
result both the US and USSR heavily drew upon the idea of
development in a variety of African, Asian or Latin American
contexts, constituting the “Third World” of newly independent
states as an arena of global political and ideological struggle.
President Truman’s Point Four speech “proposed a complicated
merger between development and the Cold War” (Cullather, 2000:
651) and in just a few paragraphs of his inaugural speech of 1949
the principal axes of global opposition, communist/non-communist
FIGURE 1.3 “Redefining the power III”, part of a series of images depict-
ing post-colonial performances and futures by Angolan artist
Kiluanji Kia Henda. The series shows Angolan fashion
designer Shunnoz Fiel dos Santos standing atop various
vacated pedestals on colonial monuments across Luanda,
Angola. Here Fiel stands in place of Portuguese colonial
Governor-General Pedro Alexandrino near Largo Rainha
Ginga in Luanda. The image poses questions about Angola’s
historical memory whilst seeking to introduce into public
dialogue more inventive and imaginative notions of the
nation’s future (Cobb, 2014). Courtesy of Kiluanji Kia
Henda/Galleria Fonti, Naples.
and colonial/anti-colonial were enfolded within the overspreading

categories of development and underdevelopment (Rist, 1997). In
the process, nationalists, communists, expansionists and pan-Afri-
canists all lost the power to define their struggle, their own version
of progress, as they “were now forced to travel the ‘development
path’ mapped out for them by others” (Rist, 1997: 79). Following
the commencement of worldwide technical assistance programmes
by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1949, initiated
in reaction to communist victories in Asia, development rapidly
became an intense arena for debate among member states from the
two ideological camps (Maul, 2009). Selecting a development strat-
egy “generally went together with a Cold War alignment, auto-
matically turning dissenting experts and constituencies into either
communist sympathisers or counterrevolutionaries” (Cullather, 2009:
511). Despite common assumptions and methods, each side strove to
differentiate its own path by nominating surrogates, countries poor
enough and “typical” enough to showcase a developmental triumph
FIGURE 1.4 A mural at Largo da Independência in Luanda, Angola,

beneath a statue of Agostinho Neto, symbolises the break
from the chains of empire. Photo by author.
and “trophy” projects. Although there were various forms of assis-

tance on offer from within the communist world (see chapter 4),
engineers from Moscow, Pyongyang and Belgrade largely built the
same model farms, trophy stadiums, dams and refineries “with the
same extravagant promises and meagre results as their Western
counterparts” (Cullather, 2009: 507), although the real stakes
“were measured in prestige, state power, and international align-
ments” (508).
In the process of decolonisation, “development” served as an
overarching objective for many nationalist movements and the inde-
pendent states they tried to form, a “lodestar” (Wallerstein, 1988)
invested with the hopes and dreams of many newly emerging states
seeking to address inequalities and divisions in their societies (Rah-
nema, 1997a). Driven on by Cold War imperatives it was also taken
up by a range of “developmental states” in East Asia such as South
Korea (see chapter 5) that sought modernisation through macroeco-
nomic planning. With the accelerating pace of decolonisation and the
creation of independent states in the South, geopolitical questions
were thus increasingly addressed from a set of new or “Third World”
perspectives, emerging from the perception that “underdeveloped”
countries had distinct geopolitical considerations from those of

Western societies. Key to this were theories of modernisation (see
chapter 3), at the core of which was an assumption of convergence,
that there is one best form of political economy and that all states are
moving towards it. Modernisation was a key part of the Cold War and
was an “imperial” struggle between universal rationality and local,
contextualised knowledge (techne vs. mêtis) (Scott, 1998). The way
in which the Cold War framed and conditioned the meanings of key
terms like modernisation and development is hugely important here,
in part because the “storyline of development changes when you put
the diplomatic history back in” (Cullather, 2009: 508). This was not a
singular or straightforward process since, as Farish (2010: xvii)
notes, there were multiple Cold Wars. There were also multiple
models of the modern on offer. In the US, modernisation rescued a
political consensus for aid that was falling apart in the early 1960s
(Cullather, 2009), and revitalised UN agencies struggling to find a
mission (Maul, 2009). Moreover, modernisation theory allowed
newly independent regimes to signal ideological alignments and
identify allies. As the US and newly independent regimes eyed each
other with suspicion, development provided room for collaboration
(Cullather, 2000).
In the literature on modernisation, technology was theorised “as
a sort of moral force” (Escobar, 1995: 36) that would educate and
transform but that was at the same time “neutral and inevitably
beneficial”. Such ideas underlay the Kennedy administration’s diag-
nosis of global poverty: since capital and technology were what the
US had to offer. As Galbraith (1979: vi) observed, “poverty was seen
to be the result of a shortage of capital, an absence of technical
skills. . . Having vaccine, we identified smallpox.” Insurgency was
almost always the disease for which development would provide the
remedy, in both a curative and a preventive sense. Imagining devel-
opment as a series of technical interventions and a process of
incremental, managed change towards a final ideal state, proponents
of modernisation were fond of modelling, or the dissection of case
studies, with the aim of revealing generalisable principles that could
be applied in other circumstances. In the vocabulary of development,
a “model” (itself an artefact of the Cold War) was a loose, descriptive
analogue pairing a nation with a strategy (e.g. the Taiwan model of
export-led growth) and “encapsulated a country’s economic or poli-
tical history as a sequence of strategic moves open to imitation”
(Cullather, 2009: 510). From this viewpoint “a particular nation state
appears to be a functional unit – something akin to a car, say, or a
television set – that can be compared with and used as a model for
improving other such units” (Mitchell, 1991a: 29). The penchant for
replicable models can be traced to the Enlightenment’s search for a
legible society that could be known and controlled from the centre
(Scott, 1998), which peaked in the mid-twentieth-century period of
“high modernism”, characterised by a mania for colossal, centrally
designed social landscapes – Le Corbusier’s planned cities, Stalin’s
collective farms, the Tennessee Valley Authority – where nearly
every aspect of human and natural life could be supervised by
experts. In the process, history often got lost as “universal, repeatable
features are emphasised while idiosyncrasies, unique circumstances,
individuals, or motivations are blotted out like unwanted commissars
in a Stalinist photograph” (Cullather, 2000: 645). Politics was also
often “blotted out” of modernisers’ stories of the stages of growth
whilst popular resistance to modernisation was often reduced to a
merely “technical” difficulty.
AN AFROCENTRIC FOCUS
In seeking to examine the nexus between geopolitics and develop-
ment, the book draws upon a wide range of examples, some from
Asia and Latin America but the clear majority from Africa, a
continent that has long been the focus of intensive D/development
and that “continues to be described through a series of lacks and
absences, failings and problems, plagues and catastrophes” (Ferguson,
2006: 2). This is partly because of my own research interests, which
have largely been centred on Lusophone Africa in particular, but
partly also because Africa’s complex geopolitics have so often been
neglected in IR and Political Geography (see chapter 2). As a
continent of “lacks and absences, failings and problems, plagues and
catastrophes” it has often had a certain kind of (in)visibility in terms
of debates about statehood or globalisation, for example, and in
writing this book I wanted to challenge that by placing Africa at the
centre of my analysis. IR has typically focused on the way in which
marginalised, poor and weak African countries are acted and impacted
upon by great powers and international institutions (Beswick and
Hammerstad, 2013; Abrahamsen, 2017) and consequently the agency
and diversity of African state and non-state actors have often been
neglected. The continent also provides an ideal vantage point from
which to explore the intersections between geopolitics and develop-
ment because of the idea that Africa is currently “rising”, buoyed by
relatively high levels of economic growth combined with the growing
regional and even global political power of some of the continent’s
bigger players (e.g. South Africa). For some observers, this “rise” or
“renaissance”, given that it is based on an intensification of resource
extraction, only serves to further push the continent into underdeve-
lopment and dependency, reifying its peripheral position in the global
economy (Taylor, 2014, 2016). In this view, the growing volume of
development cooperation between African states and (re)emerging
powers like China will do little to change the structural tapestry of
Africa’s historically entrenched dependency (Taylor, 2016).
The continent has today become an “emerging market”, a source
of violent threat and a target of various moral crusades and over the
past decade or so, the term “frontier”, both as a concept and as a
metaphor, has been widely used in association with the increasing
importance of Africa in international relations and the global econ-
omy (Bach, 2013, 2016). There are a number of reasons for this
including the discovery of substantial new oil and gas reserves, the
proliferation of spectacular infrastructural rehabilitation and develop-
ment projects, the availability of large stocks of uncultivated arable
land and the growing significance of foreign cooperation with “rising
powers” like China, India and Brazil but also a wide range of other
players like Turkey, South Korea and Malaysia that seek strategic
influence in Africa along with access to resources, markets and
global alliances. Descriptions of Africa as the “world’s last frontier”
or as “untapped” or “overlooked” constitute an invitation to “call
back the ghosts of the explorers, soldiers, traders and settlers who
each in their own way once ‘discovered’ Africa” (Bach, 2013: 11).
The frontier’s association with the assertion of control by a core over
its periphery has led to talk of a “new scramble for Africa” based on
resource extraction, renewed exploitation, accumulation, the margin-
alisation of African economic actors and the corruption of African
elites (Bach, 2013). Historically, the European encounter with Africa
has often been quite “bi-polar” and “pendulum-like”, swinging
between optimism and pessimism towards the continent, its peoples
and cultures and engaging in both positive and more explicitly racist
and paternalistic registers (Reid, 2014). The idea that massive GDP
growth is inherently “good” and something to be worshipped
(Hickel, 2017), which prevails in the West’s economic engagement
with Africa, is a modern manifestation of the early-nineteenth-
century perception that all the continent needed was to be “opened
up” to free trade in legitimate commodities, whether traded by states
or by individuals, and that as a result Africa would “find the peace,
stability and prosperity it so badly lacked” (Reid, 2014: 159).
Africa has increasingly become the focus of what Teju Cole
(2012) has called the “white saviour industrial complex” in
reference to the viral video Kony 2012 which aimed to stop and
apprehend the Ugandan leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army
(LRA), Joseph Kony. In particular, “saving” the continent has
become a favourite hobby for celebrity humanitarians (Mathers,
2012), through self-righteous Africa-related campaigns and events
such as those concerning “conflict minerals” or debt (e.g. “debt,
AIDS, trade, Africa” or DATA), the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC),
Live 8 and Make Poverty History, although arguably these often do
more harm than good (Moyo, 2009) in approaching international
problems in a way that satisfies the sentimentalities of (white)
audiences (Cole, 2012), but diverts attention away from the struc-
tural causes and (geopolitical) roots of conflict or impoverishment.
Kony 2012 promoted “the belief that western involvement in weak
states in order to protect individual and group rights arises from
unquestionably altruistic motives and is the answer to addressing
human suffering worldwide” (Belloni, 2007: 454). Similarly, the
SDC campaign presented Darfur as a moral rather than a political
issue and ignored its complex history, whilst simplifying the issues
to racial and religious binaries (of Arab Muslim perpetrators and
black Christian victims) and reporting fictional data (Mamdani,
2009). Celebrities mete out a “politics of pity” (Boltanski, 1999)
where structural and social problems are forcefully refracted
through the neoliberal lens of the “heroic individual”, thereby
taking responsibility off international financial institutions (IFIs),
states and the economic structures of inequality more generally
(Goodman, 2010). As Shivji (2007: 43) asks, “how can you make
poverty history without understanding the ‘history of poverty?’”
U2’s lead singer Bono, who has been very vocal about African
poverty, has attempted to gain credibility by conjoining his past
with that of Africa by invoking the history of Irish colonial
dispossession under the British and by transferring his Irish under-
privileged background and post-colonial citizenship to Africans and
to the African present (Magubane, 2008). As someone born in
Ireland myself (and a big fan of U2 growing up), I have always
found this fascinating but also how celebrity humanitarians like
Bono or Bob Geldof are themselves part of a long tradition that
continually objectifies “Africa” as a place of “ungovernability”
where “horrendous things happened to benighted people, and
where the West could display its full panoply of moral and material
powers to positive ends” (Reid, 2014: 144).
In several celebrity humanitarian accounts “Africa” appears as
a feminised object, something beautiful to be admired, gazed at
and tamed, rather than a speaking subject of world politics in
charge of its own future or representation (Repo and Yrjölä,

2011). Africa has been consistently infantilised and homogenised,
repetitively reduced to what is “seen” to be deficient (Andreasson,
2005). This is in part the result of a dominant “scopic regime” that
plays a major role in enacting a place in the world called “Africa”,
largely through the repetition and reiteration of colonial tropes
(Campbell and Power, 2010). The changing nature of these artifi-
cial “Africas” is apparent in critical analyses of museums and
colonial exhibitions, photographs, advertising, Hollywood movies
and media images (Coombes, 1997; Ryan, 1997; Landau and
Kaspin, 2002; Mayer, 2002; Ramamurthy, 2003; Chouliaraki,
2006; Repo and Yrjölä, 2011). The writing of Africa through the
metaphor of darkness and light has been a central and recurring
theme (Brantlinger, 1988), as has the visualisation of Africa as a
space of backwardness and underdevelopment that requires exter-
nal intervention. Similar representations of Africa as the “dark
continent” continue to play out in contemporary media representa-
tions (e.g. concerning China–Africa relations; Mawdsley, 2008;
Power, Mohan and Tan-Mullins, 2012). Africa has also been a
focus for the production of “poverty porn” by NGOs, charities and
aid agencies that have sought to exploit visual images of African
poverty in order to generate the necessary sympathy or support for
a given cause. The subjects are overwhelmingly children (usually
depicted in a pitiable state with a swollen belly, staring blankly
into the camera, waiting for salvation). Drawing upon post-colo-
nial and post-development literatures, this book seeks to proble-
matise and challenge these persistent colonial representations
which depict “Africa” as an object rather than a subject of world
politics, or as a feminised and infantilised space of deficiency,
poverty, backwardness and underdevelopment. Rather than seeing
Africa as acted and impacted upon from outside by great powers
and international institutions or as in need of saving by benevolent
white saviours, it highlights the agency of African political actors
and insists on the complexity, heterogeneity and rich diversity of
African cultures and polities.
Finally, as a continent constructed as a source of violent
threat, Africa reveals a great deal about contemporary configura-
tions of the geopolitics/development nexus, in part because of the
changing (and increasingly covert) military relationships between
the continent and a range of external actors. Since 9/11 Africa’s
perceived fragility and marginality have been increasingly securi-
tised, with growing concerns in the US in particular about Islamic
extremism and the dangers of state failure and underdevelopment
on the continent. The (re)emerging economies have also made

security and defence a key part of their cooperation with African
states (alongside other key actors like the EU). African political
leaders now regularly link their own domestic struggles (e.g. with
a particular group of insurgents) to larger global security agendas
and have proved especially adept at persuading Washington that
they are the best guarantors of stability in their particular region or
can be relied upon to sign up to larger anti-terrorist projects (Reid,
2014). Association with the US may however render countries more
vulnerable than previously to outside attack and, in the eyes of many
of their citizens, erode rather than increase their legitimacy, particu-
larly following US President Trump’s reference in January 2018 to
African nations as “shithole countries” (The Guardian, January 12th,
2018). Again, this is not just about the US, however. Saudi Arabia,
the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar and Iran have also been
seeking support from countries in Africa in an attempt to advance
their own domestic and international political and security agendas.
Saudi Arabia and its allies have been concerned about jihadist groups
that have taken root in East Africa and the Horn, including Islamic
State and al-Qaeda affiliates, gaining strength in the Arabian Penin-
sula. Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s break with Qatar in 2017 (claiming
that the Gulf state supports terrorism) upended traditional alliances
and both countries have since urged African states to break relations
with Iran, enhancing their development cooperation with Africa and
establishing ports and military bases at sites in Somalia, Djibouti and
Eritrea whilst Qatar and Turkey, which support a different model of
political Islam and are closer to Saudi Arabia’s arch-rival Iran, have
also been increasing their presence in Somalia and Sudan (Stevis-
Gridneff, 2018).
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The book comprises a total of eight chapters. Chapter 2 explores the
ways in which questions of development and (geo)politics in the non-
Western world (particularly Africa) have historically been concep-
tualised in Political Geography and International Relations. It exam-
ines the emergence of “tropical geographies” (and the orientalist
representations that shaped them) but also considers the emergence
of the Area Studies complex and in making the case for a post-
colonial geopolitics of development calls for greater attention to
subaltern spatialities and imaginaries. Chapter 3 focuses on one of
the most significant and enduring metageographies of development,
the “Third World”, and examines the theorisation, discursive prac-

tices and institutional architecture of modernisation along with the
way in which they were closely shaped by Cold War geopolitics.
Chapter 4 then considers the Cold War history of foreign aid
practices with specific reference to the US, China and the USSR
and examines their use of development as a means of either counter-
ing communist insurgency or fomenting it. Chapter 5 then turns to a
consideration of the role of state and non-state actors in development,
exploring the post-colonial crisis of state-led developmentalisms in
the South and the consequent proliferation of social movements that
have sought to resist and contest state-led narratives of development
and to construct alternatives. Chapter 6 examines the emergence of
the security–development nexus and the increasing securitisation and
politicisation of overseas development and official aid practices since
9/11 and explores the rediscovery of development-based counter-
insurgency in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. It also seeks to map
the contemporary configuration of the expanding US military assem-
blage in Africa and the contemporary scripting of the continent as a
“swamp of terror” infested with Islamic insurgencies. Chapter 7 then
examines the importance of economic risers or (re)emerging econo-
mies like China, India, Brazil and South Korea who have increas-
ingly sought to develop an internationalist profile and to assert
themselves as humanitarian, peacekeeping and peacebuilding actors
in (and champions of) the South, along with the growing importance
of SSDC and asks what this means for the existing landscape of
development cooperation and for Africa. Finally, chapter 8 distils the
key conclusions from the book and maps out a research agenda for
furthering the study of geopolitics and development.
Chapter 2
Post-colonialism,
geopolitics and the
periphery
INTRODUCTION: THE CHANGING
METAGEOGRAPHIES OF DEVELOPMENT
The true power of the West lies not in its political and
technological might but in its power to define. (Nandy,
1987: ix)
The geographer’s “South” is not exactly the same as the “South”

in UN trade debates, or the “third world,” or the “less developed
countries,” or the economists’ “periphery” or the cultural theor-
ists’ “post-colonial” world, or the biologists’ “southern world,”
or the geologists’ former Gondwana – though there is some
overlapping along this spectrum. . . there is enormous social
diversity within each; recognizing the polarity is only the begin-
ning of analysis, not the end. (Connell, 2009: 3)
T HROUGHOUT its history, the complex spatialities of development

have often been collapsed down into shorthand geographical imagi-
nations and designations like “the tropics”, the “Third World” and
the “Global South” and whilst these practices vary within academic
and policy circles (albeit with “some overlapping”) (Connell, 2007,
2009), “disciplinary languages have a history of upholding national
boundaries, regional differences, and geopolitical hierarchies”
(Levander and Mignolo, 2011: 2). As such, “[i]ntellectual inquiry
can all too easily naturalize territoriality” (2). This chapter seeks to
critically examine the scripting and mapping of some of the major
regionalisations and spatialisations of the non-Western world that
have historically guided development theory and practice, such as
Post-colonialism and the Periphery 41
“the tropics”, the “Third World” and the “Global South”, and
explores their (in)significance to theorisation and scholarship in IR
and Political Geography.
During the emergence of modern Geography as an academic
discipline over a century ago a number of schemes were developed
that attempted to regionalise the world, at macro as well as sub-
national scales (Sidaway et al., 2016). Indeed, the urge to classify
and compare has been a founding feature of Geography, remaining
a point of departure for the discipline and one that requires further
reflection on its origins and fortunes (Sidaway, Woon and Jacobs,
2014: 6). Much of what has travelled under the banner of “compar-
ison” has tended to be “deeply retrograde” (Hart, 2018: 372) but
comparison can operate as a means of critical engagement as well
as a tool of oppression (Hart, 2018). As Connell (2009: 3) notes,
recognising the polarity expressed by terms like the “Third World”
or “the South” is “only the beginning of the analysis, not the end”.
In seeking to further understand the nexus between geopolitics and
development it is first necessary to interrogate the metageographies
that have historically shaped understandings of international rela-
tions and political geography – the spatial structures and “uncon-
scious frameworks” (Lewis and Wigen, 1997) that have organised
studies of development past and present:
Every global consideration of human affairs employs a meta-

geography, whether acknowledged or not. By metageography
we mean the set of spatial structures through which people
gain their knowledge of the world: the often unconscious
frameworks that organize studies of history, sociology, anthro-
pology, economics, political science, or even natural history.
(Lewis and Wigen, 1997: ix)
The concept of metageographies refers to the relatively unexamined

and often taken-for-granted spatial frameworks through which
knowledge is organised within all fields of the social sciences and
humanities. The distinction between the merely geographical and the
metageographical is not always clear-cut. In one sense “Africa”, for
example, is merely a geographical label that is defined in different
ways by different writers, but if one essentialises the category and
begins writing about “African politics”, one clearly moves into
metageographical terrain. Thus, as Lewis (2015: 1) explains, “geo-
graphical concepts become ‘metageographical’ concepts to the extent
that they lose their specific spatial coordinates and become imbued
with extraneous conceptual baggage”. It is not rare to associate an
42 Post-colonialism and the Periphery
entire continent fully with a specific label (such as “underdeveloped

Africa”), thus ascribing a high degree of “homogeneity” to a con-
tinent of 54 states, a practice that is not uncommon inside the “black
box” of development or underdevelopment (Grant and Agnew,
1996). Mignolo (2005) calls for a shift away from the assumption
that history takes place in continents, towards an understanding of
how such geographies came about – as labels, designations, and
identities that are themselves historical constructs – reflecting wider
geopolitics. In part, this involves a focus on the “locus of enuncia-
tion”, or the “epistemic location from where the world was classified
and ranked” (Mignolo, 2005: 42). The idea of Latin America, for
example, can be traced from its emergence in Europe under France’s
leadership, through its appropriation by the Creole élite of South
America and the Spanish Caribbean in the second half of the nine-
teenth century and supposes that there is an America that is Latin,
which can be defined in opposition to one that is not, creating the
image of a homogeneous region with defined borders in ways which
exclude indigenous peoples and overlook complex geographies of
migration (Mignolo, 2005).
As important concepts and partitions of the world, the wide
circulation of these metageographies plays a fundamental role in
the building of our personal geographical imageries (Vanolo,
2010) and imaginations; using the language of Baudrillard
(1983), hyper-realities (representations) are often more determin-
ing than “hard facts” in influencing our actions. In this way it is
important to consider the ideas, methods and categories that
foreign scholars bring as part of a process of intellectual pacifica-
tion and ordering of the world (Cooper, 2005). This also involves
understanding the variety of metaphors used in development as
“culturally learned ways of looking at places, not as ‘mirrors’ of
the territory” (Vanolo, 2010: 27). As noted in chapter 1, an
important example of this is the metaphor of “Africa” as the
“dark continent” which is in part the result of a dominant “scopic
regime” that plays a major role in enacting a place in the world
called “Africa”, largely through the repetition and reiteration of
colonial tropes (Campbell and Power, 2010). We might also trace
the historical emergence of other “geopolitically determined
domains” such as Southeast Asia, the Southern Cone of Latin
America and Southern Africa (Sidaway, 2012). “Southeast Asia”,
as Keyes (1992) has argued, largely amounts to an artificial
grouping of diverse lands and peoples projected as a distinct
region by colonial administrators and by allied leaders as a theatre
of operations during World War II. Tyner (2007: 1) has also
shown how “the construction of Southeast Asia as a geographic

entity has been a crucial component in the creation of the Amer-
ican empire”. Arguably the idea of the Middle East has also had
comparable significance (Culcasi, 2010).
According to post-development scholar Wolfgang Sachs
(1992: 3), “the scrapyard of history now awaits the category
Third World to be dumped”. Before the category is completely
discarded, however, it is important to fully appreciate its signifi-
cance as a geopolitical and epistemological category in relation to
development and its spatialities (see also chapter 3) as well as its
historical “decomposition” as a category (Sidaway, 2013) and the
alternatives that have been put forward to replace it. The “Third
World” was not a place but rather a project (Prashad, 2007: xv)
and one that came to embody something of the radical spirit
associated with national struggles, revolution and liberation (Sid-
away, 2012). For Vanolo (2010) this means that the “Third World”
may be considered as a “creative metaphor” while “North” and
“South” are dismissed as “just denominative marks”, designating a
global divide that is conceptually similar to “rich–poor”. Just as
the Third World was not a place, however, neither is the “Global
South” simply “a directional designation or a point due south from
a fixed north” (Grovogui, 2011: 176). Like the term “Third
World”, the “Global South” is also “a symbolic designation that
captures the possibilities of cohesion that can emerge when former
colonial entities engage in political projects of decolonisation” and
one that “continues to invite re-examinations of the intellectual,
political, and moral foundations of the international system”
(Grovogui, 2011: 176). The South is thus “an idea and a set
of practices, attitudes, and relations” but also represents a
“disavowal of institutional and cultural practices associated
with colonialism and imperialism. . . [both] a call and a label
signifying the coming into form of a different world based on
responsibility toward self and others” (Grovogui, 2011: 178).
More than an existing entity to be described by different
disciplines, the “global South” has been “invented in the strug-
gle and conflicts between imperial global domination and
emancipatory and decolonial forces that do not acquiesce with
global designs” (Levander and Mignolo, 2011: 3). In examining
the geopolitics–development nexus it is important to attend to
the historical construction of such invented metageographies
along with the way in which they became both the focus of
“global designs” but also key sites of struggle between imperial
domination and anti-colonial emancipation.
This chapter begins with a discussion of one of the earliest

metageographies to have shaped geographical research on develop-
ment: “the tropics”. This became a powerful and enduring imagina-
tive geography and a particular kind of Orientalism (Power and
Sidaway, 2004) but, particularly through the work of scholars like
French geographer Yves Lacoste, it also arguably became an impor-
tant site for the early development of critical geopolitics. The chapter
then traces the historical emergence of Area Studies out of imperial
projects of classification, ordering and power in the context of post-
war concerns to contain the spread of communism before exploring
the ways in which questions of development and (geo)politics in the
non-Western world have historically been conceptualised in Political
Geography and IR. In particular, the chapter attempts to set out the
situated basis of their claims and vantage points and directly engages
with a number of critiques of “Western IR” and Political Geography.
The principal focus here is on the historical silencing of a Southern or
“Third World” Other through constructions of “the West” as the only
subject with a right to speak and through the mapping of the global
South as a space of exception. The chapter then examines the ways in
which Africa in particular has been discussed and debated in IR and
Political Geography and seeks to draw out the ways in which these
(sub)disciplines have struggled to capture the complexity of politics
and political spaces on the continent, along with the role they have
played in the normalisation of particular kinds of states as the bench-
mark for analysis through the creation of certain assumptions and
teleological arguments in which many African states have been
depicted as “deviant”, “weak” or “failing”, with no “real” sovereignty.
Finally, the chapter concludes by making a case for a post-colonial
geopolitics of development focused on subaltern geopolitics, which, it
is argued, offers a more nuanced sensibility towards the varied range
of post-colonial trajectories and forms of politics in the South.
TROPICALITY AND ORIENTALISM

whether viewed as the exotic site of a noble innocence and
simplicity that the West has lost, or as a fertile yet
primitive estate awaiting the civilising and modernising
intervention of the West, the tropics have been affixed to
Western frameworks of meaning, desire and knowledge-
able manipulation – a framework in which tropical peoples
have been deemed to be unable to represent themselves.
(Clayton and Bowd, 2006: 209)
The concept of “the tropics” has been seductive, powerful and

enduring and, like the Orient, needs to be understood “as a
conceptual, and not just physical, space” (Arnold, 1996: 141–
142). Tropicality, as a discourse or complex of Western ideas,
attitudes, knowledges and experiences, can be traced back to the
fifteenth century (Clayton and Bowd, 2006) and one of the
“Western frameworks of meaning, desire and knowledge manip-
ulation” (211) it gradually became affixed to was that of develop-
ment. Tropicality, like Orientalism, operates as what Said (1978:
55, 327) described as a system of citation, with a select number of
tropes and motifs (“typical encapsulations” as Said called them)
about the Orient, or tropics, taking on the mantle of truth through
repeated use (Bowd and Clayton, 2013). The language of devel-
opment was key to these systems of citation and the metageogra-
phies and truths they gave rise to. As Said (1978: 55, 327) argued,
partial and value-laden ideas and images of regions such as the
Orient and tropics become taken-for-granted texts and “create not
only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe”.
Orientalism worked through an “imaginative geography” that
rendered the Orient as “an enclosed space” and “a stage affixed
to Europe” (Said, 1978: 63–68). The tropics also provided a
similar kind of stage in the early nineteenth century, as the British,
for example, “affixed” India to the tropics through the deployment
of alien European categories of nature and landscape (Arnold,
2005: 225). In this sense, the ideas and methods that Western
observers and scholars brought to foreign and colonial regions
were “less a natural means of analysis of bounded societies
located elsewhere than part of a process of intellectual pacification
and ordering of the world” (Cooper, 2005: 15).
Naming a part of the world “the tropics” became a way of
identifying a space that was separate from the West (Arnold, 2000,
2005) and of judging this space against the northern temperate
zone (Clayton and Bowd, 2006) constructed as the normal, against
which the tropical world is perceived and evaluated. A false
singularity was ascribed to the tropics as “other” where climate
was used to make sense of cultural difference and in the process to
project moral categories onto global space. The tropics here were
depicted as altogether “other” – climatically, geographically and
morally (Driver and Yeoh, 2000) – as Western identities (and
discourses of development) were elaborated in opposition to
foreign lands and peoples. From the earliest photographic attempts
to represent tropical hybrid races to depictions of disease in new
tropical medicines, there were multiple practices through which
“the tropics” were known, practical and bodily as well as intellec-

tual and discursive (Power, 2009). By the beginning of the nine-
teenth century it was commonplace to proclaim that the luxuriance
and heat of the tropical zone made its indigenous peoples wild and
indolent and therefore ill equipped to harness the natural riches of
the tropical world or to become “civilized”. As landscapes of
desire, the tropics were understood as a domain of largely
untamed nature that served, by contrast, to demonstrate the moral
and material “superiority” of northern climates, civilisations and
“races”. Whether considered a sublime landscape, malignant wild-
erness, or the endangered site of environmental conflicts, the
tropics are thus largely a construct of the Euro-American imagina-
tion (Stepan, 2001) although geographical formations of “tropical-
ity” came in many varieties and were refracted through various
national intellectual traditions.
As an orientalist discourse that articulated with wider imperial
visions of non-Western places and subjects, the notion of a
“tropical geography” has a somewhat complex history through
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but became more forma-
lised and widely recognised after World War II (Power and Sid-
away, 2004). Tropical visions and representations extended far
beyond particular national research schools and traditions whilst
debates about “tropical geography” drew in contributions from
geographers based in a wide variety of locations. In France,
geographers’ concern with the tropics and tropicality first emerged
in the context of French colonial engagement with monsoon Asia,
specifically Indochina (now the states of Cambodia, Laos and
Vietnam), and the construction of scientific and geographical
knowledge that ensued was intrinsically bound up with French
power there (Bruneau, 2005). In Britain, World War II was a key
turning point, increasing the exposure of geographers to the non-
Western world. Some British geographers like Charles Fisher and
Bertram Hughes Farmer found themselves in the service of the
military and some even became prisoners of war. Others worked
for the Naval Intelligence Division (NID), which produced a series
of geographical handbooks intended to provide Commanding
Officers in the Navy with information on countries they might be
called upon to serve in. These military handbooks went on to
become important points of reference, regarded by Farmer (1983:
73) as “very useful indeed to the first generation of post-war
British geographers struggling to write lectures in their demob
suits and to prepare themselves for fieldwork overseas”. Military
institutions, practices and personnel (along with experiences of
war) thus played an important role in the emergence of teaching

and research on tropical geographies. Commenting on geography’s
age-old military penchant “for targeting places and people”,
Wisner (1986: 212–215) noted over 30 years ago how geographers
had showed “remarkably little awareness of how central their
knowledge and methods are to military adventures”. Geographical
investigation in the tropics was often depicted as a kind of
militarised adventure dedicated to progress and modernity, the
realisation of “tropical potential” and the enlightenment of tropical
spaces and usually relied on an implicit geographical tradition of
exploration, which has historically played a key role in legitimis-
ing whiteness given Geography’s imperial disciplinary roots
(Abbott, 2006).
Geographical scholarship on the tropics gained momentum
after World War II and following the creation of the Malayan
Journal of Tropical Geography in 1953 and the publication in
English of French geographer Pierre Gourou’s The Tropical World.
Gourou became a key architect of twentieth-century tropicality
and played an important role in the complex post-war reconfigura-
tion of the colonial world as a “backward” and “developing” space
(Arnold, 2000). In Gourou’s scripting “the image of the tropics as
a world set apart by nature, a world characterised by poverty,
disease, and backwardness. . . acquired a new scientific authority
and specificity” (Arnold, 2000: 16). Gourou marginalised issues of
colonialism and revolution in much of his work (although it was
full of ambivalences) (Clayton and Bowd, 2006) but instead
stressed the importance of scientific knowledges for tropical
development and focused on issues like tropical diseases, soils,
plantations, population densities and the potential for white settle-
ment. The Martinican intellectual and politician Aimé Césaire
(1972) attacked Gourou’s “tropicality”, arguing that its zonal
imaginary preserved the temperate/tropical binary that under-
pinned European and American colonial and neo-colonial exploi-
tation of the tropical belt (Clayton and Bowd, 2006) and that it
implied that significant progress could only come from the science
and expertise of the temperate Western world, making Gourou a
“watchdog of colonialism” (Césaire, 1972: 32). Echoing Enlight-
enment rationalities and unable to escape a Eurocentric commit-
ment to the superiority of “western civilization” (Bruneau, 2005),
Gourou saw the West as the epitome of “civilisation”, with India
and China in secondary roles and the rest more or less outside
history – the subjects of “tropical geography” (Clayton and Bowd,
2006).
A distinct field of geographical enquiry quickly began to emerge,

supported by new conferences, journals and funding possibilities. In
a way, the notion of “the tropics” was crucial to the very creation and
professionalisation of the discipline of Geography (Power and Sid-
away, 2004), imbuing it with a sense of itself as a “sternly practical
science” (Livingston, 1993). Geographical practices and knowledges
provided a set of lenses through which “the tropics” were known,
understood and represented and what began to emerge was a new
spatialised domain of intellectual enquiry underpinned by (colonial)
geographical imaginations and heavily racialised constructions of
otherness around which crystallised a distinctly “modern” set of
truths, assumptions and hierarchies. People of “the tropics” were
routinely positioned as “backward”; their “clumsy” practices were
seen as requiring the kind of modern economic development that was
anticipated to come with the emergence of modern states.
A focus on issues of land use, agrarian change, population
growth, mobility and environmental conservation (amongst others)
ran through much of the early thematic approaches of these kinds of
geographies and many geographers were often uncritical of the
impact of colonial rule on indigenous societies, some even dedicat-
ing large sections of their texts to “colonial achievement” and (in
general) viewing colonialism as something of a material success.
However, in a discussion of French geographical scholarship (and
its anti-colonial and anarchist influences), Ferretti (2017) chal-
lenges the notion that nineteenth-century European writing about
tropicality was always straightforwardly in the service of empire.
Nonetheless, many geographers worked for the late colonial state,
undertaking surveys, administering forestry and agriculture, over-
seeing new development projects and censuses, although many also
worked for newly independent post-colonial states where they
carried out similar roles (Craggs and Neate, 2018). Indeed, colonial
and post-colonial state boundaries delineated many of the geogra-
phies that were written, as the white male geographers of yesteryear
became “local specialists” in the colonies of their nations of origin,
focusing their attention on the management challenges of emergent
statehood (Gibson-Graham, 2016: 800–801).
Craggs and Neate (2018) trace the passage of a cohort of
careering geographers through the Geography Department at Uni-
versity College Ibadan (UCI), which had strong links to the
Nigerian Colonial Service, showing how geographical knowledge,
through survey and agriculture, contributed to wider projects of
colonial development. Focusing not just on the publications writ-
ten by these geographers or their contributions to theory but on
their contributions to the everyday work of academic geography

(e.g. hiring, teaching, textbooks, course outlines, departmental
administration, university regulations, subject associations),
Craggs and Neate (2018) show how geographers’ work at colo-
nial universities and in Britain was both influenced by and itself
part of the process of decolonisation. As employees of universi-
ties that started as late-colonial development projects and became
much-prized post-colonial institutions, academics, as well as the
universities they worked in, were visible embodiments of the
decolonising and developmental state (Livsey, 2017). Only
recently has Geography begun to explore the discipline’s mid-
twentieth-century political entanglements, and decolonisation,
arguably one of the most important geopolitical transformations
of that century, has remained largely absent from disciplinary
histories (Craggs and Neate, 2018).
In the 1960s the study of “developing areas” gradually became
more formalised in the UK, reflecting broader geopolitical and
educational shifts, along with a desire on behalf of the UK govern-
ment not to lose its competitive advantage in expertise about
developing areas as it withdrew from the colonies, and a concomi-
tant rise in interest in area studies in the US, reflecting wider Cold
War concerns (Craggs and Neate, 2018). Yet the founding of such
area studies centres and associations, as well as the building up of
African or Southeast Asian expertise in particular departments, also
reflected the interests of a large group of academics, geographers
amongst them, who had worked in the colonial universities. Many
of the contributions to what was becoming known as “development
geography” still lacked any major theoretical undercurrents, how-
ever. Much of the geographic scholarship of the 1950s and 1960s
was framed by some variant of modernisation theory (see chapter
3), or the presumption that processes of modernity were shaping
indigenous institutions and practices. Many geographers interested
in Africa sought to model modernisation surfaces and attempted to
map patterns of modernity by charting the diffusion of indices of
modernity (from roads and schools to mailboxes) through the
settlement pattern. This work at best raised only limited questions
about the legacies of colonial transport systems or the character of
African urbanism. One of the things that changed this however was
accelerating revolutionary pressures in the South (epitomised by the
insurgencies in Vietnam and the Portuguese colonies and the lurch
into Mao’s “cultural revolution” in China) which some radical
geographers began to embrace (Power and Sidaway, 2004; Bunnell,
Ong and Sidaway, 2013).
The philosophical and theoretical foundations for the growing

radicalism in development geography were found in the work of
Marx, with which radical geographers began to increasingly engage
in the 1960s and 1970s in response to wider shifts in development
thinking across several disciplines. Dependency theory had begun to
offer popular structuralist explanations of the causes of “underdeve-
lopment”, a kind of “anti-geopolitics” (Routledge, 2003), and to
locate the production of dependent relations within the structure of
the capitalist world economy. The establishment of the radical journal
Antipode in 1969, which published a number of significant contribu-
tions concerned with geography and uneven development, also
provided a further stimulus. The flows and networks of knowledge
creation in emerging debates around the political geographies of
development were complex, however. Consider, for example, the
circulation of ideas developed by the Brazilian critical geographers
exiled by the military dictatorship (1964–78), such as Milton Santos,
who played a leading role both in critical urban studies (e.g. Santos,
1979) and in development studies as demonstrated by the abundant
material he published and supervised in French (Santos, 1969, 1970,
1971, 1972), or Josué de Castro who inspired the reutilisation of the
word “geopolitics” in France in a critical sense (de Castro, 1952,
1965, 1966) (see also Lévy, 2007; Ferretti, 2018). Publishing in
journals like Hérodote in France and Antipode in the English-speak-
ing countries, scholars such as Santos worked with and influenced
radical and critical geographers in France and in North America,
helping to draw attention to the “Third World” in working on themes
of social geography, decolonisation, poverty and underdevelopment
(Davies, 2018; Ferretti, 2018; Ferretti and Pedrosa, 2018). These
authors also contributed to important South–South flows and net-
works of knowledge creation on themes like decolonisation, by
engaging with French anti-colonialist geographers like Jean Dresch
and with African scholars like Akin Mabogunje (Figure 2.1) (see
Dresch et al., 1967; Dresch, 1979; Mabogunje, 1980, 1981, 1984).
In the post-war context of decolonisation and Cold War, a potent
image of the tropics as militant, combative, belligerent and revolu-
tionary began to emerge as the idea of the tropics was increasingly
resisted in various ways by the “tropicalised” (Clayton, 2013). Cuban
revolutionaries, in particular, propagandised their Marxist position
through deft manipulation of tropical imagery and narrative (Sacks,
2012). Tropicality was also combated in “altogether more visceral
ways” in a series of jungle and guerrilla wars in Malaya, Indochina,
the Congo, Kenya and Vietnam (Clayton and Bowd, 2006: 218).
Clayton (2013) deploys the term “militant tropicality” to identify this
FIGURE 2.1 Akin Mabogunje presents a paper on the theme “Geography

and the Challenges of Development in Africa: A Personal
Odyssey” at the Festival international de géographie (FIG),
at Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, in France on September 30th, 2017.
Source: Wikimedia commons.
suite of counterhegemonic knowledges, practices and experiences

emanating from the tropical world that challenged the way the West
judged “the tropics” against the presumed normality of the temperate
north. This represented:
an eclectic body of counter-hegemonic thought and practice

which, from World War II, brought “the tropics” into the air
of revolutionary discourse and anti-imperialist struggle, and
challenged the West’s construction of the tropical zone as an
exotic and bountiful space at its behest. (Clayton, 2013: 188).
French geographer Yves Lacoste’s 1972 exposé on the Amer-

ican bombing of the Red River Delta of North Vietnam (Lacoste,
1972; see Figure 2.2) and its impact on opposition to the Vietnam
FIGURE 2.2 Yves Lacoste at a congress on Vietnam held in Nijmegen in

October 1972. Photo by Hans Peters. Source: National
Archive of the Netherlands.
War is particularly significant here (Bowd and Clayton, 2013). The

International Commission of Inquiry into US War Crimes in
Indochina, which Lacoste came with, sought to investigate allega-
tions that the US Air Force (USAF) was deliberately bombing the
region’s dike system, threatening catastrophic flooding. In a series
of reports and newspaper articles using various tools of classical

geography (first-hand observation, mapping and the integrated
analysis of physical and human factors), Lacoste disclosed the
troubling political connections between law, war and environment
(or what he termed “geographical warfare”) (Bowd and Clayton,
2013; Lacoste, 1973). Lacoste showed how the exotic imagery of
the tropics that had operated as a mode of othering and Western
dominance could also serve as means of opposition and critique.
Lacoste’s exposition of geographical warfare depended heavily on
Gourou and aspired to be a mode of analysis that could make
geography a means of stopping rather than waging war, as tropi-
cality became a critical instrument (Bowd and Clayton, 2013).
Gourou (1961) had been heavily critical of the physical
determinism that pervaded some accounts of the tropics [such as
Wittfogel’s (1957) study of Asian hydraulic systems entitled
Oriental Despotism] and Noam Chomsky subsequently identified
important radical extensions to Gourou’s “tropicalist” critique of
Orientalism, with North Vietnamese resistance to American
imperialism “now paired with peasants’ ingenious, yet fraught,
mastery over the Red River” (Bowd and Clayton, 2013: 637). This
resilience was, Chomsky (1970, 1971) noticed, at odds with what
Porter (2009) has since termed “military orientalism”: US stereo-
types about “war against Asian hordes”. As Bowd and Clayton
(2013: 637) have argued, Lacoste’s tropicality should be seen as
“ambivalent or strategic”, which (again to borrow Said’s terms)
was “filiated” to the discourse of tropicality but “affiliated” to a
global anti-war movement (Said, 1983: 157). Lacoste saw Hér-
odote as a vehicle for bringing French geographical research to a
wider audience and whilst the journal’s inaugural issue is best
known for its interview with Foucault on geography, the Vietnam
War also looms large. Its front cover gives an aerial view of an
American B-52 bomber traversing a pockmarked Vietnamese
landscape (see Figure 2.3), and Lacoste used his experience in
Vietnam to reflect on “the links between certain geographical
representations and certain forms of ideological behaviour”
(Lacoste, 1973 cited in Bowd and Clayton, 2013: 639). Lacoste
then was acutely aware how geographical knowledges and meth-
ods had been central to military adventures (Figure 2.4). His
exposé (Lacoste, 1973) has been linked with the development of
“critical geopolitics”, yet strangely, as Bowd and Clayton (2013:
635) point out, there has been “a lack of dialogue between the
literatures on tropicality and critical geopolitics”. The engagement
between critical geopolitics and the non-Western world is
FIGURE 2.3 The front cover of the inaugural issue of the Hérodote journal
gives an aerial view of an American B-52 bomber traversing a
pockmarked Vietnamese landscape. Copyright of La Décou-
verte, Paris.
considered later in the chapter but it is the use of area-based

knowledges in the post-war struggle to contain the spread of
communism to which we now turn.
THE RISE OF THE AREA STUDIES COMPLEX

The birth of area studies can be traced back to Enlightenment efforts
to support theories of human progress by comparing Europe to other
FIGURE 2.4 Front cover of the Hérodote journal for a themed issue on
Geopolitics in Africa. Copyright of La Découverte, Paris.
regions of the world and elaborating the contrast between Europe and
other areas (China, India, Africa, America), a tradition of universal
comparison and ranking which has been carried into the twenty-first-
century theories of development (Ludden, 2003). European imperial
expansion also played an important role (Ludden, 2000) as Area
Studies emerged out of, and continued to reflect, imperial projects of
classification, ordering and power. The emerging Area Studies map
included the former Soviet Union, China (or East Asia), Latin
America, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia,
eastern and central Europe, and, much later, western Europe but
strangely it “did not include the United States, despite the fact – or
because of the fact – that it was the principal site of area studies
scholarship” (Mirsepassi, Basu and Weaver, 2003: 2).
A range of different branches of Area Studies were developed
in the Cold War concerned with communist areas, coinciding with
various policies of containment that were adopted by the US. As an
academic discipline Geography withered to some extent in the US
in the first half of the twentieth century (with Harvard Geography
disbanding in 1948), creating space for the emergence of Area
Studies which quickly became “the dominant academic institu-
tion in the US for research and teaching on America’s overseas
‘others’” (Goss and Wesley-Smith 2010, ix). An international
division of labour emerged during the early stages of the Cold
War within the social sciences based upon the idea of three
separate worlds, which excluded other kinds of participation
and narration (Pletsch, 1981). In the USSR Soviet knowledge
of the “Third World” had also begun to develop (see chapter
4), particularly under Nikita Khrushchev, as the Institute of
Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences expanded,
and new institutes were set up for the study of Africa and Latin
America in 1960 and 1961, respectively (Westad, 2006: 68).
The Soviet intelligence services also expanded during this time
and were given briefs relating to information gathering about
“third world” countries (Westad, 2006).
Following the Cold War division of the globe into three
worlds and as Area Studies expanded, an emerging alliance was
forged between modernisation theory and classical orientalism
(e.g. through language training for social sciences) (Ludden,
2000). Said (1978: 17) noted how Orientalism was characterised
by “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scho-
larly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts”
which had “less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’
world”. Area Studies constituted not a simple copy of Orientalism
“but another original, an afterlife and an afterimage” (Harootunian,
2002: 153). At the discursive level, the approach of Orientalism
towards the non-West is almost directly inherited by Area Stu-
dies with knowledge perceived in a highly instrumental manner,
serving the purpose of monitoring and controlling the non-West
(Kolluoglu-Kirli, 2003). Southeast Asia, for example, which
soon became the scene of the biggest US effort to contain Third
World revolution (and perceived communist influence), “was
more real, in the 1950s and 1960s, to people in American
universities than to anyone else” (Anderson, 1998: 10) as Area

Studies thrived during US hegemony (Evans, 2002).
In parallel with emerging work on “the tropics”, most of those
who were later to become leading figures in Area Studies had served
during the war as area experts for the Army (Naft, 1993). World War
II had brought large numbers of social scientists into government
work, with many deciding not to return to an isolated Ivory Tower after
they had seen Washington, whilst the Japanese attack on the US naval
base at Pearl Harbor also ushered in an era of total mobilisation,
sending social scientists to war in large numbers and in a variety of
capacities (Engerman, 2010). The rise of Area Studies as a Cold War
innovation thus had its roots in wartime intelligence as well as Army
and Navy training programmes and in the “pervasive and persistent
militarization that characterised the United States during the 1940s and
1950s” (Farish, 2010: xii). In this sense “area studies as a mode of
knowledge production is, strictly speaking, military in origins” (Chow,
2006: 39). One interesting example of this was Project Camelot, a US
military-sponsored study of the revolutionary process planned in 1964
to be executed by the Special Operations Research Office (SORO).
With a projected cost of US$6 million (Solovey, 2001) it sought to
assemble an eclectic team of social scientists to enhance the US
Army’s ability to predict and influence developments in target countries
(mostly in Latin America and the Middle East) (Wallerstein, 1997),
although it did not move beyond the planning stage due to a series of
controversies. SORO itself was created at American University in 1956
by the Army‘s Psychological Warfare office and initially focused on
creating handbooks for US personnel overseas, before expanding into
studies of the social context for counterinsurgency. As a result, studies
of counterinsurgency proliferated significantly, and Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia became obvious targets for the new techniques of social and
psychological warfare that had begun to emerge.
In 1941 President Roosevelt created a civilian intelligence and
propaganda agency attached to the White House, the Coordinator of
Intelligence (COI), directed to centralise intelligence on matters of
national security. It was re-named the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS) in 1942, creating a model for collaboration between intelli-
gence and academe (Cummings, 1997) whilst its Research and
Analysis Branch became a crucial source of wartime service for
many scholars. The OSS, dissolved in 1945, had many prominent
post-war development scholars of the 1950s and 1960s amongst its
alumni, including the economists Walt Rostow and Paul Sweezy who
became key contributors to modernisation and dependency theories,
respectively (Barnes and Crampton, 2011). MIT’s influential
Center for International Studies (CIS), a key source of Cold

War modernisation thinking which had co-evolved with Area
Studies (see chapter three), was underwritten in its early years
in the 1950s by the CIA, almost as a subsidiary enterprise
(Cummings, 1997).
For Rafael (1994), what is significant about Area Studies is not so
much the unsurprising point that they are tied to Orientalist legacies but
rather how, following the end of World War II, Area Studies were
increasingly integrated into larger institutional networks, ranging from
universities to foundations, making possible “the reproduction of a
North American style of knowing, one that is ordered toward the
proliferation and containment of Orientalisms and their critiques”
(Rafael, 1994: 91). In the US, the “area studies complex” was spear-
headed first by the Rockefeller Foundation and later the Carnegie
Corporation and the Ford Foundation as universities, state agencies
and foundations became increasingly interwoven in the pursuit of
knowledge about communist areas. The 1958 Defense Information
Act had made substantial funding available for the study of languages,
histories and geographies of remote places (Mirsepassi, Basu and
Weaver, 2003) whilst the Ford Foundation invested a total of US$270
million in 34 universities for area and language studies from 1953 to
1966 (Cummings, 1997). The CIA (the OSS’s successor) also collabo-
rated with Ford and some of the other major foundations (such as the
Social Science Research Council or SSRC) and hired prominent Area
Studies scholars from the leading research universities to engage in
consultation and recruitment. Large numbers of geographers helped
gather and interpret intelligence for the US during World War II
(Barnes and Crampton, 2011), along with all the social sciences which
were represented in the Research and Analysis branch of the OSS. In
this sense, “no nation had ever made such systematic use of the social
sciences in the gathering and interpretation of military and strategic
intelligence” (Barnes and Crampton, 2011: 232).
While the Area Studies enterprise was explicitly designed to
serve national needs, “those needs were not necessarily ‘Cold War’
in origin; the programs started during World War II, reflecting a
sense that Americans knew little about a world with which they
would be more deeply engaged” (Engerman, 2010: 397). The
Association for Asian Studies (AAS) was the first “area” organisa-
tion in the US, founded in 1943 as the Far Eastern Association and
reorganised as the AAS in 1956. In both direct and indirect ways,
the US government and the major foundations traced the boundaries
of Area Studies by directing scholarly attention to distinct places
and to distinct ways of understanding them (for example,
communist studies for North Korea and China and modernisation

studies for Japan and South Korea). In the US, area studies of
Russia and the predominantly Slavic societies, or of East and
Southeast Asia, were deemed to be of strategic importance, receiv-
ing significant federal funding and circulating widely within mili-
tary communities. Countries inside the containment system, like
Japan or South Korea (often constructed as “success stories” of
development), and those outside it, like China or North Korea, were
clearly placed as friend or enemy, ally or adversary (Cummings,
1997), and the key processes were things like modernisation, or what
was called “political development” towards the explicit or implicit
goal of liberal democracy (Cummings, 1997: 8).
Viewing Area Studies across the board and in the longue
durée, we can arguably identify three “waves” of interest, punc-
tuated by three “crises” (Sidaway, 2017). Imperial Area Studies
lost much of its original rationale when the European empires
yielded to post-colonies and its descriptive style was eventually
replaced by the social scientific American-led Area Studies of
the Cold War. The end of that conflict, in tandem with globalisa-
tion and the critique of Area Studies’ enduring orientalism, have
yielded a third wave of Area Studies, more conscious of the
politics of representation, questioning of putative boundaries
around areas and attendant to transnationalism (Sidaway, 2017).
In recent years, critical appraisals have reconsidered the role and
status of Area Studies within Geography and cognate disciplines
(Gibson-Graham, 2004, 2016; Roy, 2009; Sidaway, 2012, Sid-
away et al., 2016) and there has been a rethinking of Area
Studies such that the emphasis is no longer on “trait geogra-
phies” but on “process geographies” (Appadurai, 2000) or on the
forms of movement, encounter and exchange that confound the
idea of bounded world-regions of immutable traits. As will be
argued in the next section, however, the engagement with ques-
tions of geopolitics in the non-Western world has been rather
“backward” and “underdeveloped” in the discipline of IR and the
sub-discipline of Political Geography.
IR, POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY AND

DEVELOPMENT
Writing a few years after the establishment of the journal Political
Geography, Perry (1987: 6) noted that, “Anglo-American political
geography poses and pursues a limited and impoverished version
of the discipline, largely ignoring the political concerns of four

fifths of humankind.” Eleanore Kofman reiterated this in the mid-
1990s, noting “the heavily Anglocentric, let alone Eurocentric,
bias of political geography writing” (Kofman, 1994: 437). These
limitations are not unique to Political Geography, however;
“Anglo-American” human geography more widely has periodi-
cally been subject to similar critique (Berg, 2004; Jazeel, 2014,
2016; Kitchin, 2005; Minca, 2003; Radcliffe, 2017; Robinson,
2003a; Slater, 1989). The concern articulated in some of these
interventions is that there are dominant “parochial forms of
theorising” (Robinson, 2003a) in the discipline as a whole, centred
upon particular intellectual traditions and contexts, leading to “a
geography whose intellectual vision is limited to the concerns and
perspectives of the richest countries in the world” (Robinson,
2003a: 273). This “view from the West” has clearly shaped a
range of theorisations in Political Geography such that “parochial
knowledge” has continued to be “created in universal form”
(Robinson, 2003b: 648). This parochiality has been seen as based
upon “a US-UK configuration” (Mamadouh, 2003: 667) or “Euro-
American axis” that has come to prominence in a way that
potentially narrows the base of political geographical thought
and obscures “the situated basis of its claims and vantage-point”
(Sidaway, 2008a: 51).
Critiques of IR have also suggested the presence of a similar
“Euro-American axis” and even that Eurocentrism is constitutive
of International Relations (Gruffydd Jones, 2006). Here, the
narratives of IR are seen to establish Europe as the central
referent and main actor of history, and events beyond its borders
become derivative of events that have already happened in
Europe (Barkawi and Laffey, 2006). Common theories of IR
(e.g. liberalism, constructivism, realism) all rest on Western
conceptions of statehood, civil society, political processes and
rationalities, and have been developed with reference to Western
historical processes of state formation (Harman and Brown,
2013). Tickner (2003a: 300) writes of the developing world as
an agent of IR knowledge rather than an object of IR study and
even goes as far as to say that IR is “autistic”, in that it “ignores
problems and perspectives that fail to resonate with its own
worldview”. IR has shared something of a Eurocentrism and
reductionism with the discipline of Development Studies, where
people and places in the South have often become the objects of
history and modernity (Pieterse, 1995; Hart, 2001; Escobar,
1995), foreclosing a wide range of different forms of political
agency along the way. Both have also (at times) had a tendency
towards the silencing of a Southern or “Third World” other
through their constructions of the West as the only subject with
a right to speak and through their mapping of the global South as
a space of exception. Further, both have been characterised by an
implicit and Eurocentric statism that places the state at the centre
of explanations (Dunn, 2001).
For all its concern with the realm of inter-state relations, IR
as a discipline is fundamentally shaped by a particular vision of
what a state is (Brown, 2006) and has therefore played a role in
the normalisation of particular kinds of states as the benchmark
for analysis, creating certain assumptions and teleological argu-
ments in which many states in the South can be depicted as
“deviant”, “weak” or “failing”, with no “real” sovereignty
(Mercer, Mohan and Power, 2003). As Doty (1996) once noted,
texts about Third World sovereignty and statehood in IR scholar-
ship have often shared a fear or sense of danger regarding the
entry of the “Third World” into the international society of states
and in trying to make sense of “Third World” sovereignty
scholars drew on “a whole array of hierarchical oppositions”
(149) with “weak states” in the South needing to live up to the
Western ideal model. Similar representations of states in the
South as bedevilled by corruption, chaos and disorder and in
need of modernisation have also been articulated by key global
development agencies like the World Bank and IMF (thus legit-
imising intervention in the affairs of those states). The benevo-
lent, democratic “international community” thereby replaces the
superior “West/white man” of earlier imperial encounters (Doty,
1996). As Robinson (2003b: 651) suggests, “what if these kinds
of states were allowed to coexist, to be exemplars of state-ness
everywhere, to speak to what states elsewhere might also
become?” Traditions of political thought from the ancient
Greeks to modern Europe and America are important foundations
in the development of Western IR theories and have often been
taken for granted as the foundations of IR knowledge, but they
displace other worldviews that are equally salient to understand-
ing IR (Cheung, 2014).
Inayatullah and Blaney (2004: 2) have noted that the “current
shape of IR” is “itself partly a legacy of colonialism” whilst
Saurin (2006) even conceptualises IR as “imperial relations” and
questions whether the strategy to overcome its Eurocentrism can
be achieved through post-colonialism (see also Biccum, 2009). In
taking aim at the core concepts in IR theory, Darby (2004: 6)
notes that the “decolonisation of the international has barely

begun”. Similarly, in Geography, critical geopolitics initially
began with a sense of needing to “decolonise our inherited
geographical imagination so that other geo-graphings and other
worlds might be possible” (Ó Tuathail, 1996a: 256). There have
been several attempts in recent years at thinking past “Western” IR
which has increasingly been seen as “ethnocentric, masculinised,
northern and top-down” (Booth, 1995: 125), with many critics
arguing that it has consistently ignored or misrepresented regions
of the “global South” and Africa in particular (Neuman, 1998;
Nkiwane, 2001; Chowdhry and Nair, 2003; Thomas and Wilkin,
2004; Lemke, 2011). IR (and to an extent Political Geography)
has been structured by a global division of labour that is deeply
entangled with racial/colonial hierarchies and so thinking about
the value of Southern knowledges in this context necessitates a
clear sense of the geopolitics of knowledge production: the
intersection of the epistemic and social location of knowledge
(Grosfoguel, 2010). Given the parochiality of this scholarship it
may also be necessary to radically reimagine our modes of
engaging Southern knowledges outside the logics of modern
academia (Santos, 2014: 190).
Major Western IR (and Political Geography) journals continue
to be dominated by scholars based in North America and Europe
and the Western self thus “remains the author and authority of IR”
(Dunn, 2001: 3), but it is important to remember that IR is not just
Western – it is also liberal – whilst the “liberal underpinnings of
IR theory are used to interpret and support liberal programmes of
reform in Africa promoted by western states” (Harman and
Brown, 2013: 72). Efforts to insert the periphery into IR are
often based on an attempted reversal of “Western” theorising yet
such attempts should not limit their task to looking beyond the
spatial confines of the “West” in search for insight understood as
“difference”, but also ask awkward questions about the “Western-
ness” of ostensibly “Western” approaches to world politics and the
“non-Westernness” of others (Bilgin, 2008).
In an article criticising the American study of IR, Biersteker
(1999) argues that one way to overcome its provincialism is to
engage with scholarship from other parts of the globe and from
other disciplines. Similarly, Inayatullah and Blaney (2004: 2) call
for “an IR based on the creation of conversations among cultures”.
The idea that scholars in the core of the field (mainly the US and
UK) are the innovators of theory, while scholars in the periphery
(e.g. Africa, Asia and Latin America) are mere consumers of
theory, has however been widespread. Unfortunately, as Mallavar-

apu (2005: 1) points out, this view is not only held in the core:
scholars from the South “have been complicit in viewing them-
selves as mere recipients of a discourse shaped elsewhere”. As
Tickner (2007: 5) has also noted, just “as members of an academic
community accept its respective rules and power arrangements as
a precondition for admission, [some] academic elites in the south
internalize and reproduce this hegemonic arrangement by favour-
ing core knowledge as more authoritative and scientific in com-
parison to local variants”.
Rather than focusing on the passive reception of theories
developed in the West it is also important to recognise the ways
in which these bodies of scholarship have been adapted and
reworked as they have travelled to new locations. Acharya and
Stubbs (2006: 128) note how scholars of Southeast Asian IR, for
example, have adapted IR theories to make them more appropriate
for understanding the particularities of the region. Similarly, in
Latin America, dominant US discourses have been appropriated
and moulded to the Latin American context, suggesting that the
flow of knowledge from the US has been adjusted to fit conditions
in the region (Tickner, 2003b: 326). The literature on autonomy
produced in Latin America during the 1980s, for example, suc-
ceeded in establishing a “conceptual bridge” between dependency
theory and mainstream IR theory (Tickner, 2003b: 330). Auton-
omy came to be regarded as a sine qua non for economic
development (as per dependency theory) but was also linked to
Latin American foreign policy and became viewed both from the
inside in “as a mechanism for guarding against the noxious effects
of dependency on a local level, and from the inside out as an
instrument for asserting regional interests in the international
system” (Tickner, 2003b: 330). Similarly, Ayoob’s (2002) response
to the narrow focus of conventional IR theory was to develop a
“subaltern realism” (which focuses on state-making in the Third
World) to better account for the experiences of “subalterns in the
international system” (40).
In Korea, the call to develop IR theory based on the Korean
perspective has been driven, since the 1980s, by a desire to
counter the external influence of foreign perspectives (Chaesung,
2010: 69). There have also been efforts by Chinese IR scholars to
contemplate the possibility of developing IR theories from a
national perspective (Cheung, 2014). The development of IR as
an academic discipline in China has been closely tied to the country’s
changing domestic and international political circumstances and
first began when IR departments were established in the Universities

of Peking, Renmin and Fudan in the 1960s where the revolutionary
experience in Asia, Africa and Latin America was often the focus
(Cheung, 2014). To lend support to the contemporary foreign policy
rhetoric of China’s “peaceful rise”, Chinese IR scholars have
drawn upon various intellectual traditions in ancient China to
demonstrate an alternative understanding of power and interna-
tional order, and to argue specifically that a powerful China is
non-threatening. Ancient Chinese political philosophies in the
pre-Qin Warring States period, the concepts of tianxia (“all
under heaven”) and Confucianism have been used by Chinese
scholars to construct a positive and pacifist image of a powerful
China as a benevolent force in a hierarchical international order
(Callahan, 2010). China is not just concerned with geopolitical
ambitions overseas, however, and also faces substantial chal-
lenges posed by fissures within its sovereign space (notably
Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan’s status) (Callahan, 2011). In this
context, it is worth remembering the call from Chinese histor-
ian Emma Teng (2004: 7) for a corrective to the assumption
that imperialism was “essentially a Western phenomenon”.
In trying to meet the broader challenge of reimagining IR
as a global discipline (Acharya, 2014) and in developing a post-
colonial geopolitics of development, it is important to attend to
the subaltern geographies of IR (and Political Geography) and
to engage with other ways of thinking politically about space,
other geographies “that may be considered lower ranking in the
context of disciplinary geography’s Eurocentric hegemony”
(Jazeel, 2014: 96). According to scholars like Arturo Escobar
and Walter Mignolo who have been concerned with conceptua-
lising “decoloniality” (see chapter 5), it is important not to
hierarchise knowledges, but to bring them together, in a more
horizontal relation, from different settings in juxtaposition with
each other (Connell, 2007). As Jazeel (2014: 88) has noted,
there is:
much to gain from treating subalternity not just as a reference

to subordinate subjects and/or groups, but also as a more
figurative reference to geographies occluded by the hegemo-
nic conceptualizations of space that pervade our discipline.
Critical geopolitics in some ways also remains a particularly

Western way of knowing which has been much less attentive to
other traditions of thinking through international politics and the
role of the nation and citizen within these narratives (Sharp, 2013:
20). As Tyner has argued:
Our geographies, and especially our political geographies,

remain largely distant from non-European theorists and the-
ories. Our texts on nationalism and identities, in particular, are
woefully ignorant of Pan-African nationalism and other Afri-
can diasporic movements. (Tyner, 2004: 343)
Africa still does not figure prominently in Political Geography

literatures and debates and relatively little African political geo-
graphy has been published in the flagship journal of the sub-field,
Political Geography, or the other major English-language Political
Geography journal, Geopolitics (Myers, 2014). Geopolitical repre-
sentations originating in Africa also rarely make much of an
impact on political theory (Sharp, 2011) whilst “few western
theorists assume that Africans, their modes of thought, ideas and
actions have been integral to the dramas of modernity” (Grovogui,
2006: 8) or that African discussions of the inadequacy of moder-
nity “provide useful grounds for thinking differently about inter-
national relations, modern political forms, their modalities, and
implications” (11). Julius Nyerere’s continental thinking, for
example, is a form of geopolitical imagination that challenges
dominant neorealist projections and is significant as a contribu-
tion to geopolitical thought (Sharp, 2013). Kwame Nkrumah’s
pan-African ideology and work on neo-colonialism are another
example (White, 2003) and there is also the Non-Aligned Move-
ment’s alternative geopolitical vision for development (see
chapter 3), which consciously rejected the totality of both
Soviet and US projections of modern futures (Sharp, 2013).
More generally, it is also necessary to acknowledge that certain
concepts and traditions attributed to Western scholarship (such
as postmodernism or liberal democracy) in fact have non-Wes-
tern roots, or in the case of democracy “multiple places of
birth” (Bilgin, 2008: 7–8). Even realism does not have its roots
exclusively in Western history or thought (Clark, 2001: 88) and
includes, for example, the work of China’s Shang Tzu and Han
Fei-tzu or India’s Kautilya.
Writing just over 20 years after Perry’s original intervention,
the editors of Political Geography noted in 2008 that “[m]ost
political geographers in their discipline’s North American and
European core still know fairly little about the evolution of
political geographies in relative peripheries” (O’Loughlin, Raento
and Sidaway, 2008: 2). There does however seem to be a growing

number of scholars keen to challenge the hegemony of the English
language in Political Geography and, more generally, to learn
from other regions (O’Loughlin, Raento and Sidaway, 2008).
This is about more than just extending the geographical scope of
the kinds of empirical studies which dominate the discipline and
the kinds of places which are paid attention to in the course of
theoretical innovation and scholarly discussion. As Sidaway con-
tends, there is more at stake here than simply “supplementing the
range of case studies and terminologies that characterise Anglo-
phone political geography” (Sidaway, 2008a: 41), especially if
such non-Western political geographies are offered as “supple-
ments that remain as examples, footnotes or exceptions to the
Anglo-American mainstream” in the absence of the mainstream
becoming “more attendant to its own situatedness” (Sidaway,
2008a: 48–49).
In many ways, the work of Edward Said provides a model for
IR and Political Geography scholars to “be critical” (Duvall and
Varadarajan, 2007). In Said’s work, there is “an uncommon
articulation of the postcolonial and the global, a suturing together
of a global moment of humanism and a postcolonial moment of
listening to and hearing – contrapuntally reading – the voices of/
from alternative loci of enunciation” (Duvall and Varadarajan,
2007: 83). These could be constitutive principles for critical
approaches to geopolitics and IR. Typically work on post-colonial
geographies has tended to favour studies of long-ago high imperi-
alism as well as present-day colonialisms but Craggs (2014: 40)
urges geographers to turn their attention to the era of the mid-
twentieth century, “during which people, institutions and states
negotiated, performed and experienced becoming postcolonial”.
Geographers have however increasingly brought a post-colonial
sensibility to researching geopolitics through a focus on the sub-
altern and on the “politics of representation from the margins” in
order to highlight those voices that are too often rendered silent in
political accounts (Sharp, 2011, 2013; Dittmer, 2010; Harker,
2011). Spivak (1985) defines the subaltern as “a group of people
whose voices cannot be heard or are wilfully ignored in dominant
modes of narrative production” (in McEwan, 2009: 61). Academic
engagement with the subaltern began with the Subaltern Studies
collective in the 1980s, following their criticism of Marxist and
elitist narratives within India that disregarded the historical role
and agency of the Indian masses and subsequent identification of
non-elites, specifically peasants in India, as “agents of political
and social change” (in McEwan, 2009: 60). Their methodology of

“history from below” engages with the masses rather than state
elites and with specific events and incidents rather than grand state
narratives (McEwan, 2009).
This focus on subaltern geopolitics is a valuable framing that
enables us to explore how political actors outside the main power
centres do not simply bear witness to dominant geopolitical
discourses, but also produce their own narratives (Harker, 2011;
Woon, 2011). It recognises that “subaltern imaginaries offer crea-
tive alternatives to dominant (critical) geopolitical scripts” (Sharp,
2011: 271) and thus challenges critical geopolitics to “find space
for this subaltern agency, to reverse the gaze, to look back”
(Sharp, 2011: 271–272). Sharp’s (2013: 22) focus on the original
military meaning of the subaltern as a subject position that is
“neither the commander, nor outside of the ranks” presents it as an
ambiguous subject position of marginality “that refuses to be seen
purely as the ‘Other’” (Woon 2011: 286). Rather than being seen
solely within the realm of the dominated and the resistant, the
term “subaltern” thus provides space for a more complex render-
ing of geopolitical identities, processes and institutions, “suggest-
ing a position that is not completely other to dominant geopolitics,
but an ambiguous position of marginality” (Sharp, 2011: 271).
PLACING AFRICA IN IR AND POLITICAL

GEOGRAPHY
At best, Africa remains a case-study in which to explore
international relations; at worst it is still, depressingly,
wheeled on to the stage as representative of whatever delin-
quency, from state failure to the drugs trade, is exercising the
analyst. (Harman and Brown, 2013: 70)
The very emergence of African Studies can be closely linked to

questions of geopolitics, as the processes of decolonisation gave
birth to a spate of new countries precisely at the time of simmer-
ing Cold War tensions. At its inception the dominant scholarship
and research agendas of African Studies mapped readily onto the
geopolitical concerns of the West (Zezela, 2006, 2007). According
to the German-born American political scientist and historian
Hans Morgenthau (1973: 369), Africa did not have a history
before World War II and prior to the interventions of great
powers as it was “a politically empty space”. In IR Africa has
often been pushed to the margins of some mainstream approaches by

a focus on great powers (Harman and Brown, 2013) or “the states
that make the most difference”, as Kenneth Waltz (1979: 73) once
put it. As Taylor (2010) has argued however, it is not the case that
sub-Saharan Africa has been irrelevant in international politics, as the
slave trade, the “scramble for Africa”, the colonial period, the proxy
wars of the Cold War and the continent’s natural resources have all
contributed to the region’s geopolitical and geoeconomic importance.
For Ayoob (2002), if theories of IR are focused solely on the great
powers the likelihood is that this will result in political theories which
reproduce the visions of those same powers. The study of geopolitics is
also arguably problematic in this sense as it has historically been
framed as the study of the spatialisation of international politics by
core powers and hegemonic states (Ó Tuathail and Agnew, 1992: 192).
Not only does such a fixation with the “great powers” ignore geopo-
litical narratives emerging from the majority world, it also means that
critical geopolitics has remained a largely Western way of seeing and
knowing (Sharp, 2013).
Despite the undoubted relevance of Africa as a space where
IR is played out, from colonial rule to resource competition and
post-colonial aid dependency (Harman and Brown, 2013), there
have been numerous critiques of the way in which Africa has
historically been marginalised and neglected in IR. African Stu-
dies has arguably always suffered from an inferiority complex
(Abrahamsen, 2017) with the continent viewed by some as IR’s
permanent “other”, serving to reproduce and confirm the super-
iority and hegemony of Western knowledge, epistemologies and
methodologies. For Dunn (2001: 3) Africa provides the “ever
present and necessary counterpart that makes the dominant [IR]
theories complete”, serving as a kind of mirror, the other to a
mythical Western “self”. Here Africa is the voiceless space upon/
into which the West can write and act and “exists only to the
extent that it is acted upon” (Dunn, 2001: 2). To an extent Marx-
ism, Dependency and World Systems approaches refocused IR’s
gaze on Africa but they have also often replicated Western biases
by viewing an “agency-less” Africa as the victim of manipulation
by the great powers in the core and by seeing it solely as part of
the periphery. There has often been an assumption then that Africa
“does not have meaningful politics, only humanitarian disasters”
(Dunn, 2001: 1). As an object of study, the continent becomes a
place apart, a place for the application of theories, or a source of
raw data, but “not a site for the generation of ideas and theoretical
insights that have widespread and general relevance for the world”
(Abrahamsen, 2017: 129). Depictions of Africa in international

politics as “agent, bystander or victim” (Van Wyck, 2016) have
often informed both policy-making representations of the conti-
nent in the media and academic literature (Bach, 2016).
Africa is so much more than a case study with which to
explore international relations or the geopolitics of development,
and this book seeks to get away from the tendency to wheel the
continent on stage as “representative of whatever delinquency”
(Harman and Brown, 2013: 70) only for it to be dismissed as an
undifferentiated exemplar of the more disorderly areas of the
international system. Africa is not just acted upon by global
systems of governance (made up of international institutions,
global policies, foreign aid flows etc.) but has its own actors in
global geopolitics which have more fully acquired subject status in
the international relations system (Cornelissen, 2009: 24; Abra-
hamsen, 2017). As Bayart (2009: 269) argues, as a mirror, Africa
(however distorting it may be) “reflects our own political image”
and as such has “a lot to teach us about the springs of our western
modernity”. The application in Africa of basic concepts key to
traditional IR such as sovereignty, the state, the market, anarchy
and the international/domestic dichotomy can be very revealing in
this regard, with many critics arguing that these concepts become
problematic if not highly dubious when used in the African
context (Dunn, 2001). Due to its neorealist insistence on placing
the state at the centre of explanations and on using conceptions of
states as coherent and clearly delimited entities, Dunn (2001)
argues that IR is incapable of comprehending the “real” political
dynamics of the continent (since defining where statehood begins
and ends in Africa is too empirically uncertain). Others point to “a
lack of ‘fit’ between the discipline’s theoretical constructs and
African realities” which is particularly problematic since “the
state, sovereignty and statehood are not fixed categories of analy-
sis when understanding Africa and IR” (Harman and Brown,
2013: 71). Similarly, although critical geopolitics has sought from
the outset to unsettle the central position occupied by the state in
traditional Political Geography and IR writing and has directly
challenged “conventional demarcations of foreign and domestic,
political and non-political, state and non-state” (Dodds, Kuus and
Sharp, 2013: 7), it has often remained quite state-centric. This is
particularly problematic in studies of African politics where more
inclusive conceptualisations, that explore non-state and particu-
larly sub-state actors as important agents of state dissolution and
state formation, are needed (Malaquias, 2001).
Although IR concerns itself with other actors and non-state

processes, Hirschman (1989) once cautioned that the complexity
of the Third World may threaten the discipline:
in relationship to the Third World, one has a sense of a

discipline looking for a coin in a floodlit street in a country
where 90% of the people have no electricity. The very great
possibility of this field of study seeming to be irrelevant to the
poorest people of this world appears to be inherent. Even
when it goes beyond relations between states. . . it remains a
discipline which is distant in the extreme from the concerns of
the vast majority of the Third World, and, therefore, from
some of the most fundamental problems facing the world
community. . . A field of study that is so concerned with the
behaviour of those who have power has precious little to say
about the powerless. . . International relations, then, beyond
appearing irrelevant, also looks like an unconcerned disci-
pline. (Hirschman, 1989: 53)
Hirschman (1989) noted that at the time IR was not participating

in debates surrounding development, neo-colonialism, the nature
of the state etc., that other disciplines such as Sociology, History,
Development Studies and even Political Science have engaged in
at least since the 1960s. Similarly, Murphy (2007) praises the
progress made by development and feminist scholars and laments
the failures of IR scholars to engage in scholarship which places
human suffering at the centre of its theoretical project, pointing to
the “disconnection” between IR scholars and issues and experi-
ences of inequality:
given the vastness of the inequalities that exist at a global

level, the social worlds of critical IR scholars and those we
wish to serve are so disconnected. . . there is no social group
of the world’s least advantaged with which we have any
particularly close connection; it is very unlikely that we
understand much at all about their life-worlds, self-under-
standing or struggles. (Murphy, 2007: 131–132)
Noting that IR has long ignored a number of paradigms and

discourses that Africa has been at the centre of, such as develop-
ment, Dunn (2001: 2) has argued that the continent “has long been
absent in theorising about world politics”. Placing the interpretive
grid of development at the centre of our analyses of African
politics is not without its own problems, however, and the effect
of arguing that Africa underlines the limits to theory and is so
different that it requires an as yet unspecified “new” theory only
serves to further exoticise Africa and to marginalise the continent
from the core debates of IR (Brown, 2006). Further, many of the
issues which critics cite as problems of “IR theory” in Africa, are
not unique to Africa and are in fact problems in IR theory
wherever it is applied (Brown, 2006). The weakness and absences
of statehood in Africa have often been overstated then and what is
required is a more relational understanding of states (and of the
connections between states and societies) so that the broad issues
that emerge are ones that can and should be applied to thinking
about state agency in general (Brown, 2006). There is no one-way
process of imposition of the Western ideal state onto Africa as if
Africans themselves had little to do with it and not only was the
course of colonisation shaped by the interaction between Africans
and Europeans, but decolonisation and the foundation of indepen-
dent states was a process in which Africans were actors, not
simply “acted upon” (Brown, 2006). Critics of the problems of
IR theory in Africa thus often inadvertently exoticise and essen-
tialise both Africa and Europe and their histories and differential
participation in the international system.
There is consequently a need to recognise the diversity and
character of post-colonial sovereignties (Sidaway, 2003) and not to
interpret this as a hierarchy with the putatively “strong” Western
states at the apex and post-colonial states (especially those frac-
tured by insurgencies and secessionist movements) at the bottom
as somehow “abnormal” or lacking the features of the Western
state. This is part of a wider need to unsettle the ideology and
imagined history of a beneficent West, intent on “spreading
democracy and prosperity” since “established conceptions of the
political underwrite western dominance” (Darby, 2004: 3) and
given that as Adebajo (2008b: 236) has poignantly observed, the
West’s self-representation is “repugnant in its hypocrisy and his-
torical inaccuracy”. Rather, the supposed “weaknesses” of some
post-colonial states might be interpreted not as arising from a lack
or absence of authority and connection but rather as an excess of
certain forms of them (Sidaway, 2003). Further, if we continually
see Africa as a space of exception, as apart from the world, we
miss its wider embeddedness and relationality. As Mbembe and
Nuttall (2004: 348) put it: “the obstinacy with which scholars in
particular (including African scholars) continue to describe Africa
as an object apart from the world, or as a failed and incomplete
example of something else, perpetually underplays the embedded-

ness in multiple elsewheres of which the continent actually
speaks” (original emphasis).
As outlined in the previous chapter, this book adopts a
Foucauldian approach to the study of development and it is
worth noting here that the applicability of Foucault’s thought to
global politics, particularly the concept of governmentality, has
come in for sustained criticism with African politics often invoked
as a “limit” to liberal forms of government, beyond which ana-
lyses predicated on advanced-liberal or neoliberal formations of
power cannot go. As the argument goes, “areas like sub-Saharan
Africa are relatively bare spots on the map. The networks of
capital and information associated with post-industrial progress
are sparse and stretched in these zones” (Joseph, 2010: 236).
Africa is used here to demonstrate the inadequacy of governmen-
tality-inspired engagements with international politics, with Joseph
concluding that “[i]f we are concerned with how techniques of
governmentality build lasting social cohesion, then clearly areas
like sub-Saharan Africa are currently non-starters” (2010: 238–
239). As Death (2011) notes however, this usage of Africa echoes
the stale, tired dismissals of life on the “dark continent” as nasty,
brutish and short. A governmentality approach to understanding the
forms of rule and the practices, technologies and mentalities of
government in Africa can be very useful in resisting the simplistic
dichotomy between dominators and dominated and in showing that
dependency, subjectivity and autonomy can be related and co-
constitutive categories, rather than analytical opposites, as can
resistance and complicity (Bayart, 2009: xxiii, 208, 250–253). A
governmentality approach can provide illuminating insights into the
operation of politics in societies outside Western liberal democra-
cies, as well as into the operation of contemporary global politics,
since it can help to map the fragmented, uneven, heterogeneous,
overlapping, fractured spaces of global politics, not just in Africa:
it is precisely in terms of what might be called spaces of

contragovernmentality, ungovernability, anarchical govern-
ance, or the borderlands of global politics, that a governmen-
tality approach to African politics can contribute most to our
understandings of world politics. (Death, 2011: 23–24)
Foucault has frequently been caricatured as a Eurocentric,

inward-looking theorist obsessed with textuality, discourse and repre-
sentations, and having little of value to say to those outside
metropolitan café culture (Williams, 1997). Scepticism towards the

applicability of poststructuralist or postmodernist approaches has also
come from within African studies (see discussions in Abrahamsen,
2003; Ahluwalia, 2001; Shani, 2010). Foucault’s Eurocentrism has
perhaps been overemphasised, however (Escobar, 1984–85: 378;
Jabri, 2007). Foucault lived and worked in Tunisia from 1966–68
and was closely involved with student anti-government protests in
Tunis against the Bourguiba regime. Foucault’s methodological transi-
tion from archaeology to genealogy can be attributed to his period in
Tunisia, and “it was the student revolts of Tunisia that had the effect of
politicising his work” (Ahluwalia, 2010: 605). Foucault also appears
to have considered a move to Zaire, and was attracted to Africa’s
“tropicality”, being drawn to “the sun, the sea, the great warmth of
Africa” which he believed allowed him a sense of perspective and a
better vantage point to reflect upon European social and political
institutions (Ahluwalia, 2010: 599).
CONCLUSIONS: TOWARDS A SUBALTERN

GEOPOLITICS OF DEVELOPMENT
The Global South is everywhere, but it is also always some-
where, and that somewhere, located at the intersection of
entangled political geographies of dispossession and reposses-
sion, has to be mapped with persistent geographical responsibil-
ity. (Sparke, 2007: 117)
The question of Africa‘s place within IR is not then simply a

question of “add Africa and stir”. (Abrahamsen, 2017: 127)
political geography is richest when reworked, resituated, rede-

ployed and re-imagined. (Sidaway, 2008a: 51)
An important part of the project of extending Political Geogra-

phy’s engagement with the non-Western world and the periphery
is, I want to argue, an intensification of the dialogue between
critical geopolitics and development theory which began with a
series of interesting exchanges in Transactions between Gerard Ó
Tuathail and David Slater in 1993–94 (Slater, 1993, 1994; Ó
Tuathail, 1994). Slater’s important intervention challenged the
circumscription and disciplining of the political by Western devel-
opment agencies by exposing the meta-politics and geopolitical
imaginations that enframe their orthodoxies. Slater’s contention
that all conceptualisations of development contain and express a

geopolitical imagination which condition and enframe its mean-
ings and relations is a critical one, suggesting that it is impossible
to understand the contemporary making of development theory
and practice without reference to geopolitics and the geopolitical
imagination of non-Western societies (Slater, 1993). In response Ó
Tuathail suggested that to develop this engagement further it was
also necessary to document how Cold War discourses were a
condition of possibility for post-war development discourses and
to document the disciplinary, practical and popular geopolitics that
the pursuit of development has involved.
In this book I want to show that there are many different ways
that we can begin to do this. Typically, the study of “develop-
ment” in Geography has been kept apart from other sub-disci-
plines like Political Geography or Economic Geography by a well-
established division of labour which casts an engagement with the
geographies of the non-Western world as “area studies” or con-
structs development as a technical or managerialist domain, shorn
of all politics. Political geography is richest when “reworked,
resituated, redeployed and re-imagined” (Sidaway, 2008a: 51),
particularly when resituated in relation to the global South and
when brought into conversation with the critical study of develop-
ment and its multiple and contested spatialities. Similarly, the
study of development in Geography can also productively be
brought further into dialogue with economic geography, particularly
since geopolitical and geoeconomic logics of power must be grasped
dialectically, which can help bring to the fore “specific – and some-
times unduly neglected – aspects of development dynamics” (Glass-
man, 2018: 412). The scholarly division of labour has also kept apart
Development Studies and IR which, as Gruffydd Jones (2005: 75)
notes, are in many ways “both natural and uneasy bedfellows”.
Despite the important and insightful exchanges between Slater and
Ó Tuathail in the 1990s, to a significant extent the domain of the
(geo)political is still quite often regarded as discrete and separable
from the (geo)economic and the technical domain of “development”.
The dialogue between critical geopolitics and development theory
that Slater and Ó Tuathail’s interventions began remains somewhat
underdeveloped but in the chapters that follow I seek to reinitiate,
deepen and intensify it.
In this chapter I have argued that we might begin with the
ways in which sociocultural and political formations in the
South have been categorised, classified, compared, mapped and
represented but also with how people from the South have
generated counter-representations of their own realities (Slater,

2004), contested representations of North–South relations or
produced their own “geographies of repossession” (Sparke,
2007). This means attending to the metageographies, or the
spatial structures and “unconscious frameworks”, that create
the worlds of development, past and present, “acknowledging
the power of the dominant imaginative geographies while also
disclosing the critical possibilities of the other geographies that
are covered-up” (Sparke, 2007: 122). We might also trace the
decomposition of important metageographies over time. The
complex geographies of (post-)development raise important
questions about the composition and decomposition of the
“Third World” as a meaningful geopolitical and epistemological
category and underline the need for more sustained attention to
the interactions of enclosure, boundaries and subjectivities (Sid-
away, 2008b). This focus on the new metageographies of
development including enclaves (Sidaway, 2007) and other
“spaces of enclosure” (Vasudevan, McFarlane and Jeffrey,
2008) is very valuable here (see chapter 7).
It is also necessary to engage with recent critical reworkings
and reimaginations of area studies and with the critical rethinking
of comparison, which in part requires being deeply suspicious of
efforts that assert overarching processes and reduce spatio-histor-
ical difference to empirical variation, along with a commitment to
an approach that is closely attentive to constitutive processes
arising out of multiple arenas of practice (Hart, 2018). Geogra-
phers have used a range of approaches to do this. Robinson
(2016a, 2016b) deploys a Deleuzian assemblage approach in
contrast to the more deconstructive approach used by Roy (2015,
2016b) and the Marxist post-colonial geographies developed by
Hart (2018). This work is grounded in conceptions of different
regions of the world as “always already interconnected” (Hart,
2018: 389) and starts with important processes and practices rather
than with any bounded units of analysis (nation, city, village etc.).
Hart (2018) suggests a relational approach to comparison where
“relational” refers to an open, non-teleological conception of
dialectics at the core of Marx’s method, one that draws on both
critical ethnography and spatio-historical analysis of conjunctures
and interconnections.
The global South “is everywhere” as Sparke (2007) rightly
observes and cannot easily be identified with or anchored to simple
geographical locations but instead it can and should be located at the
“intersection of entangled political geographies”. All too often, as
Comaroff and Comaroff (2012: 1) note, the “non-West. . . now the

global south” is presented:
primarily as a place of parochial wisdom. . . of unprocessed

data. . . as reservoirs of raw fact: of the historical, natural, and
ethnographic minutiae from which Euromodernity might fash-
ion its testable theories and transcendent truths.
The South is not a stable ontological category symbolising sub-

alterneity (Roy, 2014a) and is best understood as a temporal
category, as “an emergence that marks a specific historical con-
juncture of economic hegemony and political alliances” (15). In
this book my intention, following Sparke (2007: 117), is to utilise
the category “global South” as a “concept metaphor” since such
an approach interrupts the “flat world” conceits of globalisation
(Roy, 2014a), enabling us to think about the locatedness of all
theory and to map the geographies of theory responsibly. As
Comaroff and Comaroff (2012: 47) suggest, “the south cannot be
defined, a priori, in substantive terms. The label bespeaks a
relation, not a thing in or for itself. It is a historical artefact, a
labile signifier in a grammar of signs. . ..it always points to an ex-
centric location, an outside to Euro-America” (emphasis in origi-
nal). It is this sense of relationality in thinking about geopolitics
and development in the South that I want to take forward in what
follows since it is in this “ex-centric” space, this “outside”, that
“radically new assemblages of capital and labour are taking
shape” that “prefigure the future of the global North” (Comaroff
and Comaroff, 2012: 12). Theory from the South is not about
narrating modernity from its “undersides” but rather “revealing the
‘history of the present’ from the ‘distinctive vantage point’ that
are these frontiers of accumulation” (Roy, 2014a: 15).
The move towards a more “post-colonial” (or “post-tropical”)
geography and geopolitics of development requires a much greater
engagement with the complex and rich experiences and scholar-
ship of different places. This requires being attentive to other
geopolitical traditions and other modes of thinking about interna-
tional politics as well as tracing the complex South–South and
South–North flows and networks of knowledge creation around
the political geographies of development. The course of Area
Studies, for example, looks different when viewed from a range
of sites and vantage points (even within the Anglophone academy)
or through different contests (see also Berg, 2004; Kratoska, Raben
and Nordholt, 2005; Sidaway, 2012; Smith, 2010). Tropicality was
also plural and contested (Driver, 2004) and there were multiple
practices through which “the tropics” and later the “Third World”
came to be known. IR theorising in particular has strong Western
and liberal foundations and needs to deepen its engagement with
non-Western spaces and the post-colonial world as the Western self
“remains the author and authority of IR” (Dunn, 2001: 3) with
Western conceptions (e.g. of statehood, civil society) and experi-
ences (e.g. of histories of state formation) taking centre stage. Some
scholars have consequently argued that it is necessary to “bring
Africa in from the margins” of how we think about international
relations (Brown, 2006) since there is a growing recognition that
Africa is a source of “theoretical and conceptual innovation for
International Relations as a discipline” (Bach, 2016: 144). IR is
however becoming more self-reflexive and aware of its parochial-
ism and shortcomings and similarly, African Studies is showing an
increasing engagement and rapprochement with IR. In both IR and
Political Geography there has been talk of decolonising knowl-
edges, but decolonisation is not a metaphor (Tuck and Yang, 2012)
and, as Esson et al. (2017) argue, the emphasis on decolonising
knowledges rather than structures, institutions and praxis risks
reproducing coloniality, as it re-centres non-Indigenous, white and
otherwise privileged groups in the global architecture of knowledge
production. In this sense, we might take up Rivera Cusicanqui’s
(2012: 100) call for an actively “decolonizing practice” in academic
work that goes deeper than vocabulary. This also requires confront-
ing white supremacy and privilege both past and present and a
commitment to anti-racism (Esson et al., 2017).
Neither is it sufficient simply to “bring Africa in” or to
demonstrate the inadequacy or failure of IR theory to capture
African realities. It is not a question of adding interesting, anom-
alous, different and esoteric empirical cases from the continent, or
a case of “add Africa and stir” (Abrahamsen, 2017: 127), but
rather of recalibrating theory itself since Africa is no longer some
“distant or deviant locale whose relevance needs to be demon-
strated within or to the disciplines but instead a window on our
contemporary world” (139) and constitutive of it. Such interven-
tions echo that of Comaroff and Comaroff (2012: 2) who have
argued that the post-colonies might offer “privileged insights into
the workings of the world at large” (see also Mbembe and Nutall,
2004). An assemblage approach usefully offers one way of meet-
ing the challenge of foregrounding Africa in IR in a manner that
appreciates both its specificity and its globality but thinking
politically with assemblages also enables a better sense of how
the political orders of contemporary Africa come into being and of

what forms of agency and power different actors, actants, norms
and values have (Abrahamsen, 2017). By studying Africa “from
the ground up”, as it is being constantly assembled by a multi-
plicity of local and global forces, the continent’s politics and
societies “can be captured as both unique and global, as a
window on the contemporary world and its articulation in parti-
cular settings” (Abrahamsen, 2017: 127).
Just as scholars have increasingly come to look at the colonial
construction of “development” and its key concepts so too might
geographers give further consideration to the colonial construction
of some of the key categories used in Political Geography (such as
sovereignty, territory, states and so on) (cf. Sidaway, 2000, 2003).
Similar work has begun in IR (Inayatullah and Blaney, 2004;
Muppidi, 2012) where scholars have traced how colonial forms
of knowledge have impacted modern understandings of interna-
tional relations. In this sense, a post-colonial critique in Geogra-
phy must “take aim at the theoretical heart of the discipline”
(Robinson, 2003b: 649). Also important here is the formulation
of a more nuanced sensibility towards the varied range of post-
colonial trajectories and forms of politics which in itself ought to
introduce caution into some Western narratives about their uni-
versality and value across diverse contexts (Robinson, 2003b).
This requires greater attention to the subaltern geopolitics of
development, listening to and engaging with voices from alterna-
tive loci of enunciation, exploring geopolitical representations and
imaginations that emanate from the non-Western world and, in
addition to the post-colonial methodology of “history from
below”, which focuses on ordinary people (and not just elites) as
agents of social and political change, what is needed here is “a
geopolitics from below” (Routledge, 1998) that captures how
development is rejected, reworked, resisted and reimagined in the
everyday, from the ground up. The ways in which tropicality was
contested through counterhegemonic knowledges, practices and
experiences emanating from the tropical world, such as “militant
tropicality” (Clayton, 2013), represent important examples of the
subaltern geopolitics of development. Unlike “anti-geopolitics”
(Routledge, 2003), a focus on subaltern geopolitics does not
position its subjects outside of the state and associated institutions
but instead recognises the possibility that political identities can be
established through geographical representations that are neither
fully “inside” nor “outside” and enables a more complex rendering
of geopolitical identities, processes and institutions. The subject of
subaltern spatialities is taken much further in chapter 5 in relation

to the role of the state, insurgency and social movements in
development but it is to the mid-twentieth-century subaltern
spaces of mobilisation around the three worlds schema that we
now turn in chapter 3.
Chapter 3
Modernising the
“Third World”
INTRODUCTION: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF

MODERNISATION
T HE emergence of the Third World, together with the bloody,
conflict-ridden process of decolonisation that it brought forth, not
only coincided temporally with the Cold War but was inextricably
shaped by it (McMahon, 2001). It was the Cold War struggle
between the US, the Soviet Union and their respective allies for
global power, influence and ideological supremacy, itself premised
on an “endless performance of multiple boundaries” (Farish, 2010:
xix), that gave birth to the term. Consequently, for some, without the
Cold War the Third World ceases to exist since it was so heavily
defined by its geopolitical structure and discourses (Roy, 1999).
Backed with enormous power and spurred on by an intense mutual
rivalry, after 1945 the superpowers held a strong sense of destiny
and formulated agendas that they thought might appeal to political
leaders in the Third World, with the US and Soviet dominions
constructed as very different in aim to those of the retreating
European empires. Both the US and USSR identified vital national
interests in Third World territories (Leffler, 1992) and for both
Washington and Moscow, “developing areas appeared critical to
the achievement of basic strategic, economic, political and ideolo-
gical goals” (McMahon, 2001: 2). The “most important aspects of
the Cold War”, as Westad (2006: 396) notes, were thus “neither
military nor strategic, nor Europe-centred, but connected to political
and social development in the Third World”. IR scholarship has
often viewed the early Cold War largely through a Eurocentric lens,
as essentially a struggle over the fate of Europe, but revisionist
Modernising the “Third World” 81
scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s changed this by highlighting the

centrality of the Third World in the US drive for global hegemony
(McMahon, 2001). The “Third World” was not incidental or per-
ipheral here – most of the East–West crises of the Cold War erupted
in the Third World, as did most of the armed conflicts that broke out
after World War II.
This chapter examines the emergence of the three worlds
schema and the theories, practices, ideologies and discourses that
led to the construction of a Third World as a space in need of
modernisation and “development”. There was no singular moder-
nisation “theory” led by a single proponent, only a more amor-
phous modernisation school of thought which contained within it
various development strategies, ideologies and theorisations (not
all of which originated from the US). In some ways, modernisa-
tion thinking is almost inseparable from the Cold War and was not
“merely some adventitious appendage to the idea of three worlds,
it is constituent to the structural relationship among the underlying
semantic terms” (Pletsch, 1981: 576). Critically examining the
theorisation of modernisation in the “Third World” in the context
of its Cold War political and historical geographies can tell us a
great deal about the geopolitical enframing and imagination of
development. The “Third World” was much more than an arena
for Cold War superpower rivalry – it witnessed popular mobilisa-
tion on a vast scale and the subjugation and oppression of its
peoples across Asia, Africa and Latin America was often invoked
in calls for revolution and tricontinental solidarity. It was articu-
lated as an idea, as a set of commonalities and collective demands
and as a project of mobilisation around race and identity, in
important diplomatic spaces and sites such as the “Afro-Asian
solidarity” meetings in Bandung and Cairo (in 1955 and 1961,
respectively), the creation of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity
Organisation (AAPSO) (founded 1957), the Non-Aligned Move-
ment (founded 1961) and the Tricontinental Conference in Havana
in 1966 (Prashad, 2007). During the Cold War, the international
institutional architecture of Development was also structured
around the idea of three worlds (along with many parts of the
“area studies complex”) and the United Nations, from its inception
in 1948, was increasingly regarded as the main institution for the
expression of “Third World” demands.
The Third World became the object of theories and ideologies
of modernisation that sought to develop its peoples, industries and
infrastructures in the name of various socialist and capitalist
visions of modernity. In the context of widespread decolonisation,
82 Modernising the “Third World”
modernisation became either a way of exporting socialist revolu-

tion or of containing and countering the spread of the communist
“contagion”. This chapter traces the emergence of the Third World
as a series of ideological projects and seeks to understand plans
for its modernisation as they unfolded through a variety of nodes,
sites and practices and in the specific encounters between “mod-
ernisers” and their subjects (Engerman and Unger, 2009). Western
countries like the US certainly did much to manage, control and in
many ways, create the Third World politically, economically,
sociologically and culturally (Escobar, 1984–85; DuBois, 1991)
but the “thoroughly teleological” idea of three worlds (Pletsch,
1981: 576) was not solely a Western construction and its history
and geopolitics need to be viewed and understood from a range of
different sites and vantage points. For all its power in the Cold
War, the US “was not everywhere and at every moment the most
important part of the ‘battle for the hearts and minds’ of the Third
World” (Engerman and Unger, 2009: 378).
Modernisation programmes in particular have often been seen as
“at best plays for geopolitical loyalty, ploys to help the American
economy, or playing fields for academics eager to try out their
theoretical models in practice” (Engerman and Unger, 2009: 376).
Modernisation was very much a transnational enterprise with complex
spatialities, however, and was closely shaped by a wide variety of
localities, projects and individuals. Modernisation theories and prac-
tices transcended national and regional borders, transferred knowledge
across continents and sought to establish significant political and
economic connections between societies and individuals. As Connelly
(2001) has shown in his work on the Algerian struggle for indepen-
dence, throughout the Cold War local actors could be authors of and
full participants in their own history. Citino (2008) similarly empha-
sises the need to consider the role of non-US actors, arguing that Cold
War modernisation relied in part on an “Ottoman legacy”. In the
pursuit of modernisation Middle Eastern post-war underdevelopment
was (re)imagined in terms of an Ottoman imperial geography, with
Turkey, for various geopolitical reasons, depicted as further along in
the development process than the Arab successor states (Citino, 2017:
89). The Middle East was also the source of important challenges to
modernisation thinking, such as in the work of Ali Shariati, an Iranian
scholar, sociologist and intellectual of the 1970s. Highly influenced by
the Third Worldism that he encountered as a student in Paris (Matin,
2010), Shariati argued that modernisation had replaced the idea of
civilisation in the Third World and that colonialism had convinced
colonised peoples that the two were one and the same, separating them
from their own traditions and cultures and replacing them only with an
empty, rootless modernisation focused on creating and then catering to
desires that would benefit the expansion of Western capitalist produc-
tion (Shariati, 1979). In order to acknowledge the significance of such
contributions, what is needed is a more “global history” that explores
modernisation:
not as an American export, but as a global phenomenon that was

hotly contested, between blocs but also within them; it examines
the intersections between modernisation and geopolitics, consid-
ering them analytically distinct but often overlapping; and it starts
from the assumption that modernisation was a global project in
character and scope. (Engerman and Unger, 2009: 376–377)
The chapter is divided into four parts. The first section exam-
ines the origins of the “Third World” as an ideological project
refracted through various national contexts, with a particular focus
on China and some of the diplomatic sites where “Third Worldism”
was performed and enacted. The next two sections then explore the
role of the Soviet Union and the US, respectively, in constructing a
“Third World” as a space of Cold War intervention. Attention then
turns to the Cold War political geographies of modernisation in the
US and the USSR and the historical experiences and models of
modernity they were based upon before the final section explores
the geopolitical enframing and imagination of modernisation as a
form of inoculation against the “contagion” of communism.
THE THIRD WORLD AS IDEOLOGICAL PROJECT

this ignored, exploited, scorned Third World, like the Third
Estate, wants to become something, too. (Sauvy, 1952: 14)
The Third World was not a place. It was a project. During the
seemingly interminable battles against colonialism, the peoples of
Africa, Asia and Latin America dreamed of a new world. . .. They
assembled their grievances and aspirations into various kinds of
organizations, where their leadership then formulated a platform
of demands. . .. The “Third World” comprised these hopes and the
institutions produced to carry them forward. (Prashad, 2007: xv)
The concept of the three distinct worlds has a long historical

pedigree and does not come to us “as a mere descriptive category”
(Ahmad, 1992: 308) but carries within it multiple and sometimes

contradictory layers of meaning and political purpose. Not surpris-
ingly (given the imprecise nature of the term itself) there are
several competing explanations of its origins but typically it is
most often used in reference to “the former colonial or semi-
colonial countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America that were
subject to European. . . economic or political domination” (Westad,
2006: 3). The majority view is that the term was coined by French
demographer and anthropologist Alfred Sauvy in 1952 by analogy
to the revolutionary “third estate” of France – that is, the commoners
of France before and during the French revolution – as opposed to
priests and nobles, comprising the first and second estates, respec-
tively. Like the third estate, Sauvy suggested, the Third World “is
nothing” and “wants to become something”, implying that both had a
revolutionary destiny. Without a world government, Sauvy believed,
the very notion of a single “world population” was meaningless and
instead he proposed that there were in fact three worlds: a capitalist
“first world” of Europe, the US, Australia and Japan and a commu-
nist “second world” (both of which were headed towards conver-
gence in modernity) with the remainder belonging to a “Third
World”, caught in a “cycle of misery” (Sauvy, 1952: 14).
Although Sauvy called for assistance to the Third World, his
vision was driven by the fear that accepting the idea of a “world
population” would legitimise demands for unfettered migration
and the global redistribution of land and resources (Connelly,
2008). The concept of the Third World, then, was forged to fence
non-European populations within their own regions. The Third
World was however, as Prashad (2007: xv) has argued, not a place.
It was a project. Other than political equality it included a variety of
demands for the redistribution of the world‘s resources and the
benefits that accrue from them, a more dignified rate of return for
the labour power of its people and a shared acknowledgment of the
heritage of science, technology and culture (Prashad, 2007: xvii).
The Third World also referred to a position and a desire, its purpose
to decolonise international practices on questions of foreign policy
and development but also to chart a path towards political, social,
and cultural emancipation away from those prescribed by the super-
powers. The (geo)politics that Third Worldism gave rise to took
“distinctly different routes in various national contexts” (Nash,
2003: 101) and unfolded through a variety of different nodes and
sites from Beijing to Belgrade, Havana to Hanoi.
The origins of the concept of three worlds can also be traced to
Chairman Mao’s division of China’s social and political forces into
three categories, first applied to the international situation in his

conversation with American correspondent Anna Louise Strong in
1946 (Mao, 1961) and based on what he considered to be patterns
of exploitation rather than of diplomacy or formal ideology. Mao
stated that US “reactionaries” were striving to dominate the world
but that their global march was halted by the Soviet Union, the
“progressive” socialist state and a “defender of world peace”.
Following the Sino-Soviet split (1956–66) the Soviet Union was
being labelled by Beijing as a “social-imperialist” state which
had replaced the US as the main threat to world peace and in
1964 Mao modified his view of the world order, identifying two
“middle zones” in a forerunner of what would later be his theory
of three worlds, one comprising the “developing” countries of
Asia, Africa and Latin America, and a second made up of the
“developed” countries from Western Europe plus Japan, Canada,
Australia and New Zealand (Mao, 1969: 514). For Mao the key
battlefield lay in the zone separating the two superpower rivals
and including many capitalist, colonial and semi-colonial countries
across Europe, Asia and Africa (see Figure 3.1). Mao’s emphasis
on the existence and importance of a third force enabled China to
FIGURE 3.1 Chinese propaganda poster (1964) entitled “Resolutely sup-

port the anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of Asia, Africa
and Latin America”. Source: Stefan R Landsberger collection,
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.
develop its own identity and expand its influence in international

relations (Lin, 1989), constructing itself as part of the Third
World and at the head of a united international proletariat battling
against imperialism (see Figure 3.2). In further developing a
FIGURE 3.2 Chinese propaganda poster (April 1968) entitled “Chairman

Mao is the great liberator of the world’s revolutionary
people”. Source: Stefan R. Landsberger collection, Interna-
tional Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.
sense of contrast with the USSR, China repeatedly pointed

out that revolution could not be exported and that all commu-
nist parties were independent and should make their own
decisions (Dee, 1983: 242). Mao advocated a Chinese brand
of socialism that would serve in similarly placed societies
(colonial or semi-colonial) as a model not for emulation but
for inspiration so that people might find their own “third ways”
(Mao, 1965). In a speech to the UN General Assembly held
in April 1974, Deng Xiaoping expounded Mao’s strategic think-
ing on the question of three worlds and this came to operate
as a major “geopolitical compass” for China and its leaders
(Kim, 1980).
China was also able to outline its aspirations for the Third
World and its vision of “Afro-Asian solidarity” at the Bandung
conference in West Java (Indonesia) in April 1955. A meeting of
representatives from 29 African and Asian nations, Bandung
aimed to promote economic and political cooperation and to
oppose colonialism whilst its symbolic meaning can be explained
as a “collective crowning” or “inauguration ceremony of post-
colonial Asia and Africa” (Shimazu, 2014: 232). For Samir Amin
(2014: 131) Bandung began a kind of “counter-geopolitics,
defined by Southern states, to push the geopolitics of the triad
[the US, Western Europe, Japan] back”. Bandung was thus in
many ways the “launching pad for Third World demands” where
countries distanced themselves from the “big powers seeking to
lay down the law” (Rist, 1997: 86). Initially led by several key
statesmen of “Third Worldism” including Sukarno (Indonesia; see
Figure 3.3), Nehru (India) and Nasser (Egypt), the event was
sponsored by Burma, India, Indonesia, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and
Pakistan and sought to cut through the layers of social, cultural,
political and economic difference that separated nations of the
“Third World” in order to think about the possibility of common
agendas and actions. For all the talk of solidarity and cooperation,
however, there were several notable absentees. The USSR, South
Africa, North Korea, Israel, Taiwan and South Korea were all not
invited, conspicuous in their absence.
One of the key axes of mobilisation around Bandung was
race. The “racialised assemblages” (Weheliye, 2014 of empire
that disciplined humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans
(such as black and native populations within the colonies) and
non-humans created commonalities around which a post-colo-
nial basis for Afro-Asian solidarity could be formed. In his
opening speech to the conference on April 18th, 1955, Sukarno
FIGURE 3.3 President Sukarno of Indonesia addresses the Bandung Afro-

Asian conference in 1955. World History Archive/Alamy.
urged participants to remember that they were all united by a

common “detestation” of colonialism and racism (Sukarno,
1955: 1) and pointed out that colonialism was not dead or in
the past but also had its “modern” (neo-colonial) forms. In the
US, Bandung raised alarm partly because of recurring fears of
the “vast” populations of Asia being mobilised in a racial
alliance against the West, which remained a feature of the
American cultural and political imagination for much of the
early Cold War period (Jones, 2005). More generally, by
the time of Bandung race had become a key factor in the way
the US’ role in world affairs was perceived by both domestic
and global audiences (Jones, 2005). As Connelly (2000) has
shown, alongside the anti-communist fixations of the Cold War,
the Eisenhower administration (1953–61) was often fearful of
the emergence of North–South and more general racial tensions
when it surveyed the international scene. US authorities were
also concerned that the pan-Asian “contagion” might spread
domestically to the African-American population. Richard
Wright, an African-American writer that attended the confer-
ence, wrote in an account entitled The Colour Curtain that it
was not hard for countries with histories of colonial exploitation
to find something in common since the “agenda and subject

matter had been written for centuries in the blood and bones of
participants” (Wright, 1956: 14). For Wright, there was some-
thing almost “extra-political” about Bandung but the event itself
aroused considerable concern and suspicion on the part of the
superpowers and was dominated by discussion of Cold War
issues. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles even toyed
with the idea of a US-sponsored “reverse Bandung” conference,
in which the Western-oriented Third World countries would
have the upper hand (Gilman, 2003). Dulles, concerned about
the rise of a pan-Asian movement, feared that Bandung “might
establish firmly in Asia a tendency to follow an anti-Western
and ‘antiwhite’ course, the consequences of which for the future
could be incalculably dangerous” (Dulles, 1955: 83). Depart-
ment of State officials sought to undercut the impact of Bandung
with a set of carefully timed announcements (Engerman, 2004)
and there were fears in both the US and USSR that too much
independent international organising among Third World nations
would limit their own strategic influence.
Following Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was
founded by its leading advocates from India, Indonesia and
Yugoslavia on a principle of non-alignment with either the US or
the USSR in the Cold War. Its members did however include
countries that had in fact aligned themselves (or were members of
security pacts) with one superpower or the other such as Indone-
sia, Ethiopia and Egypt, despite the movement’s stated aims of
asserting independence from East and West. By 1970 all of
NAM’s founding members had either died or been overthrown
and it had become fractured. A year after the formation of NAM,
the “Group of 77” was also established (mostly made up of the
attendees of previous conferences) to press for changes from UN
agencies, hastening the arrival of new international institutions
explicitly dealing with “development” (Rist, 1997). The principles
of the Bandung conference were also taken forward by early
“Bandung regimes” (Nehru’s India, Nasser’s Egypt, Sukarno’s
Indonesia, Nkrumah’s Ghana) and led to what Samir Amin
(1994) has called the “Bandung Era” (1955–75) in recognition of
the extent to which, following the conference, the “Third World”
became the site of intense debates regarding options for “develop-
ment” and non-capitalist paths to socialism (Scott, 1999). From
the late 1960s through the 1970s radicalisations of the Bandung
project emerged in Chile, Tanzania, Jamaica, Grenada and Sri
Lanka. In each case “socialism” was the name of a “variously
configured oppositional idea of political community defined lar-

gely in terms of anti-imperialism, national self-determination, and
anti-capitalism” (Scott, 1999: 144). Marxism, in particular,
appeared to many in the Third World to offer a code of legitima-
tion against imperialism, a justification of power, the promotion of
new structures of rule and the possibility of “catching up with
history” (Laïdi, 1988: 11).
As a space of diplomacy Bandung was also an important site
for the performance of elite, “non-aligned” and anti-colonial
political identities in the era of decolonisation. In recent years
Diplomatic History and IR have begun to take the sociocultural
more seriously, and to engage more carefully with a variety of
different performances and spatialities of geopolitical relations
at diplomatic events like conferences and summits (Shimazu,
2012; Craggs and Mahony, 2014; Mamadouh et al., 2015). As
part of a wider re-engagement with the historical geographies of
the international as a concept, a scale, and a political and
cultural affiliation, work has also usefully focused attention on
the international conferences of the interwar period as important
sites where the international was created and challenged (Gos-
wami, 2012; Hodder, Legg and Heffernan, 2015) and where
significant “imaginary futures” of development were elaborated.
It is important to recognise that such event spaces become key
sites of knowledge creation, public performance, legitimation
and protest (Craggs and Mahony, 2014). In some of this work
the “diplomatic stage” is shifted from the abstract sphere of
high politics to the concrete sphere of the local milieu (Shi-
mazu, 2012: 335) and a variety of diplomatic spaces and
performances are taken in: not only the conference centre, but
also the street, the hotel, the evening dinner dance and the angry
press conference. The focus here is on overt performances and
their representation in the popular press but also on the smaller,
less public practices through which atmospheres (of agreement
and discord, trust and alienation) were made. Sukarno, Nehru,
Zhou Enlai and Nasser all understood the value of performance
“in their role as new international statesmen, representing the
esprit de corps of the newly emergent post-colonial world”
(Shimazu, 2014: 225).
Beyond its international significance Bandung also had an
important domestic subtext and served as a “political theatre”
where Sukarno’s Republic mobilised many signs of Indonesian
nationalism in order to muster popular support and acceptance of
the new regime, enacting them for the benefit of regions where
rebellion had been rising (Shimazu, 2014). These “performative”

acts of independence and nationhood helped to reinforce the sense
of unity in the Republic by rekindling recent popular experiences
of the Indonesian revolution, whilst at the same time acting as
symbols of the unity of the Afro-Asian world by reinforcing the
sense of solidarity of the 29 nations in attendance. In this way, the
Republic’s leaders, seen together with a variety of world statesmen
at the event, made a considerable impression on the Indonesian
electorate (Shimazu, 2014), enabling Sukarno to appear as the
great unifier and leader of a united nation, which was, itself,
emerging as a leader of the Third World. For some of its key
figures then like Sukarno, Nasser and Nehru, Bandung was as
much electoral realpolitik as an ideological call to arms (Ahmad,
1992).
In addition to Bandung, another important event in the
making of the “Third World” was the Tricontinental: the first
Conference of the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of
Africa, Asia and Latin America (OPSAAAL), held in Havana in
January 1966 (see Figure 3.4), which brought together the anti-
colonial struggles of Africa and Asia with the radical move-
ments of Latin America and marked the initiation of a global
alliance of the three continents against imperialism (Young,
FIGURE 3.4 A roadside billboard advertises the Tricontinental conference

in Havana, Cuba in 1966. The message reads “This great
mass of humanity has said enough! and is already on the
march”. Photo 12/Alamy.
2005). The extension, into the Americas, of the Afro-Asian

solidarity movement begun at Bandung was considered by
Washington to be a direct threat to the security of the US. The
Tricontinental marked both a high point in the emergence of a
non-aligned movement and the construction of a Third World
anti-imperialist project but also a break with those earlier
efforts. Whereas Bandung was a relatively modest affair, in
which the various political currents in the Third World came
together to articulate a minimum programme, the Tricontinental
was avowedly more radical, explicitly attempting to align anti-
imperialism with a wider challenge to capitalism. This conjunc-
tion was mediated at that time by the worldwide fight against
imperialism represented by the American intervention in Viet-
nam, where resistance to US intervention reminded many in the
Third World of their own anti-colonial revolutions. Although by
the end of the 1960s the high point of Afro-Asian solidarity had
passed, and much post-colonial optimism had faded, protracted
and violent decolonisation struggles in Southern Africa and
apartheid in South Africa provided a continuing focus for
action into the 1970s (Lee, 2010).
THE SOVIET UNION AND THE “ROMANCE” OF

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
The Cold War existed outside of military conflict, diplomatic
standoffs and superpower summits; it also encompassed crucial
agreements and disagreements about economics (Engerman,
2004). The principal Cold War adversaries shared a desire for
higher levels of economic production and agreed that “economic
performance was a defining element of modern life and an
important measure of national success” with industry seen as the
“prerequisite for higher levels of economic performance” (Enger-
man, 2004: 24). The conflict between East and West in the Third
World was thus an expression of two hegemonic models of
modernisation, democratic and socialist, free market versus central
planning (Westad, 2006). Both sought widespread appeal to the
new states being created from the ashes of colonialism. One,
“symbolised” by the US:
promised intensive urban-based growth in both the private and

public sectors, the import of advanced consumer products and
the latest technology through joining a global capitalist
market, and an alliance with the world’s most powerful state.

The other, that of the Soviet world, offered politically induced
growth through a centralised plan and mass mobilisation, with
an emphasis on heavy industry, massive infrastructural pro-
jects, and the collectivization of agriculture, independent of
international markets. . .. Both, however, offered a road to
high modernity through education, science, and technological
process. (Westad, 2006: 92)
The Cold War “mapped certain traditional Orientalist stereo-

types onto the Russians” (Pietz, 1988: 69) but for many Third
World leaders, the Soviet model “was more in line with the state-
centred and justice-oriented ideals they themselves had for the
development of their new countries” (Westad, 2006: 92–93). Sta-
lin’s “great break”, which sought to make a radical change from an
agrarian past by advancing “full steam ahead” along the path of
collectivisation and industrialisation to socialism and to leave
behind an age-old Russian “backwardness”, along with ambitious
Five-Year plans implemented by a centralised planning apparatus,
resonated with many in the “Third World” in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Soviets’ journey from a “backward” exporter of agricultural
products to an industrial society and “a nation of metal” through the
construction of huge new steel plants, gigantic dam projects and
vast industrial enterprises with newly mechanised collective farms
feeding the workers had considerable appeal (Engerman, 2004).
Leftists and economic planners from overseas flocked to observe
the Soviets’ plans in action with many of these “pilgrims of
planning” (Engerman, 2004) succumbing to what American diplo-
mat and historian George Kennan once termed “the romance of
economic development” (Kennan, 1932) in Russia which, he
argued, had led young people to “ignore all other questions in
favour of economic progress”. Even Kennan, however, balanced
his criticisms of Soviet policies with an appreciation of the Soviets’
goal of modernisation (Engerman, 2004). Experiences with national
development planning in the first three decades of the twentieth
century in post-Revolutionary Russia preceded the beginning of
debates in America about the possibility of “modernisation” (Enger-
man, 2000) whilst many of the pioneers of development economics
were from East Central Europe (Berger, 2001). North American
economists and policymakers became increasingly interested in the
Russian “version” of the national development project and from the
onset of the Cold War there were fears that the USSR was
providing a better example of development than anything the West

had to offer (Gilman, 2003).
In the context of decolonisation and in places like Addis Ababa,
Luanda and Havana, the Soviet Union and its developmental methods
appeared to occupy the rhetorical high ground during the early post-
war period as the Soviets came without the same colonial baggage
that accompanied Western powers. For those in the midst of an
insurgency, Russian communists had a model for how to overthrow
the former regime and a pattern for a new state that was “just” and
“modern” whilst in little more than a generation Lenin, Stalin and
their compatriots had “transformed a backward, underdeveloped
country into a military-industrial powerhouse” (McMahon, 2001: 7).
Economic plans in India, Indonesia and elsewhere in the Third World
sought to emulate Soviet economic priorities, emphasising industry
over agriculture. India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, for instance, wrote enthu-
siastically about Russian industrial progress, drawing explicit compar-
isons between Russia’s circumstances and India’s and claiming that
Russia’s determination to overcome its economic backwardness
would make India’s struggle all the easier. Nehru sought to learn the
strategies of rapid industrialisation (Nehru, 1949 [1929]) and keenly
watched the “Soviet experiment”, arguing that its economic ambitions
provided a sharp contrast with the bleak outlook of the 1930s, its
Five-Year Plans “a bright and heartening phenomenon in a dark and
dismal world” (Nehru, 1941: 230–231).
For the intelligence cadres of the liberation movement known
as the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) that were trained
in Moscow by the Soviets in the 1960s, Soviet egalitarianism, anti-
racism and state provision for basic needs held a powerful appeal
due to the dramatic contrast to settler-ruled Rhodesia (Alexander,
2017). The foundation for the communists’ claim to have moder-
nised Russia (and the basis of its claim to provide a model for
“backward” countries of the Third World) was the collectivisation
of agriculture and the process of making the peasants create the
state-controlled surplus that was necessary to jump-start an indus-
trial economy. There was a belief that the success the Soviet Union
had in technology and production in the 1950s would win support
for communism abroad. In particular, the Virgin Lands campaign
(Nikita Khrushchev’s plan to dramatically boost the Soviet Union’s
agricultural production in order to alleviate the food shortages
plaguing the Soviet populace) and the space programme were two
key projects that inspired this as Soviet know-how in agriculture
and industry was held up as something that would help the transi-
tion to socialism move faster.
The USSR also played on its ambiguous position as both

“inside” the international system and “outside” it, presenting
itself as the natural “midwife” for completing the independence
of newborn states (Laïdi, 1988). The Soviets chose to support
liberation movements not only because of the Cold War but also
because it regarded these struggles as part of the global “anti-
imperialist struggle” (Shubin, 2008: 3) which was not understood
as a battle between the two “superpowers” assisted by their
“satellites” and “proxies”, but rather as “a united fight of the
world’s progressive forces against imperialism” (Shubin, 2008:
3). Under Khrushchev (1955–64), there was a rediscovery of
Lenin’s argument that the peoples of the colonial world repre-
sented de facto allies of the proletariat and of the first proletarian
state, the Soviet Union (Kanet, 2006), along with a belief that their
struggle for independence from the imperialist West would con-
tribute to the weakening of the major opponents of the Soviet
Union, including ultimately the US (Kanet, 1974).
While Americans celebrated the market, the Soviets denied it
(Westad, 2006). For Lenin’s followers, modernity came in two
stages: a capitalist form and a communal form, reflecting two
revolutions, that of capital and productivity and that of democratisa-
tion and the advancement of the underprivileged. Communism was
the higher stage of modernity and it was the destiny of Russian
workers to lead the way towards it. The Communist International
(Comintern) set up in 1919 would be the vehicle through which
communists would set off rebellions against colonialism, although
its influence in the Third World declined between 1928 and 1943
and there was some stifling of dissident voices within it (Westad,
2006). Lenin began bringing “Third World” socialists to Moscow in
the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Communist coup and Mongo-
lia, as the first People’s Republic, became a testing ground for much
of communist policy where many of the same methods of cultural
work, education collectivisation and propaganda that would appear
later in other countries, were first introduced by Soviet advisers.
Many future leaders of anti-Western resistance passed through the
Comintern (including Nehru and Ho Chi Minh) and their encounters
with communism and the Soviet Union provided succinct ideas
about how to construct their movements and subsequent states
(Westad, 2006: 55). The Soviet Union also sought to expand its
influence abroad by means other than diplomacy. The Peoples’
Friendship University of Moscow, for example, founded in 1960
and renamed after Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, following his
assassination in 1961, granted scholarships and degrees to thousands
of students from Africa, Asia and the Middle East while indoctrinat-
ing them with communist ideology in an effort to influence the
future elites of the Third World (Staar, 1991). Many foreign
students, however, primarily those from Africa, experienced racism
by members of Soviet state institutions in the 1960s and 1970s and
African students and African-American residents in the Soviet
Union found that opportunities for economic and spatial mobility
were extremely racialised and that racial slurs were often used
outside official antiracism discourse (Fikes and Lemon, 2002: 503).
Khrushchev’s first major visit abroad in 1954 was to Beijing
(followed by India, Burma and Afghanistan) and stressed Soviet
willingness to cooperate in the national development of Third World
countries with colonialism and imperialism as the enemy. Building
an alliance with China was seen as a priority through the assistance
programme carried out under the Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty, a
kind of Soviet Marshall Plan, agreed in 1950. The relationship with
China had been lauded as the ultimate proof of socialism’s suitability
for the Third World but increasing rivalry between the two led to
more intense competition for strategic influence there. In an ambi-
tious attempt to stamp Soviet socialism on China, Moscow agreed in
1953 to increase aid sevenfold over two years and “in every depart-
ment of every ministry, in every large factory, in every city, army or
university there were Soviet advisors or experts who worked with the
Chinese to modernise their country” (Westad, 2006: 69; see
Figure 3.5). In 1954, the USSR proposed 156 key projects to assist
China, including plans for the development of the Yellow River basin
and the huge Russian-designed Sanmenxia dam project which began
construction in 1957 (Li, 2003). Mao had wanted “more, faster, better
and cheaper” socialism, however, and by designing the Great Leap
Forward in 1958 “broke with all Soviet advice about caution and
stages” (Westad, 2006: 69).
In July 1953 the Soviet representative to the UN Economic and
Social Council (ECOSOC) announced that the USSR would con-
tribute four million rubles to the UN programme of technical
assistance to underdeveloped nations (having had a long history of
opposition to it) (ECOSOC, 1953: 142). Over the next three years
the USSR worked intensively towards the restoration of Lenin’s
vision of “forging a united front between the nationalist aspirations
of the developing world and the revolutionary, anti-Western objec-
tives of the Soviet regime” (Porter, 1984: 16). A five-year trade
agreement was signed with India in September 1953 and in the
following year Afghanistan became the first Third World nation to
receive credits from Russia since World War II (see Figure 3.6). In
FIGURE 3.5 Chinese propaganda poster (1953) entitled “Study the Soviet
Union’s advanced economy to build up our nation”. Source:
Stefan R Landsberger collection, International Institute of
Social History, Amsterdam.
February 1955, one of the first and largest Soviet economic aid
projects in the Third World was announced: the Bhilai steel mill in
India costing over US$100m (Westad, 2006: 17).
The Soviet cause was boosted significantly when Fidel Castro
declared his commitment to building a Marxist–Leninist political
system in Cuba and turned to Moscow for military and financial
support. Following the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Fidel Castro’s
regime began a programme of actively supporting anti-imperial
revolutions across the so-called “Third World”. This brand of Cuban
Internationalism was heavily influenced by the call for international
solidarity among the proletariat; a key tenet of Marxism–Leninism,
carried out according to the axiom of guerrilla warfare developed by
Ernesto “Che” Guevara. It was under this ideological umbrella that
communist Cuba became not only an exporter of revolutionary
rhetoric but a material supporter and participant in the armed struggle
against imperialism. In December 1961 Cuba sent its first interna-
tional aid – a cache of rifles, machine guns and mortars – to the
Algerian FLN (Front de Libération National). No African liberation
movement was denied Cuban solidarity, whether expressed in material
FIGURE 3.6 Soviet pilot and cosmonaut Gherman Titov (second right) at
the construction site of the Naghlu hydropower station in
Kabul province, Afghanistan. The project was financed and
supervised by the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1968.
Source: Sputnik/Alamy.
and arms or in the training of military and civil technicians and

specialists (Deutschmann, 1989: 45). Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau,
Cameroon and Sierra Leone all at one time or another requested and
received forms of solidarity aid (Babbit, 2014) and Cuba’s interven-
tion in Angola’s liberation struggle (although not always in synchrony
with the Soviet Union) proved decisive (Marcum, 1978). In March
1977, Fidel Castro set out on a triumphal tour of Africa, both
celebrating the Cuban victory in Angola (see chapter 4) and confirm-
ing his role as chief spokesman for the Third World (George, 2005).
In the 1960s, Cuba and Vietnam challenged not only
Washington in defence of their revolutions, “they also challenged
the course set by the USSR for the development of socialism. . .”
(Westad, 2006: 158) and were certainly not, as various US admin-
istrations liked to depict them, Soviet “puppets”. After 1949 US
officials viewed Beijing’s expansive inclinations with “nearly as
wary an eye as Moscow’s” (McMahon, 2001: 5) and worried that

they posed just as dangerous a test. Maoist China’s criticism of
Moscow for lacking revolutionary fervour had paved the way for
independent brands of communism and while countries like Cuba
and Vietnam were recipients of Soviet aid, they were also ready to
embarrass the Kremlin in the lengths to which they would go to
challenge the West (Young, 2006).
THE US AND THE THIRD WORLD

The US itself became a Third World power (though the term
had not yet been coined) when it seized possession of several
Pacific and Caribbean territories following the Spanish–Amer-
ican war of 1898 (McMahon, 2001), although its extensive
trade links with the non-Western world long pre-dated the
imperial surge of the 1890s. In particular, during the adminis-
trations of Theodore Roosevelt (1901–09) and Woodrow Wilson
(1913–21) the US substantially deepened its diplomatic, mili-
tary and commercial involvement with non-Western areas.
World War II also further deepened US awareness of (and
interests in) the raw materials and markets available in “devel-
oping areas”. In this sense, the US “fixation” with the Third
World that developed during and after World War II “had
strong historical antecedents” (McMahon, 2001: 2). After
1945, a big part of what furthered this obsession was a growing
concern that the “nationalist aspirations of dependent peoples be
accommodated so as to defuse more revolutionary tendencies”
(McMahon, 2001: 3). US beliefs in individual liberty, free
market economics and “progress” led to policies of intervention
in East Asia, the Americas and Africa that long pre-dated the
Cold War, but which became much easier to justify once
communism could be portrayed as a threat (Westad, 2006).
Initially under Roosevelt and later the Truman administration
(1945–53), what increasingly began to take hold was the idea
that the US should assume a more activist role in the Third
World. US strategists of the 1950s, often referring more to the
“free world” than to the Third World (Sewell, 2010), set about
integrating “developing” regions more fully into the global
economy and spurring free trade but also aimed to establish a
worldwide network of US military bases. The Cold War alone
was not responsible for creating US interests in and priorities
for the Third World then, it merely served to reinforce them.
President Truman’s Point Four programme, announced in his

inaugural address on January 20th, 1949, was based on a strong belief
in sharing American know-how, technology and capital in order to
share the “American experiment/experience” with nations around the
world (McVety, 2008). On that important day of Truman’s second
inauguration some “two billion people became under-developed. . .
transmogrified into an inverted mirror of others’ reality” (Esteva,
1992: 7). Under President Truman, “underdevelopment” became the
incomplete and “embryonic” form of development and the gap was
seen as bridgeable only through an acceleration of growth (Rist,
1997). Truman vowed to make a central part of the US government’s
national security agenda the development of the underdeveloped
world, where there were “untold resources” needing only “somebody
who knows the technical approach” (Truman, 1949). Technical
assistance was seen as contributing to economic development,
which in turn contributed “to a host of politically good things –
democracy, peace, non-Communist governments, good will, interna-
tional understanding” (Packenham, 1973: 47–48), although no one
had proven that economic development would in fact lead to political
development. The Truman administration made technical assistance
a crucial part of Point Four (McVety, 2012) although it requested
only US$45 million for the programme and in practice the State
Department struggled to define its scope (Latham, 2011; see
Figure 3.7). Rather than offering a grand plan for economic develop-
ment, Point Four technicians taught classes on public health and
irrigation, distributed chickens and vaccines, and helped build
schools and water treatment facilities in 34 countries around the
world (McVety, 2012). Green revolution technologies, for example,
sought to dramatically increase yields of wheat and rice and although
gains in productivity were typically attributed to plant breeding
science, security concerns and management of foreign exchange
were prime motivators of the new technologies (Perkins, 1997).
After 1945 the US’ role in the Third World was deeply contra-
dictory, on the one hand claiming its anti-colonial credentials and
pushing for decolonisation and the liberty of colonised peoples whilst
on the other acting as an imperial power itself, through the creation
of a trade and investment empire, through a series of controversial
wars, invasions and occupations and through projections of its power
and authority. In practice the US also often struggled to “balance its
desire for friendly, cooperative relations with the emerging postcolo-
nial states with the need to maintain harmony within the Western
alliance” (McMahon, 2001: 6), seeking to avoid alienating European
NATO allies that held colonies. US analysts attempted to
FIGURE 3.7 A projection of 'Point IV around the world' prepared by the

Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA) in 1953 maps
out the global extent of the programme's interventions.
Courtesy of US Library of Congress.
demonstrate the efficacy of the capitalist pathway to development

and prove its superiority over the communist route, combating the
alternative form of modernity the Soviets had been developing since
1917 (Westad, 2006: 25). Containing the Soviet Union and construct-
ing a “healthy international environment” were, as National Security
Council Paper 68 (NSC-68) pointed out in April 1950, the two most
basic policy goals of the US, distinct but overlapping (National
Security Council, 1993: 40–41). The Third World was crucial to
each (McMahon, 2001). Until the end of the 1950s, US policies of
communist containment mostly focused on Asia, with Africa
regarded as “secured” by the maintenance of repressive colonial
regimes such as Portugal and South Africa (Young, 2005).
Condescending and paternalistic, US development theory in the
post-war period recast older notions of racial hierarchies and “drew its
inspiration from the old American vision of appropriate or legitimate
processes of social change and an abiding sense of superiority over the
dark-skinned peoples of the Third World” (Hunt, 1987: 160), rating the
amenability of certain cultures to modernisation. Development in this
sense needs to be understood not only as a geopolitical tool of the Cold
War, but also as a biopolitical technique of governance that took shape
within the realm of the domestic and through a racialised gaze
(Domosh, 2015, 2018). Several recent studies have traced US develop-

ment practices to the first decades of the twentieth century, if not earlier,
and to events that occurred as much within the US as outside of it
(Ekbladh, 2002, 2010, 2011; Sneddon and Fox, 2011; Domosh, 2015,
2018; Nally and Taylor, 2015). High-profile US domestic infrastructure
projects provided inspiration and served as models of what US aid
could potentially achieve through development of the Third World
(Ekbladh, 2010), such as the Tennessee Valley Authority
(TVA) established in 1933 as a grand scheme to develop the
natural and human resources of the Tennessee Valley region
(see Figure 3.8) and the New Deal’s Rural Electrification
Administration which became prototypes of how the state
could act as a rational, benevolent enforcer. Further, in the
1960s, as popular mobilisation proliferated across the Third
World, America’s civil rights movement was mobilising
domestically and its cities were beset with widespread racial
violence which also provided an important, if often neglected,
context for the making of US development discourses and
strategies.
Key elements of US international development practices in
the post-war era can be traced back to the US South in particular,
a region considered “undeveloped” in the first decades of the
twentieth century. The domestic agricultural extension service run
FIGURE 3.8 A comprehensive planning chart from the Tennessee Valley

Authority in 1940 maps out the construction benefits from
several hydroelectric dams. Everett Historical/Shutterstock.
by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) targeted the rural

farm home and farm women in a series of heavily gendered and
racially segregated interventions that then informed US interven-
tions in other countries under the guise of agricultural modernisa-
tion (Domosh, 2015). The USDA’s African-American extension
service in the early decades of the twentieth century also served as
a model for early articulations of liberal ways of development
(where it was also taken up by experts in the British Colonial
Office concerned with the ecological and economic crises looming
in their African colonies) since this biopolitical approach to
governance seemed to hold the promise of social engineering that
would create self-reliant individuals and self-sustaining commu-
nities (Domosh, 2018). Similarly, the Rockefeller Foundation’s
extension service, which attempted to spark agrarian change in
the US South through the inculcation of modern habits and
aspirations among farmers, provided a model for its international
rural development projects which sought to spread “green revolu-
tion” technologies of self-help as part of an anti-revolutionary
geopolitics, using the idea of “revolution within” to contain the
threat of “revolution without” (Nally and Taylor, 2015).
The US was buoyed by the perceived success of the first major
US foreign aid programme – the Economic Recovery Program
proposed by Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947, which
seemed to demonstrate that the US could kick-start growth in
impoverished economies. The Marshall Plan, which had proposed
US$13.3 billion of spending over four years in quite “recipient-
friendly terms” (Sogge, 2002: 1), had sketched out the principles of
“helping” poor countries to “recover” and restructure their econo-
mies and societies. US policies were also subsequently shaped by
(and pursued through) an emerging post-war international institu-
tional architecture of Development. The role of agencies like the
World Bank, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisa-
tion (UNESCO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and
the World Health Organization (WHO) in negotiating the Cold War
has usefully been traced in a number of critical reassessments
(Engerman, 2003; Jolly, 2004; Kraske, 1996; Marshall, 2008;
Mason and Asher, 1973; Shapley, 1993; Connelly, 2008). Geopoli-
tical agendas can be glimpsed behind both the problems these
agencies identified and the solutions they adopted as US officials
began to recognise that they could perhaps accomplish more by
masking their actions behind multilateral institutions and technical
interventions. These institutions played a subtle, nuanced role in
waging the Cold War in that multilateral development offered an
understated, “constructive” alternative to the clumsy, overtly self-

interested and “contentious” manoeuvres of national diplomacy
(Staples, 2006: 62–63).
Until 1957, more than 50% of World Bank financing was to
“developed” or “Part I” countries, although this fell to zero by 1968
(Kapur, Lewis and Webb, 1997). World Bank loans to “developing
countries” were often subordinated to Cold War objectives pro-
moted by the US, with the agency financing programmes of support
for dictatorships (such as in Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala,
the Philippines and Zaire) whilst turning a blind eye to mismanage-
ment and corruption (Bello, Kinley and Elinson, 1982). Cold War
geopolitics deeply influenced the World Bank’s efforts to promote
economic development in the “Third World” with the Bank cham-
pioning the cause of private property and free markets in the face of
growing Soviet influence (Escobar, 1995). Many US appointees to
the World Bank presidency, such as John McCloy, Eugene Black,
Robert McNamara and Paul Wolfowitz, were also seasoned career
cold warriors. Together with the IMF, the Bank played an important
role in the scripting of spatial entities (through the discourses of US
foreign policy) as democratic or totalitarian, developed or under-
developed, East or West, civilised or barbaric, and ultimately, based
on these dichotomies, as friendly or hostile, creating the possibility
and justifications for certain types of intervention (Popke, 1994).
The FAO similarly acted as a US surrogate until 1965
(McLin, 1979) and every executive director of the UN Children’s
Fund (UNICEF) since 1947 has been American whilst some of
UNICEF’s policy actions are taken in consultation with the US
State Department (US Department of State, 2003). International
efforts to control population through organisations like UNICEF,
the WHO and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) also quickly
became embroiled in the campaign to contain the spread of
communism (Connelly, 2008), with the CIA investigating
UNESCO activities as early as 1947 and claims circulating in
1953 that UNESCO was under communist control (Dorn and
Ghodsee, 2012). As such, the idea of teaching poor people to
read “became hopelessly entangled with fears of socialist revolu-
tion” (Dorn and Ghodsee, 2012: 398). Cuba’s success with literacy
campaigns (and its “Third World” appeal) led the US to take an
interest in developing its own literacy campaign to “promote
capitalist economic development by providing trained manpower
for nascent industries and increasing peasant productivity by
teaching ‘modern’ farming methods” (Dorn and Ghodsee, 2012:
387). Fears of the spread of communism were thus increasingly
at the heart of the Development apparatus, particularly as it

became clear in the early 1970s that the US was losing the war
in Vietnam.
ARRESTING THE COMMUNIST “CONTAGION”:

THEORISING MODERNISATION IN THE US
If national security was the sum of our fears, a nightmare
vision of an American garrison state cowering before a hostile
Eurasia, development spoke our dreams: a transparent, mod-
ernising world mastering man and the environment with
American technology. (Cullather, 2000: 652)
Key modernisation theorists often described communism as a

“pathological” or “deviant” form of modernity, hoping that the
Soviets would “converge” with the liberal version extant in the
West (Gilman, 2003). Whilst containment focused on the problems
of keeping the Soviets and their leftist allies at bay, development
was intended to provide “long-term immunity against the contagion
of communism” (Hunt, 1987: 159–60). It was believed that what
would stop the disease in its tracks was an alternative, capitalist
form of modernity. In this way development theory became the
“younger sibling of containment” (Hunt, 1987: 157). The moder-
nisation school turned anti-communism “from the hysterical red-
baiting populism of McCarthy into a social-scientifically respectable
political position” (Gilman, 2003: 13). The social sciences had
come under particularly heavy attack from McCarthyite inquisi-
tions, as did their institutional sponsors, such as the Ford Founda-
tion which was accused by a 1954 congressional investigation of
financing “the promotion of Socialism and collective ideas” in
the US (Deconde et al., 2001). In a way then the quest for the
improvement of “developing areas” thus provided a safe outlet
for social engineers whose New Dealism had become suspect
(Cullather, 2000). The modernisation school continued pre-war
progressive themes that emphasised the meliorist impact of
government social programmes and when some of these, such
as Truman’s Fair Deal, began to fall apart, liberals found themselves
unable to continue their social engineering projects domestically
(Gilman, 2003).
The “developmental state” with its paternalistic vision of
government assuming responsibility for economic growth and
social and economic equity and well-being for all its citizens thus
became “the third world analog to the welfare state” (Gilman,

2003: 17). The US, in effect, exported its liberalism in the form of
the energy and ideas of its best social thinkers and the funds of its
largest philanthropies (such as Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie),
which were increasingly focused on issues affecting “backward
areas” (Packenham, 1973). Together with government agencies
and universities they jointly created the institutional arrangements
for generating theorisations of modernisation. Third World elites,
underlined the Social Science Research Council in 1957 (SSRC,
1957), were looking for a new concrete form for their states and
societies, and “it was the duty of American social scientists to
produce one” (Westad, 2006: 32). In this sense, modernisation
continued the long-standing idea of the “manifest destiny” of
the US in embodying the conviction that the country “could
fundamentally direct and accelerate the historical course of the
postcolonial world” (Latham, 2011: 2). As such, it represented
“the most explicit and systematic blueprint ever created by
Americans for reshaping foreign societies” (Latham, 2011: 5).
Modernisation was in part a “will to spatial power” (Slater,
1993: 421) and certainly helped to construct an American world
order (Ekbladh, 2011), using social science to rationalise the
post-World War II drive to achieve global free trade and
American geopolitical hegemony (Gilman, 2003). Through a
growing number of area studies framed around modernisation,
orientalist discourse came to play a key role in the attempt to
subordinate, contain and assimilate the Third World “other”
(Slater, 1993).
The need to “do something” for these post-colonial regions
was very much a political imperative but one that demanded a
“scientific” justification. Key to the development of US moderni-
sation thinking was the creation in the early 1950s of the Center
for International Studies (CIS), the result of a top-secret anti-
communist propaganda project conducted at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) called Project Troy. CIS scholars
made several interventions around US aid policy and saw it as an
integral part of the anti-communist containment policy that had
begun with the Truman doctrine in 1947, regularly arguing for
increases in the aid budget. Founded by economist Max Millikan,
its first study on “Soviet vulnerability” (Rostow, 1953) was con-
ducted by US economist and political theorist Walt Whitman
Rostow, one of the founding fathers of modernisation thinking.
During World War II Rostow served in the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS), described by Gardner (2009: 60) as “a nursery of
American cold war intellectuals”, and he participated in (among

other tasks) the selection of targets for US bombardment. In 1947
Rostow served as assistant to Gunnar Myrdal, the then Executive
Secretary of the Economic Commission for Europe, giving him a
key role in the development of the Marshall Plan. Rostow’s
seminal text entitled The Stages of Growth (Rostow, 1960) offered
up a paternalistic and prescriptive five-stage typology that envi-
saged a “take-off” from “traditional society”, through “transitional
society” and the “drive to technical maturity” into an age of high
mass consumption (Rostow, 1960). Rostow worked closely with
the JFK administration to establish new aid programmes that
would help nations of the Third World proceed from stage to
stage in an orderly fashion.
The CIS was an important source of regional and area studies
expertise emerging during the early Cold War and its officials lobbied
for and publicised the need for American development aid overseas.
Focusing on India in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Engerman,
2004), CIS scholars typically explained the urgency of their work in
technical and economic terms but also in geopolitical ones, empha-
sising the necessity of keeping India out of the Soviet bloc. A key
focus of CIS scholarship was why some countries were especially
susceptible to communism and at what point they might fall prey to
what Rostow called the “communist disease”. For Rostow commun-
ism was “an opportunistic virus that took out infant nations not yet
blessed with a constitutional ‘maturity’” (Gilman, 2003: 195) and
was not the agent of modernisation but a side effect of it, or a
“disease of the transitional process” likely to spread in any nation
during the early, difficult stages of development. Instead of accelerat-
ing growth, he argued, communism disfigured it, producing an
unbalanced and dysfunctional modernity. The political scientist
Lucian Pye joined the CIS in 1956 on the strength of his newly
published book Guerrilla Communism in Malaya and his work
similarly regarded post-colonial nations “as essentially rebellious
adolescents, potentially susceptible to Communist delinquency,
which in turn might lead to a life of international crime” (Gilman,
2003: 170). For Pye, communism was an ideology that appealed to
“disturbed” individuals, adrift amidst the transition of modernisation
(Gilman, 2003: 196). These representations of post-colonial nations
as “young” or “immature” and as somehow “endangered” by the
transitional stages of growth appear throughout the literature on
modernisation. Development, Rostow and Millikan assured the CIA
in 1954, could create “an environment in which societies which
directly or indirectly menace ours will not evolve” (Millikan and
Rostow, 1954: 41) as foreign aid quickly became a key weapon for
waging the Cold War (see chapter 4).
JFK, THE “DECADE OF DEVELOPMENT” AND

THE RISE OF “DEVELOPMENTESE”
The inclination under the Truman and Eisenhower administrations
to defer, at least in part, to the European colonial powers in areas
like Southeast Asia and the Middle East (Suez excepted) gradually
gave way to a growing desire and active effort under the Kennedy
administration (1961–63) to “woo” and secure the states of the
Third World. In JFK’s White House the Third World “was still a
collection of trouble spots where freedom was a mixed good and
sometimes even downright dangerous” (Hunt, 2007: 208), his
administration clutching at modernisation theory as a means to
manage these same trouble spots (Hunt, 2007: 208) whilst “grop-
ing for an explanation of the United States’ place and responsi-
bilities amid the uncertainties of the post-war world” (Gilman,
2003: 5). For Rostow the most politically dangerous period in a
nation’s development was the “preconditions” stage and he argued
that it was on the weakest nations, facing their most difficult
transitional moments, that Communists concentrated their atten-
tion as “the scavengers of the modernisation process” (Rostow,
1961a: 234). The Democratic administrations of the 1960s took
Rostow’s theory to mean that if the US could quickly help
shepherd underdeveloped countries safely through the transition
to modernity and into the take-off stage, by whatever means
necessary, then the Communist “contagion” could safely be
arrested.
The main mode of transmission for the Communist “virus” for
Rostow was guerrilla warfare, since, as Schlesinger (2002: 341)
has noted, “Guerrillas were an old preoccupation of Walt Ros-
tow’s.” Indeed, Rostow advised JFK to turn Fort Bragg in North
Carolina into a centre for teaching a counter-guerrilla operations
course, arguably making him the “primary theorist” and “grand
designer” of counterinsurgency phenomena in the United States
(Gray, 2015: 114). Rostow recommended destroying what he
called the “external supports” to guerrilla insurgents, as “the most
hawkish civilian member of the Kennedy and Johnson administra-
tions” (Milne, 2008: 6). Averell Harriman, one of America’s most
celebrated diplomats, once described Rostow as “America’s Ras-
putin”, comparing him to the Russian mystic who advised Russian
czar Nicholas II, for the powerful and sometimes unsavoury

influence Rostow exerted on the decision making of Presidents
JFK and Lyndon Johnson (he also served as a speech writer for
President Eisenhower) (Milne, 2008). Rostow was the first to
advise Kennedy to send US combat troops to South Vietnam, and
the first to recommend the bombing of North Vietnam and an
invasion of Laos. A State Department white paper on Laos in
1959 even insisted that the landlocked country of three million
people constituted a “front line to the free world” (United States
Department of State, 1959: i).
Vietnam in particular was an important test case for the
modernisation thesis laid out in Rostow’s Stages (Gardner, 2009).
In 1966 Rostow was named Special Assistant for National Secur-
ity Affairs (the post now known as National Security Advisor)
where he was a main figure in developing the government’s policy
in the Vietnam War, a position he approached with a “missionary
zeal” (Gardner, 2009: 60). Rostow was a bundle of contradictions,
however (Milne, 2008). In his earlier work outside of government
Rostow argued that the US needed to assist developing nations
economically, not militarily, and that this was the best path to
eventual democracy and alliance with the US; but in his later
work, he repeatedly argued that military regimes could supply the
stability and administrative competence needed for development
and that eliminating the enemy’s capability to wage war by
destroying factories, power plants and logistical networks was the
best path to victory (Milne, 2008). Rostow’s supposedly “vision-
ary” rhetoric would thus soon “end up justifying the bombing of a
number of countries back through several ‘stages of growth’”
(Gilman, 2003: 199). Drawing on his experience as an army
captain in World War II and his work in the Economic Warfare
Division of the American Embassy in London, where he had the
principal task of identifying suitable enemy targets for Allied
bombing missions, Rostow championed massive escalatory strate-
gic bombing of North Vietnam, much like the bombing of the
Axis powers in World War II (see Figure 3.9). Rostow had very
little understanding however of Southeast Asian political or cul-
tural history and was analytically deficient in perceiving the
conflict as a nationalist civil war first, and a war between com-
munism and a fledgling democracy second (Milne, 2008). Along
with Max Milikan, Rostow was asked by JFK to draft the initial
proposal for the Peace Corps (see below) and played a key role in
the development of the US Agency for International Development
(USAID) and the Alliance for Progress (AfP).
FIGURE 3.9 In the situation room at the White House in Washington, DC,
George Christian, President Lyndon B Johnson, General
Robert Ginsburgh and Walt Rostow look at a relief map of
the Khe Sanh area in Vietnam on February 15th, 1968. Photo
by Yoichi Okamoto. Courtesy of LBJ Presidential Library.
The AfP was set up in 1961, along rigidly Rostovian lines,

providing economic, technical and educational assistance to Latin
American countries and suggesting that it was only by becoming
more like the US that Latin America could really begin to develop
(see Figure 3.10). In anticipation of imminent take-off, the AfP
called for a big push to raise investment rates, foster social capital
and induce thorough reforms in institutions, land tenure and
income distribution. Rostow predicted a transition to self-sustain-
ing growth within the decade, allowing the administration to keep
the problem of underdeveloped areas “off our necks as we try to
clean up the spots of bad trouble” (Rostow, 1961b). The antici-
pated follow-on effects of the alliance failed to materialise, how-
ever, and despite US$20 billion in aid support, growth rates after
the first year were far below the ambitious target figures. As
Latham (2011) points out, Rostovian modernisation thinking was
never held to account for the alliance’s failures and instead set-
backs only appeared to some observers to reinforce the validity of
concepts that provided explanations and remedies for failure. The
AfP’s problems were blamed on stubbornly anti-modern Latin
FIGURE 3.10 President John F Kennedy introduces the First Lady at La

Morita, Venezuela, accompanied by President Romulo Betan-
court of Venezuela and others on December 16th, 1961. US
State Department. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Personal
Papers. John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
leaders who had refused to carry forward the reforms or were

simply chalked up to bureaucratic ineptitude and personnel pro-
blems (Latham, 2011). Since the theory was rooted in the histor-
ical experience of the industrial core, there was a belief that it
could not be invalidated by contradictory experience in periphery
nations (Deconde et al., 2001). In this way, modernisation fun-
nelled dissent into its own framework, where it could challenge
the execution but not the conception of the plan.
Theorisations of modernisation often “echoed and amplified
unfolding American sentiments about the condition of modernity
at home” (Gilman, 2003: 12) and were as much about defining
America as attacking communism. It resonated with Americans’

cultural understandings of themselves and their country’s destiny
(Latham, 2000). As cultural historians have shown, Americans
interpreted and imagined the developmental encounter through
multiple literary and cinematic forms (Klein, 2003; Slotkin, 1992;
Nashel, 2000; Reynolds, 2008). Across fiction, reportage and poli-
tical commentary, an American version of the underdeveloped
world began to emerge between the 1940s and 1960s as US writers
like W E B Dubois reflected on foreign cultures and on their own
complex positions as Americans in a global context. In the works of
these authors, the ideals of the US as “apostle of modernity” and
sponsor of “development” feature as central in the decades after
World War II (Reynolds, 2008). The Rogers and Hammerstein
musical The King and I and bestsellers such as Eugene Burdick
and William Lederer’s The Ugly American and Tom Dooley’s
Deliver Us From Evil (1956) validated modernisation thinking by
associating it with mythic conventions in which “a ‘hostile’ [Asian]
is converted into a ‘friendly’ one by the White American’s display
of honour and competence” (Slotkin, 1992: 449).
Writers and artists framed a tolerant, inclusive and sentimental
role for the US and its citizens (Latham, 2011: 61), celebrating
their nation’s altruistic efforts to reach across the lines of race and
culture and putting forward a liberal, internationalist ideal of
integration and education. The Ugly American, co-written by
William Lederer, a publicist working for the US Navy and the
CIA, remained on the New York Times best-seller list for 78
weeks, sold an astonishing four million copies and was made into
a blockbuster movie starring Marlon Brando. The ensuing media
frenzy almost put development on a par with the space race in
terms of its popularity with the US public (Deconde et al., 2001).
It also created a new strand of populist internationalism that JFK
seized upon to boost his presidential bid but also the atmosphere
in which JFK declared America’s willingness to “bear any
burden”, building up US special forces and emphasising new
tactics of counter-insurgency to combat communist “people’s
war” in South Vietnam (Hellman, 1986). Under JFK, “. . .the
non-western world [was] to be the site of Western adventures, the
battlefield on which Westerners tired of domestic routines [could]
find urgency, adventure and glory” (McLure, 1994: 45).
Under the influence of men like Rostow and Pye then, “devel-
opmentese became the Kennedy administration’s court vernacular”
(Cullather, 2000: 641). JFK told campaign aide Harris Wofford that
he had wanted to run for President to initiate a “new relationship”
between the US and the developing world (Kennedy quoted in Rice,

1985: 23). Concerned about the existence of an “economic gap” in
Asia that was being filled by Soviet aid, in the first year of his
presidency, Kennedy launched the AfP, the Peace Corps, Food for
Peace (which took established agricultural surplus disposal pro-
grammes and organised them around a developmental mission) and
USAID, declaring the 1960s to be the “decade of development” in a
challenge taken up by the UN in 1961. JFK’s administration saw
decolonising countries as central to a changing world, even claiming
that the USA was an older anti-colonial sister to the twentieth-century
anti-colonial movements. There was also his Irish Catholic minority
status which led Norman Mailer in 1957 to label him a “white negro”
(Mailer, 1957). Dubbed “Secretary of State for the third world”
(Schlesinger, 2002: 509), JFK’s engagement of non-aligned countries
and courting of Third World leaders was unprecedented (see
Figure 3.11). As Rostow (1985) noted, Kennedy had been deeply
moved and influenced by exposure to poverty in visiting some parts
of the Third World. JFK also badly wanted to deploy American
“expertise” and “liberalism” abroad and the modernisation school
gave him a justification for doing so (McVety, 2015; see Figure 3.12).
The Peace Corps idea was conceived during the Presidential
campaign and JFK saw them as helping to overcome the efforts
of “Mr Khrushchev’s missionaries” (as he often liked to call
them) who had been busy strengthening their ties with the Third
World, expanding trade with Latin America in the mid-1950s
and announcing technical assistance programmes to the impo-
verished countries in the US’s backyard. A descendant of the
missionary tradition originated by Christian Europeans (Cobbs,
1996), the Peace Corps sought not specialists but “representa-
tive Americans” who could transmit values by example and
create a catalytic effect by introducing ideas from a supposedly
higher point on the developmental arc. Although initially set up
as a means of countering growing Soviet commitments to
decolonisation and foreign aid, the Peace Corps also played a
role in domestic nation-building within the US and helped to
project a non-opportunistic image of the US as seeking not to
“dominate” but only to help (see Figures 3.13 and 3.14). To an
extent it often framed development around a North–South axis
(rather than East–West) through various means, including a
refusal to send volunteers to Vietnam, elaborate provisions to
avoid CIA infiltration and a “rhetoric of universalism rather
than anticommunism” (Cobbs, 1996: 105). As a foreign policy
initiative, it was one of the most successful strategies of the
FIGURE 3.11 President John F Kennedy, accompanied by Deputy Special

Assistant for National Security Affairs Walt Rostow (fourth
from the left, behind two men), meets with members of the
Parliament of Ceylon at the Oval Office in the White House,
Washington, DC on June 14th, 1961. Photo by Abbie Rowe.
White House Photographs. John F Kennedy Presidential
Library and Museum, Boston.
post-World War II period for making friends for the US and by

1965 there were some 13,248 volunteers in the field (Cobbs,
1996: 89). Many other countries followed suit based on their
own larger national policies and as a way of showing solidarity
with the US and the wider Atlantic alliance. Between 1958 and
1965, Britain, Australia, Canada, Japan, Israel, France, Ger-
many, Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Bel-
gium and even Liechtenstein started volunteer programmes to
spread the message of economic development and international
goodwill. For Geidel (2015), however, the development ven-
tures of the Peace Corps legitimated the (violent) exercise of
American power around the world, contributed to the destruc-
tion of indigenous ways of life and embodied and disseminated
a particularly heroic and compelling iteration of modernisation
FIGURE 3.12 USAID agronomist Emory Howard stops to talk with an
Afghan farmer during work on irrigation and hydroelectric
power facilities in the Helmand Valley in the 1960s. Courtesy
of the US National Archives Still Picture Unit.
FIGURE 3.13 Peace Corps Volunteer Jane Keiser, 26, of Minneapolis,

works as part of a tuberculosis team training Afghan coun-
terparts in Baghlan hospital. Photo courtesy of Peace Corps.
FIGURE 3.14 Peace Corps volunteer Mary Jean Grubber administers a

tuberculosis skin test to a villager in Nsanje, Malawi in
1965. Granger Historical Picture archive/Alamy.
that allowed the US to maintain global hegemony in the face of

widespread decolonisation struggles by placing modernity,
rather than independence or economic justice, at the endpoint
of those struggles.
One of the hallmarks of the modernisation school (and the
various attempts to apply it to “Third World” contexts) was the idea
of replicating and mimicking the development of others, particularly
the US. Modernisation theorists separated the contents of modernity
from its origins as a description of specific periods of Euro-American
history and stylised them “into a spatio-temporally neutral model for
the process of social development in general” (Habermas, 1987: 2).
The “model of the modern” on offer was an image of the US writ
large (Luke, 1991) and a key component of modernisation was its
theory of convergence. The dependency scholar André Gunder Frank
once referred to this as a kind of “Sinatra Doctrine”:
Do it my way, what is good for General Motors is good for

the country, and what is good for the United States is good for
the world, and especially for those who wish to “develop like
we did” (Frank, 1997: 13)
The Dependency approach pioneered by Gunder Frank in

The Development of Underdevelopment (Frank, 1966), as a
counter-analysis to the modernisation school, first emerged in
Latin America and initially took root in Brazil, Chile and
Colombia (and the US) before later opening out into a variety
of regions including Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East.
The promised altitude that was the fifth stage of Rostow’s model
envisaged an urban-based, Western lifestyle of consumption, but
the dependency scholars argued that the planes of the South had
been stalled on the runway by unequal relations and a history of
colonialism, denying them a chance of ever being airborne or
“industrialised” (Power, 2003). Just as the modernisation
approach was adopted by international institutes and bilateral
donors, the dependency school was made up of all those opposed
to US policy and became a focal point for Third Worldism. Its
message about the manipulation of the periphery by the core was
very timely in the context of proliferating state socialisms and
radicalisations of the Bandung project. Dependency was an
“insurgent theory” (Slater, 2008) that constituted an important
attempt to “theorise back” from the Third World and provided a
valuable counter-analysis to the assumptions about growth and
the diffusion of “progress” by modernisation theorists. In doing
so the dependency scholars constructed and deployed an impor-
tant alternative geopolitical imagination which sought to prior-
itise the objectives of autonomy and difference and to “break the
subordinating effects of metropolis-satellite relations” (Slater,
1993: 430).
Both modernisation and dependency approaches were “inex-
tricably intertwined in one another’s assumptions” (Munck,
1999: 203) (including key binarisms such as modernity vs tradi-
tion, core vs periphery) and seemed in the end “to checkmate
each other” (Schuurman, 2001: 6) in that the main propositions
of the dependency scholars seemed counterpoised “point by point
to Rostow’s theory” (Rist, 1997: 110). Ironically, given the role
philanthropic foundations played in creating the conditions for
the growth and diffusion of modernisation thinking, much of the
research on what became dependency theory in Latin America was
funded by the Ford Foundation, which had helped to create net-
works of researchers concerned with development in the Third
World. The independence of philanthropic foundations like Ford
and Rockefeller from the US government enabled them to initiate
research in areas wary of US geopolitical ambitions and bring them
into US circles of debate, by appealing to a nebulous concept of

global development free of political interest (Arnove, 1982).
CONCLUSIONS: THE GHOSTS OF COLD WAR

MODERNISATION
The various hells that postcolonial countries from Indonesia to
Iraq to Colombia have entered in the last thirty years were
almost always preceded and justified by well-intentioned
modernizers, both liberal and Communist, who believed that
they knew what was best for these lands. (Gilman, 2003: 20)
Cold War geopolitical discourses constructed and invented a “Third

World” as a strategically vital third global space in need of moder-
nisation and development. As an ideological project, the Third World
took multiple forms and unfolded across various sites, nodes and
networks and its boundaries and “revolutionary orientation” (Sauvy,
1952) were performed and enacted across a number of diplomatic
sites and spaces in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Although it
enabled a series of “revolutionary myths” of socialism and national
liberation (Chaliand, 1977) as various political leaders claimed to
represent the entirety of its people and to speak on its behalf, the
Third World also gave rise to a number of radical developmentalisms
and an important “counter-geopolitics” (Amin, 2014: 131) that
sought to push back against imperialist geopolitical ambitions. Ironi-
cally, although the US set out to contain communist insurgencies,
many of its interventions did as much to radicalise the Third World as
any form of socialism. The apparent successes of socialist regimes in
offering an alternative to capitalism and an alternative geopolitical
alliance certainly helped constitute and radicalise the Third World but
in seeking to confront revolution, US policy inadvertently created a
strong and coordinated bloc of opposition and solidarity and strength-
ened the desire to find alternatives. It was the US then that, by 1970,
“had done much to create the Third World as an entity both in a
positive and negative sense” (Westad, 2006: 157). Interventions
against radicalism in places like Iran and Guatemala, interference in
the Congo in the early 1960s, support for Israel and a laissez-faire
economic system that effectively kept much of the Third World in
poverty, all served to alienate those who had supported the agenda of
the non-aligned movement (Westad, 2006: 157). Whilst the (geo)
politics of Third Worldism took distinctly different routes in various
national contexts, the 1950s and 1960s was an age of “Third World
Euphoria”, a period “when it seemed that First World leftists and

Third World guerrillas would walk arm-in-arm toward global revolu-
tion” (Shohat and Stam, 1994: 26). The activist aura once enjoyed by
the Third World may have evaporated and the post-war configuration
that justified Third World identity and non-alignment may no longer
exist but the “imaginary cartography that justified the Third World
still does” (Grovogui, 2011: 178).
Modernisation was a global project in character and scope,
taking on multiple forms (including its Soviet and Chinese
varieties) with “high-modernist faith” being found across the
political spectrum (Scott, 1998), especially among those that
wanted to use state power to bring about huge changes to
people’s work habits, living patterns, moral conduct and world
view. For both Moscow and Washington, the key objectives were
“control and improvement” (Westad, 2006: 5) and right from the
off modernisation was framed around insurgency, either as a
means of fomenting and spreading revolution and anti-imperial-
ism or as a means to confront and counter insurrection. Decolo-
nisation had increased the threat of collectivist ideologies gaining
the upper hand in the Third World and the transnational practice
of development, as it emerged in the 1950s, was about managing
these insurgencies and responding to the threat posed by popular
mobilisation, enabling the US to develop a set of rules for a
“proper revolution” (Latham, 2011): it must be a solemn affair,
with minimum disorder, led by respectable citizens with moder-
ate goals (Hunt, 1987: 116). In the US, modernisation was
inextricably linked then not just to the transference of Western
historical experiences, democratic ideals and values but also to
the maintenance of political order and stability. It offered not
only a meta-narrative that provided a sense of the “meaning” of
post-war geopolitical uncertainties but also “an implicit set of
directives for how to effect positive change in that dissilient
world” (Gilman, 2003: 5).
For various US administrations, the peoples of the Third
World needed to be defended against communism even when
they had themselves elected a communist government. Modernisa-
tion would provide the necessary inoculation against the commu-
nist contagion, this opportunistic virus that took out “infant
nations” not yet blessed with constitutional maturity during the
difficult and dangerous transitional stages of economic develop-
ment. Defending “freedom” took on the paternalistic role of the
US knowing what such countries really wanted, better than the
people themselves – a classic colonial attitude that led the US to
support anti-communist forces in Vietnam and Korea, colonial

autocracies such as the apartheid government in South Africa and
various neo-colonial regimes in Latin America (Young, 2005). US
policy towards the Third World included support for authoritarian
regimes, the use of covert operations and aid payments to ensure
political stability (Kolko, 1988) and saw material assistance pro-
vided to a variety of regional allies like Brazil, Indonesia, Iran and
Zaire to manage local conflicts and contain Soviet influence with-
out direct American military intervention. Both military and civi-
lian programmes of intervention were developed, each aiming to
create (within the recipients of US aid) modern army and police
forces capable of countering insurgencies. The US alone provided
grants amounting to over US$90 billion in military equipment and
training to some 120 countries before the end of the Cold War and
licensed approximately US$240 billion in arms sales to more than
100 countries (Kuzmarov, 2017). Experiences with countering
insurgency also fed back into and framed wider US approaches
to foreign aid. The foundations of USAID, for example, were
closely shaped by counter-insurgency experiences and practices as
its founding members, returning from the Vietnam War, trans-
ferred the counter-insurgency tactic of “population control” to
USAID’s strategy (Connelly, 2008) (see chapters 4 and 6).
Typically, writings on modernisation on both the left and
right “characteristically focus on strategies rather than on the
developers who devise them or the historical circumstances in
which they arise” (Cullather, 2001: 243) as usually “the origin
of the intention to develop is omitted from discussion” (Cowen
and Shenton, 1996: 440). Modernisation was shaped by particu-
lar localities (from Addis Ababa to Washington) but also by
particular projects (from the Virgin Lands programme and the
TVA to the CIS, Project Troy and UNESCO) and particular
individuals (such as Rostow). The passage of modernisation
programmes was rarely smooth, however, and neither were they
unilaterally “imposed” on subject populations. Even as US
policymakers tried to promote modernisation and direct its
course in countries like Egypt, India and Ghana, “foreign actors
embraced, modified and reformulated the ideology to fit their
own purposes” (Latham, 2011: 5). In Iran, for example, the Shah
was adept at exploiting American fears of communist subversion
during the JFK, LBJ and Nixon administrations, presenting
himself and his vision of modernity as the only viable option
for ensuring Iranian security (Offiler, 2015) and refocusing
modernisation on Iran’s military to secure the Pahlavi dynasty.
Similarly, in Indonesia President Suharto was able to manipulate

US fears about Indonesia becoming a communist bulwark of
Moscow or Beijing in Southeast Asia to promote his own
“army-led modernisation” and consolidate his authoritarian
regime (Simpson, 2008).
Further, despite the intensity of Cold War confrontation, it
was not the case that Third World leaders had a simple choice
between the two camps, or that their interventions were always
entirely separate or diametrically opposed. Post-colonial leaders
were willing to experiment and combined elements of both Amer-
ican and Soviet experience in order to generate more rapid
progress (Latham, 2011). Programmes of development interven-
tion are often pulled together from various sources in a “brico-
lage” (Li, 2007: 6) and by the late 1960s, American and Soviet aid
advisers were collaborating on the ground in India, Afghanistan
and the Middle East; by the early 1970s, even the more stubborn
philosophical differences, such as over birth control, had begun to
dissipate (Connelly, 2008). While the US was able to shape the
overriding architecture of international development, many Afri-
can countries had technical cadres trained in the Soviet Union,
Eastern Europe and China, and implemented mixed development
plans combining elements of state planning, cooperatives and state
farms, with US models of rural development, community devel-
opment and the land grant system of agricultural extension
(Amanor, 2013).
As Karabell (1999: 12) has argued, US interventions in the
Third World depended (to varying degrees) upon a “convergence
of interest” with local elites, whose own actions were often
dictated by their personal domestic concerns. It is important there-
fore to consider the ways in which modernisation discourses and
practices were engaged with and appropriated locally in various
contexts. Ethiopia was one example where millions of dollars of
US foreign assistance failed to transform Haile Selassie into a
democratic leader and to create a democratic state. US leaders
seemed to overlook the possibility of a nation importing Amer-
ica’s economic and scientific advances while rejecting its political
ones (McVety, 2008). Further, many twentieth-century Third
World leaders valued modernisation as a critical means of con-
solidating their own power over a state that they could now
“know” and, in consequence, more effectively dominate (Scott,
1998: 77). Despite JFK’s idealistic calls to spread “the disease of
liberty” to communist nations, his administration’s determination
to fight the Soviets at all costs meant that it proved as willing as
Eisenhower’s to overlook the reality that many of its allies were

steadily building up their immunity (Ambrose and Brinkley, 1997:
173; McVety, 2008).
The Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, himself a key con-
tributor to modernisation thinking who had been involved with the
Marshall Plan, worked with the Rockefeller Foundation and
chaired the Swedish Committee for Vietnam (Scott, 2009), once
noted that international civil servants working in UN agencies
filled roles only recently vacated by colonial officials and told a
gathering of agricultural experts in 1966 (Myrdal, 1966: 666) that
they were the “inheritors of the imperial mission civilisatrice”.
Indeed, many of the “apostles of modernity” approached the cause
with a missionary, messianic, proselytising zeal and a sense of
self-righteousness, personified and embodied in the work of key
figures like Walt Rostow. Development itself increasingly consti-
tuted a kind of modernist messianism (Rist, 1997) that, at least in
the US, promised to exorcise the secular demons of the post-war
world – poverty, communism and colonialism – and became so
popular in post-war America that it “approximated a civil religion
championed by liberal Cold warriors” (Nashel, 2000: 134).
Modernisation resonated with Americans’ cultural understand-
ings of themselves and their country’s “manifest destiny” and
echoed and amplified American sentiments about the condition of
modernity at home. With the “idea of America as an insecure
space at the heart of a Cold War map” (Farish, 2010: xxii),
modernisation discourses were as much about defining America
as attacking communism and were as much shaped by events that
occurred within the country as by those outside of it. Rostow saw
his work as giving “fresh meaning and vitality to the historic
American sense of mission – a mission to see the principles of
national independence and human liberty extended on the world
scene” (Millikan and Rostow, 1957: 2–8). Further, in the context
of the persistent and pervasive militarisation that existed in the US
in the 1950s and 1960s, Rostow and other social scientists tried to
“weaponise” their understanding of modernisation (Gilman, 2003;
Latham, 2011), “like nuclear scientists who applied their knowl-
edge of the atom to the task of making bombs” (Danforth, 2015:
478). The result was often a form of modernisation discourse that
justified military intervention and authoritarian rule and violence
in countries like Indonesia and Vietnam on the grounds that only
strong states could implement the social and economic pro-
grammes necessary to change traditional societies. Modernisation
was thus an ideology before it became a theory of development.
Rostow subtitled Stages (1960) as “A non-communist manifesto”

and made it his “life mission to offer the world a better alternative
to Karl Marx” (Frank, 1997: 2), seeking to supplant Marx as the
inspiration for revolutionary intellectuals and to “reclaim Marx
from the communism of the Soviet Union” (Gilman, 2003: 201).
Marxism inspired a variety of radical Third Worldists and the
movements and states they tried to form but also the alternative
geopolitical imagination and counter-analyses to modernisation
that dependency scholars pioneered in seeking to “theorise back”
from the Third World.
For some, the promises of modernisation were impossible,
even unreal, goals because as a process it could not be imposed or
invited and efforts to do so were doomed to fail (Escobar, 1995).
Similarly, Mitchell (2002) suggests that modernisation was purely
a discourse used by Western powers to justify exploitative imper-
ial or neo-imperial relationships with Third World peoples. In this
view, modernisation discourse only existed as rhetoric for “the
natives”, while in private “canny ‘experts’ knew better than to
fully believe their own schemes” (Danforth, 2015: 491). US
officials may have sought to conceal their strategic geopolitical
interests and motivations behind multilateral institutions and tech-
nical interventions and found in multilateral development a “con-
structive” alternative to the clumsy, contentious manoeuvres of
national diplomacy (Staples, 2006), but the peoples and political
leaders of the Third World were able to negotiate and remake
modernisation discourses in a variety of ways and to negotiate the
multiple modernities and political geographies of the Cold War
(White, 2003) in attempting to create a new geopolitics. Moder-
nisation was discredited in the wake of US failures in Vietnam and
Iran but many of its fundamental assumptions are still present
today in the way US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, for
example, have linked development to the enhancement of security
in confronting insurgency in the South, as the “ghosts of moder-
nisation” (Latham, 2011: 186) continue to haunt the crumbling
Development edifice.
Chapter 4
Cold War geopolitics

and foreign aid
INTRODUCTION: COLD WAR FOREIGN AID

AND THE BATTLE FOR THE THIRD WORLD
IN October 1975, on the eve of Angolan independence, El Vietnam
Heroico, one of three improvised Cuban ships, put in to Puerto
Amboim, just south of the capital city Luanda. It had been sent as
part of a Cuban solidarity action in Angola entitled Operation
Carlota, framed as a “people’s war” and named after a Cuban slave
called Black Carlota who, working on the Triunvirato plantation in
the Matanzas region in 1843, led a slave rebellion in which she lost
her life. The Cuban ships were subjected to all kinds of provocation
by US destroyers, which followed them for days on end, and by
warplanes that menacingly buzzed above and photographed them
(Marquez, 1977b). At the time, the US was just emerging from the
Vietnam debacle and the Watergate scandal with an unelected
president and a government keen to avoid appearing as the ally of
racist South Africa in the eyes of both the majority of African
countries and the black population of the US itself. The fall of
South Vietnam, however, along with the painful reassessment that it
led to in the US, made possible the subsequent Soviet–Cuban
intervention in Angola – the first large-scale deployment of Cuban
troops on behalf of a Soviet client state in a Third World country
(some 36,000 troops, half of whom were black, were deployed
during Operation Carlota) (Mallin, 1987; Adams, 2012).
As the Portuguese colonial forces were due to abandon Angola
on the day of independence (November 11th, 1975), nationalist
movements backed by a wide variety of external sponsors (including
the US, South Africa, China, North Korea, Zaire, Romania, the
Cold War Geopolitics and Foreign Aid 125
Soviet Union, Cuba, the German Democratic Republic, France, and

Yugoslavia) jockeyed for position as they sought to seize strategic
points and infrastructures, particularly around Luanda. Angola was in
many ways “an improbable locus for a superpower collision”
(Marcum, 1976) but as international economic and military assis-
tance flooded in it quickly became a hotly contested Cold War
battleground. The real cost of this foreign aid was huge, however –
during the period of conventional warfare between 1975 and 1976,
50,000 Angolans, the majority of them non-combatants, were killed
or died from starvation and disease caused by the war (Clodfelter,
2002: 625–626). Upon independence the post-colonial Angolan state
was beset by an insurgency that was to last almost three decades,
plunging the country into a devastating civil war.
This chapter examines the ways in which foreign aid practices
were shaped by and folded into the wider Cold War enframing and
imagination of modernisation and development and seeks to show
how aid and overseas development assistance became a key site of
Cold War geopolitical competition and rivalry with important
implications for donors and recipients alike. Foreign aid, oriented
towards both civilian- and military-focused interventions in reci-
pient countries, includes a wide range of resources transferred by
donors to recipients such as physical goods, skills and technical
know-how, financial grants (gifts) or loans (at concessional rates)
(Riddell, 2007: 17). The establishment of domestic welfare states
in the 1930s and 1940s in Europe and North America had paved
the way for the setting up of the foreign aid regime and the
willingness to consider governmental programmes of assistance
to people overseas (Lumsdaine, 1993), which had also been
helped by the proliferation of private and philanthropic humanitar-
ian assistance – by 1910 over 300 NGOs based in the “developed
world” were active abroad (Smith, 1990). The Cold War provided
an important rationale for foreign aid and from the very beginning
it was linked to political conditionalities of various kinds that
sought to create particular kinds of states or to advance the
donor’s security and strategic objectives. As such, through the
Cold War aid became “a key part of the architecture of interna-
tional relations” (Riddell, 2007: 22). At the height of the Cold War
some even argued that aid was imperialism (Hayter, 1971) whilst
scholars like Andre Gunder Frank argued that it was a form of
neo-colonialism that had created only dependency. Foreign aid
enabled a variety of countries to create spheres of strategic
influence and alliance during the Cold War, to project their
economic, political and cultural power, to pursue their foreign
126 Cold War Geopolitics and Foreign Aid
policy objectives and to sponsor (or counter) various kinds of

revolution. It also enabled donors to “train” and “discipline” client
states and to promote particular kinds of political formations and
politics. In several cases, recipient countries (such as Afghanistan
and Angola) became the site of “tournaments of modernisation”
(Cullather, 2002: 530), as competing global powers sought to
enact their different conceptions of revolution, progress and devel-
opment in a bid to win hearts and minds.
In addition to its significance in the Cold War confrontation
between the US and the USSR, Angola was also the focus of a
vitriolic propaganda battle between the USSR and China. Having
initially sided with the Marxist–Leninist MPLA (People’s Move-
ment for the Liberation of Angola), the first African liberation
movement with which China had contact, Chinese policy later
favoured the FNLA (National Liberation Front of Angola) and
UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola)
simply to preclude a Soviet victory and not because of the ideolo-
gical merits of the organisations themselves (Jackson, 1995: 405).
The Chinese armed anti-MPLA groups to show Africa to be “popu-
list, peasant-oriented, anti-Soviet and rural” (Jackson, 1995: 396),
which suited their wider agenda for the continent. For its part, Cuba
had been playing an active role in fomenting and supporting anti-
colonial and anti-imperial revolutions (Gleijeses, 2002, 2006). The
momentous victory of the “26th of July Movement” led by Fidel
Castro over the Cuban bourgeoisie (and their corporate American
allies) was regarded as only the start of an international proletariat
revolution which would spread across the periphery, with Cuba
committed to facilitating the outbreak of “another Vietnam” some-
where in the Third World (Robbins, 1979).
Cuba’s first informal contacts with the MPLA were made in the
1950s and MPLA guerrillas received their first training from
Cubans in Algiers in 1963 before the MPLA’s leader, Agostinho
Neto, met with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro (in 1965 and 1966,
respectively), to raise the possibility of wider forms of aid
(Marcum, 1969). Castro sent troops to Angola without informing
the Soviet Union and deployed them at Cuba’s own expense from
November 1975 to January 1976 (when Moscow eventually agreed
to a degree of support by arranging for a maximum of 10 flights
from Cuba to Angola) (Gleijeses, 2002). Castro himself came to see
the troops off as they departed on El Vietnam Heroico – as he did
with every contingent that left for Angola (Marquez, 1977b) – and
kept himself informed of the minutest details of the war, quoting
any statistic relating to Angola “as if it were Cuba itself. . . as if he
had lived there all his life. . .. there was not a single dot on the map
of Angola that he was unable to identify, nor any feature of the land
that he did not know by heart” (Marquez, 1977b: 134).
Cuba’s motivation to enter the war in Angola arose indepen-
dent of the USSR (Kessler, 1990; George, 1999) and the decision
to escalate to a full-scale intervention appears to have been purely
Cuban (George, 2005), although there is no denying that the
timing of the arrival of Soviet heavy arms was critical or that the
Cubans were, in some respects, a “proxy” force for the Soviets in
Africa. Cuba would maintain a presence in Angola for the next 16
years with close to 500,000 Cubans serving in various positions
from military personnel to humanitarian aid workers. Estimates
suggest that around 10,000 Cubans died in the Angolan campaign
from 1978 to 1980 (Horowitz and Suchlicki, 2003; see Figure 4.1)
and by 1988 there were over 65,000 Cuban troops in Angola,
proportionally four times the American commitment to Vietnam
(George, 2005). Moscow also rewarded Cuba financially for its
role in Angola, replenishing Cuba’s military inventory and offer-
ing to purchase Cuban goods that could not be sold on the world
FIGURE 4.1 Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos (first from left)
and his Cuban counterpart Fidel Castro (second from left) pay
their respects to the mortal remains of Cuban soldiers who fell
in combat in Angola, at the Cacahual Mausoleum in Havana
on December 7th, 1989. RAFAEL PEREZ/AFP/Getty Images.
market (Porter, 1984). Almost immediately after Angola the

Cubans and Soviets followed up with a similar large-scale opera-
tion in the Horn of Africa, where they supported the Marxist
government of Haile-Marian Mengistu of Ethiopia in a war
against their former clients in Somalia over the Ogaden in 1977–
78. Success in Angola led Soviet officials to believe “the world
was turning in our direction” (Westad, 2006: 241).
The chapter builds on the discussion of the geopolitics of Third
World modernisation in the previous chapter by exploring the ways
in which three countries that offered some of the most compelling
models of modernity in the Third World, the US, China and the
USSR (along with its Eastern European allies), used foreign aid to
advance their geopolitical strategies and particular visions of
“development”. It examines some of the different discourses, insti-
tutions, practices and imaginaries involved and also how these were
in some cases resisted, reworked and remade in particular places by
recipients.
FROM THE PERIPHERY TO THE PERIPHERY:

THE USSR AND FOREIGN AID
The role of the Soviet Union in shaping the coordinates of “Third
World” geopolitics is a neglected theme in the literature and the
instrumentalisation of the Soviet model in development practice has
not been well documented (Laïdi, 1988). After 1945 and as a result of
the war with Nazi Germany, the USSR had vastly expanded military
power and was left with huge stocks of surplus armaments along with
large and well-trained military forces as it began to use foreign aid to
spread socialism in the Third World (see Figures 4.2–4.4), to build
strategic alliances and to create a bloc in opposition to the West
(Bervoets, 2011). Key to this was Khrushchev’s rediscovery of
Lenin’s argument that the peoples of the colonial world represented
de facto allies of the proletariat and of the first proletarian state, the
Soviet Union (Kanet, 2006), whose duty it would be to lead this
international alliance of the proletariat and the fight of the world’s
“progressive” forces against imperialism. To underline this commit-
ment the Soviets frequently voiced their condemnation of Western
colonialism and pushed in the UN Trusteeship Council and in other
international fora for the immediate dismantling of the remnants of
Western colonialism (cf. Pearson, 2017).
Several organisations were established by the USSR that
sought to coordinate actions between communist parties under
FIGURE 4.2 Soviet propaganda artwork entitled “Human rights” (1977) by
Kukryniksy Art Group. Courtesy of Yevgeniy Fiks/Wayland
Rudd collection.
FIGURE 4.3 “Africa is Fighting, Africa Will Win!” Soviet propaganda poster
by Viktor Koretsky (1971). Courtesy of Wayland Rudd collection.
FIGURE 4.4 “Great Lenin showed us the way!” Soviet propaganda poster
by V. Boldyrev (1969). Courtesy of Wayland Rudd collection.
Soviet direction (Berliner, 1958; Goldman, 1967), including the

International Department of the Central Committee of the Com-
munist Party (set up in 1943) and the Council for Mutual Eco-
nomic Assistance (CMEA or Comecon) set up in 1949 in response
to the Marshall Plan and the founding of the Organisation for
European Economic Co-operation (OEEC, later the OECD).
Comecon originally consisted of the Soviet satellite states of
Eastern Europe but was later joined by Mongolia (1962), Cuba
(1972) and Vietnam (1978) and began offering subsidised oil,
technical assistance, grants and loans (all tied to the purchase of
Soviet goods and services) along with weaponry and military
training. China stopped participating in Comecon in 1961 follow-
ing the Sino-Soviet split but several other Third World countries
had observer status including Angola, Mozambique, Laos, Nicar-
agua, Afghanistan, Mexico, Iraq and Ethiopia. Comecon did not
however play a dominant or multilateral role in aid policy or
programming and served as little more than a forum for donor
consultation and coordination (Kanet, Miner and Resler, 1992).
Attempts to maintain and develop relations with communist par-
ties and various left-wing organisations in capitalist countries were
managed through the Communist International (Comintern) and
later the International Department whilst the Soviets organised
conferences, seminars, and cultural exchanges to promote personal
contacts with Third World intellectuals and “advertise” the socialist

experiment. Organisations such as the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity
Committee (SKSSAA), founded in 1956 and a member of AAPSO,
mobilised solidarity efforts directed towards national liberation
movements from Moscow and functioned in practice as a Soviet
semi-official foreign policy organ (Weinberger, 1986). There was
also the USSR’s Communist Youth League (Komsomol), which
worked to advance the Soviet cause among Third World youth
during the Cold War (Hornsby, 2016) using methods from cultural
propaganda through to attempts at political subversion.
By 1960, and as decolonisation gathered pace in Africa, the
Soviets had established cordial relationships, based on commitments
of economic and military support, with the West African governments
of Ghana, Guinea and Mali, all of which had strained relations with
their former colonial powers (Kanet, 1967; Andrew and Mitrokhin,
2005). Initially the USSR was not able to provide emerging anti-
colonial movements with much more than verbal support (Allison,
1988) but by the 1950s and early 1960s the Soviets were focused both
on expanding the community of socialist states that represented the
growing global attraction of the Soviet model and on forging relations
with “bourgeois” states such as India that, while important for Soviet
economic or security interests, were not viewed as likely to establish
Marxist–Leninist regimes (Kanet, 2006: 339). Africa became increas-
ingly important in these efforts and in March 1958 the Secretariat of
the Soviet Communist party enacted a series of measures to expand
the Soviet reach on the continent, instructing various Soviet ministries
to magnify radio and print propaganda efforts, to expand the number
of scholarships for African students and to train a network of Soviet
Africanists (Telepneva, 2017). The popular geopolitics of the Soviet
campaign in Africa included countless propaganda posters (see
Figures 4.5 and 4.6), intended to represent the Communist party’s
supposedly more enlightened perspective on race and other social
issues (Nash, 2016). Cinema in particular was regarded as an impor-
tant tool through which the Soviet Union would extend itself by
developing “a cinegeography of socialist friendship” (Cummings,
2012, emphasis in original) as the Soviets saw in Africa a parallel
with the establishment of their own cinema (Woll, 2004), arguing that
the transition from tsarism to communism was akin to the change
from colonialism to independence, which chimed well with emerging
African filmmakers (Cummings, 2012).
According to Valkenier (1983), the initial motives for the Soviets’
increased ties with developing countries were apolitical in that Soviet
authorities were anticipating overproduction in capital goods and
FIGURE 4.5 Russian propaganda poster entitled “Long Live the World
October” (1933) by Gustav Klutsis. Courtesy of Wayland
Rudd collection.
FIGURE 4.6 Soviet propaganda poster entitled “For Solidarity of Women

of the World” (1973) by V Rybakov. Courtesy of Wayland
Rudd collection.
wanted to find markets in exchange for raw material supplies. Soviet

policy towards the Third World from the mid-1950s was initially
concerned with the provision of modest amounts of political, eco-
nomic and military support to potential allies and clients, before
shifting to extensive involvement in regional conflicts through the
supply of military capabilities and the use of proxies (e.g. Cuba) and
finally to direct Soviet military intervention (Kanet, 2006). The total
amount of Soviet weapons exports to nonaligned countries between
1954 and 1964 exceeded US$2.7 billion with nearly 80% going to
non-Communist nations (Porter, 1984: 19). Egypt, Syria and Iraq were
all viewed by Moscow as progressive regimes that had broken with
Western imperialism and were in the process of laying the foundations
for a socialist socioeconomic orientation (Kanet, 2006). From 1954,
providing military and economic assistance to Nasser’s Egypt was
seen as a way to undermine Western political dominance in the Middle
East and South Asia and increase Soviet influence (Nation and Kauppi,
1984). Egypt became the focus of the USSR’s first massive military
efforts on behalf of a non-communist client at war since its efforts to
back the Kuomintang in China in the 1920s (Porter, 1984), with total
arms transfers to Egypt in the six years after the Six-Day War of June
1967 amounting to more than US$4.4 billion (Porter, 1984: 23). Under
Khrushchev, US$1 billion worth of arms were also provided to
Indonesia to back Sukarno between 1958 and 1965 in three successive
conflicts (Porter, 1984: 19) and a further US$4 billion was provided to
Ethiopia by 1984 in support of the Marxist–Leninist Mengistu regime,
along with thousands of Soviet military advisors.
Direct participation of Soviet personnel in combat or combat
support was initially avoided but this changed with the war of
attrition in the Middle East between Egypt and Israel (1969–70)
over territory Israel had taken in the Sinai Peninsula during the Six-
Day War. Following billions in arms transfers to various parts of the
Third World (reaching a value of roughly US$16.5 billion from 1973
to 1977 – Porter, 1984: 30), pro-Soviet revolutionary regimes soon
came to power as a result of violent conflicts or coups in South
Vietnam, Laos, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, South Yemen and
Cambodia. Soviet military aid to North Vietnam increased massively
after 1965, following the US decision to increase its ground forces
and in the context of intensifying Sino-Soviet rivalry, with over US$3
billion worth of weaponry provided to North Vietnam between 1965
and 1972 (Porter, 1984). Whereas Soviet involvement in the late
1950s and early 1960s was based on limited but strategically impor-
tant alliances with nationalist forces, some of the new relations
forged between Moscow and the Third World from 1970 onwards
were intended to be more comprehensive and pervasive. In particular,
the fall of South Vietnam in 1975 marked the beginning of a highly
successful strategic offensive by the USSR in the Third World
(Korbonski and Fukuyama, 1987), buoyed not only by the Vietnam
experience but by the reduced dangers of an American nuclear
response – the Nixon administration had pursued Strategic Arms

Limitation Talks (SALT) as part of a process of “linkage”, whereby
the Soviets were to be rewarded with nuclear arms control in return
for behaving themselves in the Third World (Young, 2006).
Soviet aid to Third World countries foregrounded the provision of
equipment for infrastructure and industrial development projects, such
as the Aswan Dam in Egypt, the Bihar Steel Mill in India, and various
smaller projects across the Middle East and Africa, as well as technical
assistance and the education and training of local people to build the
foundations of modern industrial and agricultural enterprises. Soviet
aid almost always went for large and visible projects in the state sector
that were expected to increase the productive capacities of the recipient
country, to create an “independent” industrial base and reduce depen-
dence on the capitalist West. In Indonesia, for example, this model of
modernisation was evident in Soviet-financed industrial plants such as
the steel mill at Cilegon on the coast of western Java which, according
to Simpson (2008: 49), was promoted by Soviet officials “as a
harbinger of rapid industrialisation”. Such projects were supported by
an army of Soviet economic advisors despatched to various parts of the
Third World to facilitate them (Kanet, 2010). Both the Soviets and the
Americans also had models of large-scale hydroelectric development
that they were keen to share with countries of the Third World who
often saw them as “highways” to modernisation. The Soviets in
particular approached dam building in the Third World with real
gusto. Engineers from both countries offered their expertise in “a sort
of hydroelectric diplomacy geared toward winning the hearts and
minds of the Third World” (Roe, 2015: 308). When the US withdrew
funding for the Aswan High Dam in Egypt the Soviets stepped in,
providing US$1.12 billion in 1956 at 2% interest for the construction
of the dam (which was designed by the Soviet Hydroproject Institute)
along with technicians and heavy machinery (Roe, 2015).
Although Soviet secrecy around its foreign aid donations means
figures are uncertain, Soviet development assistance was just under
US$2 billion in 1970, reached US$2.25 billion in 1980 and peaked at
US$4.2 billion in 1988 (Chekhutov, Ushakova and Zevin, 1991).
Expenses for development aid surpassed even the Soviet budgets for
science and internal security by more than 20% during the 1980s
(Bowles, 1992: 70). This assistance was usually offered in the form of
credits (in contrast to the grants given by the US and Western
European states), available at low interest rates, for the acquisition of
equipment and technical assistance from the USSR. In the early stages
of Soviet outreach in the Third World, the model of development that
clients were expected to follow was that of the Soviet Union itself (and
to a lesser extent the other Marxist–Leninist countries of Europe) with

a focus on state control of the economy, heavy industrial projects,
import substitution, reduction of ties with the capitalist West and closer
integration with the socialist states (Valkenier, 1983). Many Soviet
projects proved however to be unsuitable for the needs of the recipient
countries and both the theory and practice of Soviet aid were typically
focused on politics and political institutions, paying relatively little
attention to the mechanics of development. Given the chronic dearth
of spare parts throughout the Soviet economy, serious problems and
costs emerged in those countries that depended on Soviet development
projects whilst the quality of Soviet technical assistance was highly
variable (Valkenier, 1983; Brun and Hersh, 1990).
Alongside aid from the USSR there were also the related flows
of assistance from Eastern Europe to the Third World which reached
around US$514–537 million annually for most of the 1980s (Rudner,
1996). Taken together, it is estimated that Soviet and Eastern Eur-
opean communist aid represented nearly 10% of total world overseas
development assistance (ODA) disbursements during that period
(Rudner, 1996). Czechoslovakia, for example, established important
commercial relations with Third World countries and during the late
1940s and 1950s, when the Soviet Union was itself little interested,
the Czechs managed to restore and extend their economic relations
with the Third World, especially through sales of capital goods and
equipment (Pechota, 1981). In many ways Czechoslovakia was the
earliest and most ambitious Eastern European aid donor, its involve-
ment in Africa pre-dating World War II, and it had significantly more
autonomy from the USSR in conducting its foreign relations with
Africa than has previously been assumed (Muehlenbeck, 2016). As a
smaller Eastern bloc country Czechoslovakia was not regarded in the
same light as its superpower ally and exploited the economic and
cultural space this differentiation afforded (Muehlenbeck, 2016).
Czechoslovakia’s status as the leading Eastern European donor
was gradually eclipsed, however, by the emergence of the German
Democratic Republic (GDR) whose foreign policy in general, and in
Africa in particular, was a strategy seeking both closer ties with the
Soviet Union and greater international recognition and legitimacy
(Winrow, 2009; see Figure 4.7). Hungary, and to a lesser extent
Poland, Bulgaria and Romania, also enhanced their own aid profiles
in the Third World during the Cold War (Rudner, 1996). Many of
these donors used project aid (often tied to donor sources of procure-
ment) for heavy industry and capital infrastructure projects and
typically involved themselves in the design, construction and equip-
ping of the complete plant. Industrial joint ventures were also common
FIGURE 4.7 Angolan President Eduardo dos Santos (fifth from left) visits
the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate in East Berlin
on August 14th, 1981. Photo by Horst Sturm/Bundesarchiv.
along with licensing arrangements for the co-production (usually

assembly) of Eastern European products by firms from recipient
countries whilst, as with Soviet aid, agricultural investment typically
favoured large-scale state-run projects, particularly irrigation schemes.
Support was also provided for political institutions intended to enhance
recipient-country capabilities in the administration of state enterprises
(see Figure 4.8). Experiences of involvement in these aid programmes
served to broaden the professional horizons of Eastern European
technical specialists, most notably in agriculture, geology, industry,
medicine and transportation, but also to augment the donor’s knowl-
edge base concerning recipient countries (Rudner, 1996).
While Americans feared a communist takeover of the continent,
the relationships the USSR forged in Africa did not last long (Bervoets,
2011). Hasty and careless evaluation of potential socialist states, a
limited understanding of African cultures and political economies, the
heavy emphasis on military cooperation and inadequate aid, all pre-
vented the Soviet Union from developing “anything more than, at best,
friendly associations with countries that would eventually align them-
selves with the West” (Bervoets, 2011: 1). Many African countries cut
off economic and diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union during the
period from 1965 to 1974, seeing relations with Western Europe and
the US as more advantageous (Hosmer and Wolfe, 1983: 27). Under
FIGURE 4.8 Skilled workers from Angola receive vocational training in

communist East Germany on May 16th, 1983. The Angolan
participants were taking part in a six-month course at the
Central Institute for Industrial Safety in Dresden. Photo by
Ulrich Häßler/Bundesarchiv.
Khrushchev the Soviets did not get the results they had hoped for in
Africa as Soviet partners on the continent struggled with the process
of transitioning to socialism. Failed Soviet attempts to incite revolu-
tion in Egypt, Ghana, Mali and Sudan alienated the leaders of those
countries and created credibility issues for the USSR in Africa
(Nation and Kauppi, 1984: 2) but also led the Soviet leadership to
think more carefully about which countries were most suited to
socialism. When an alarming number of African countries began
pursuing a capitalist path of development in the mid-1960s, the
Soviets under Leonid Brezhnev revisited their strategy for the
region, concluding that economic aid was a limited policy tool and
that Africa’s transition to socialism would take longer than initially
expected (Hosmer and Wolfe, 1983).
By the end of the 1970s, Angola had become the focus of the
Soviets’ efforts to spread socialism in Africa, seen as an opportunity
to maintain the global strategic and diplomatic momentum gained
with the communist victory in Vietnam. The Soviets initially acted in
Angola to counter the growing influence of the Chinese, not the US,
who had held ties with all three of the Angolan liberation movements.
Their support was focused on the MPLA in its fight for independence
and in the years after (Ogunbadejo, 1981; Guan-Fu, 1983). Agostinho
Neto visited Moscow in 1964 and 1973 whilst MPLA cadres travelled
to Moscow for military training in December 1974 (Porter, 1984).
After independence hundreds of Soviet advisors and technicians
began arriving in the Angolan capital (Falk, 1988). More generally,
the USSR’s involvement in Angola helped foster a diplomatic climate
in the Third World that was more conducive to Soviet political and
military initiatives, proving that the fall of South Vietnam was not an
anomaly and that the USSR would be the “natural ally” of the Third
World. It also gave the Soviets direct access to SWAPO guerrillas in
Namibia, increased Soviet influence in the Congo and Zambia (Gui-
marães, 1998) and enhanced Soviet prestige with another former
Portuguese colony that turned to Marxism–Leninism after indepen-
dence, Mozambique (Nolutshungu, 1985).
To receive Soviet aid, the Angolan government had to show
significant progress in industrialising its economy, nationalising its
industries, instituting land ownership reforms, developing readiness
among its people to support a cultural revolution, and establishing a
vanguard party in alliance with countries of similar political ideology
(Nation and Kauppi, 1984: 32). Considering the political instability of
Angola at the time, achieving these objectives proved difficult and
consequently military assistance initially constituted the majority of
Soviet aid to the country (Guan-Fu, 1983), amounting to an estimated
US$4 billion in support between 1975 and 1985 along with the
provision of 1500–1700 advisors (Central Intelligence Agency, 1985;
see Figure 4.9) and reaching a total of nearly US$15 billion by 1988
(George, 2005: 281). Neither Soviet nor Angolan leaders however
were deeply invested in developing a strong alliance with each other
as pragmatism and national interest often came before ideology (Ogun-
badejo, 1981). Although the MPLA leadership had a sense of obliga-
tion to the USSR after independence for its support during the anti-
colonial war, relations with the Soviets were seen primarily as a means
to consolidate the MPLA’s hold on power, rather than transitioning to a
socialist state (Ogunbadejo, 1981). As Soviet diplomats realised in the
mid-1980s that their efforts to transform Angola into a socialist state
had been futile, they began to de-escalate relations and commenced a
wider withdrawal from the continent, conceding that the socioeco-
nomic conditions had not been developed for the implementation of
socialism and that class struggle was not the most important struggle
for Africa, even advising African states to prudently cultivate relations
with foreign capital and the world market (Brun and Hersh, 1990;
Bervoets, 2011). From 1974 to 1979, Africa received 33% of Soviet
FIGURE 4.9 A Soviet military expert poses with Angolan officers in

Lucusse, Angola in the spring of 1986. Source: Sergey
Sheremet, http://www.vvkure.com/
credits (a total of US$ 2.7 billion) of which states of socialist orienta-

tion received only US$300 million (Brun and Hersh, 1990: 151) as the
Soviets increasingly confined their offers of assistance to modest
programmes in agriculture, irrigation, technical training and geological
surveys.
Aside from Angola, Afghanistan also figured prominently in the
list of Soviet foreign aid destinations. The USSR was the world’s
largest donor of economic and technical assistance to Afghanistan
between 1954 and 1991, beginning around 270 major construction
projects, 142 of which were completed (Robinson and Dixon, 2010),
and providing approximately US$1.265 billion of credit between 1955
and 1979 (Porter, 1984: 610). Projects included dams, roads, electrical
power stations and power lines, irrigation canals, factories, housing,
grain elevators, bakeries, automotive repair plants, airports and educa-
tional institutions. A joint Soviet–Afghan committee decided on pro-
jects to be funded by the US$100 million loan granted in 1955 when
Afghanistan became the first target of Khrushchev’s “economic
offensive”, the Soviet Union’s first venture in foreign aid, which
financed a fleet of taxis and buses and paid for Soviet engineers to
construct airports, a cement factory, a mechanised bakery, a five-lane
highway from their own border to Kabul, and, of course, those

archetypal temples of progress and modernity, dams (Cullather,
2002). At the peak of their influence in the 1980s, Soviet projects
produced over half the country’s power, three-quarters of its factory
output and almost all the government’s tax income (Robinson and
Dixon, 2013). The Soviets also made a significant effort to improve
Afghanistan’s human capital, providing on-site training to up to
42,000 Afghans by 1969 (mostly in basic skills such as the use of
industrial equipment), and gave thousands of tons of humanitarian
assistance in the form of food and medical aid.
A closer look at the impact of Soviet development aid on
Afghanistan reveals that expertise and aid were often transferred from
one periphery (the internal Soviet/Russian one) to the other (Third
World contexts like Afghanistan) (Nunan, 2016) as Soviet aid efforts
focused on building up the state sector of the national economy
(especially in industry and agriculture). Soviet experts set about build-
ing dams and state farms, in particular around Jalalabad in eastern
Afghanistan, yet much of the expertise deployed to these locations
emerged from internal peripheries within the Soviet Union itself as in
the case of Soviet Azerbaijani botanists trained in developing olive
cultures for the Caucasus who were sent to the state farms in Afghani-
stan. Nunan (2016) frames this as a story of “South–South” transfers
mediated from one (Soviet) periphery to its Afghan cousin. Another
example is the advisors dispatched by the Soviet Communist Youth
League (Komsomol) to Afghanistan following the Soviet occupation.
Komsomol advisors focused on the construction of a mass socialist
party in Afghanistan but also worked closely with Afghan orphanages
to, in effect, traffic Afghan youngsters to Soviet orphanages and
educational institutions as a means to inculcate socialist values, as
many of the Afghan teenage orphans sent abroad ended up in internats
(boarding school-like institutions) in the Soviet periphery (Nunan,
2016). Through Afro-Asian solidarity groups like the Moscow branch
of the SKSSAA the Soviets also lobbied the Third World by focusing
on its own peripheries, the Soviet republics, their ethnic status and their
experiences since the October revolution, offering them as models for
wider Third World development (Amos, 2012).
CHINA IN AFRICA: ADVANCING A “SUBALTERN

GLOBALISM”?
From the very beginning the Chinese Communist Party was expli-
citly internationalist in premise and in promise (Kirby, 2006). The
Chinese increasingly came to believe that Africa in particular

seemed to be “re-enacting” their own recent past and that it was
China’s duty to “explain” such historical parallels to Africans
(Power, Mohan and Tan-Mullins, 2012). In the 1950s, for example,
when Cameroonians were fighting French colonialism, Mao is said
to have presented one of their leaders with a copy of his work
Problems of Strategy in the Guerrilla War against Japan, inscribed
with the greeting: “In this book you can read everything which is
now going to happen in the Cameroons” (Snow, 1988: 82). Africa
dominated in the list of destinations for Chinese foreign assistance
during the Cold War – between 1956 and 1973, out of the total US
$3.38 billion in aid granted by China, almost half (US$1.73 billion)
went to African countries (Brautigam, 2009). At the height of the
Cultural Revolution at the end of the 1960s, the Chinese media
regularly portrayed African national liberation movements as using
Maoist thought as their primary ideological tool for liberation and
revolution. This was a vital part of the strategic doctrine of
“People’s War” which held that the advanced industrial nations
constituted the “cities” of the world, and the poor nations of Asia,
Africa and Latin America were the “countryside” (Jackson, 1995).
By fomenting revolution in the various “rural” areas of the world,
eventually the liberation movements would surround and overrun
the urban areas, just as they had in China during its civil war.
Guided by Mao’s three worlds theory as it sought to spread the
gospels of nationalism and independence and in the good works
delivered by its aid projects, China would be the “champion”
(Guimarães, 1998: 154) of a Third World alliance that would coun-
terbalance the Cold War superpowers and wealthy advanced econo-
mies of the First World. China’s aid was strictly bilateral and was
usually given as a grant, or as an interest-free loan, in contrast to the
Soviet model where interest was charged at 2.5% (Snow, 1988).
Chinese aid workers were also unique in their approach, not being
permitted to “loll in hotel suites and run up expenses as other
expatriates did [having to] content themselves with the same standard
of living as the ordinary Africans they worked with” (Snow, 1988:
146). Official discourses on China’s foreign assistance would often
accentuate how distant the West’s historical experiences in achieving
“development” were from its own and those of the Third World more
generally and emphasised the struggle between the developed and
underdeveloped worlds. China has also regularly underlined its
historical credentials by drawing attention to its long-standing con-
nections with the Third World (in the diaspora as well as through
trade and diplomacy) and to its own experiences of being colonised
and an aid recipient. Like the Soviets, China made use of propaganda
to emphasise its anti-imperialism and anti-racism as well as its closer
proximity and affinity to Third World peoples and issues (see
Figure 4.10). Maoism seemingly offered the Third World a vision of
“subaltern globalism”, spreading a message of revolt against the
white Europeans and Americans who had exploited them (Friedman,
2015).
A key influence on Chinese foreign policy towards the Third
World was its relationship with the Soviet Union. The PRC was “born
pro-Soviet” and the Soviet Union had helped create the CCP (Kirby,
2006). By 1949 the shadow of a “Soviet model” of state-led indus-
trialisation and foreign trade was already evident in China whilst Mao
initially had a strong desire to transplant Soviet experience to China,
taking the country along a clearly Stalinist path. Politically, economic-
ally and militarily China became a client of the Soviet Union, guided
by Soviet advisors and sustained by Soviet aid (Snow, 1988). By the
mid-1950s however, China was increasingly uncomfortable with
being confined to the Soviet camp, seeing a chance to establish a
separate identity in the world of newly independent Asian and African
FIGURE 4.10 Chinese propaganda poster (1963) entitled “Awakened

peoples, you will certainly attain the ultimate victory!”
Source: Stefan R Landsberger collection, International
Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.
states (Snow, 1988). These ambitions were buoyed by the Bandung

conference, by the idea of “Afro-Asia” as a viable political concept
that it gave rise to and by the creation of solidarity organisations like
AAPSO. Although China focused on working through Third Worldist
fora concerned with Afro-Asian solidarity (such as AAPSO and
Bandung), Chinese wishes were often stubbornly and effectively
resisted within these organisations and by no means did China fully
control them (Neuhauser, 1968; Larkin, 1971).
In 1960 the Soviets withdrew all economic aid and technical
expertise from China, leading to the Sino-Soviet split. The bitter
ideological dispute that ensued between the two led to an intensified
competition for dominance over various organisations of Afro-
Asian solidarity and the non-aligned countries (Ismael, 1971) as
China sought to mobilise the Third World to seize the revolutionary
mantle from the Soviet Union. When Chinese premier Zhou Enlai
began a tour of African countries in 1963, considerable alarm was
raised in the West (Large, 2008). The Sino-Soviet split is best
understood not in terms of personal clashes between Mao and
Khrushchev, or even “objective” differences of geopolitical interest,
but rather as a fundamental difference in conceptions of revolution
(Friedman, 2015). For the Soviets, revolution was fundamentally
about rolling back exploitative capitalism whereas for China it was
imperialism that became the core enemy in the Maoist diagnosis of
global injustice (Friedman, 2015). In seeking to add a touch of
Third Worldist solidarity, President Nkrumah of Ghana even offered
his services as a mediator between China and the USSR, whilst the
Angolan MPLA brought Chinese and Russian officials together at a
conference in Tanzania to promote dialogue (Snow, 1994).
Between 1949 and 1976, during the most ideological phase of
China’s revolution, assistance to Africa was scripted as a “heroic
endeavour”, with the continent becoming the “object of a philan-
thropic crusade” (Snow, 1988: 146) as China sought to discharge its
“missionary duty of setting Africa free” (153). China’s relations
with its “partners” and “poor friends” in the Third World were often
“either thin or troubled through much of the Maoist period” (Hard-
ing, 1994: 394) as it refused to join key organisations like the G77
or the Non-Aligned Movement. Chinese aid went to various sectors
such as industry, transport, agriculture, water control and irrigation,
public health, power and communications, sports and cultural com-
plexes. Cotton textile mills were particularly popular. Like the
USSR, China funded state-owned factories in Africa, where skilled
technicians from Shanghai’s pre-war industries trained Africans to
manufacture substitutes for exports (Brautigam, 2009). Chinese
teams constructed bridges, roads, power plants and ports but China also
seemed happy to work on projects that were effectively inessential
monuments to the glory of the African regimes they worked with such
as conference halls, sports stadia and party headquarters and on projects
that “seemed calculated less to promote the development of a country’s
economy than to win for Peking the favour of the [recipient] regime”
(Snow, 1988: 156). Teams of doctors and medics were dispatched to
the Third World and there were educational and cultural exchange
programmes whilst each Chinese province also had a foreign aid
bureau and each was twinned with a province in Africa to help the aid
transfer process. China also specialised in training Africans in the arts
of guerrilla warfare, initially at the Military academy in the city of
Nanjing but also in Africa itself at a series of remote training camps in
countries like Tanzania and Ghana (Snow, 1988).
For its first official aid project in sub-Saharan Africa (a cigarette
and match factory just outside Conakry completed in 1964) China
chose Guinea, which had been the first sub-Saharan African country
to recognise China in 1959. Chinese aid was announced shortly after
President Sékou Touré had expelled French diplomats and French aid
had come to an end. Soviet aid personnel left Guinea shortly after,
with Chinese officials declaring that Soviet assistance had been
“imperialist aid” (Copper, 2016: 4). By the start of the 1970s Chinese
teams were building close to 100 different turnkey aid projects around
the world and had committed aid to seven countries in Asia, three in
Latin America, six in the Middle East and 29 in Africa by 1973
(Brautigam, 2009: 41). Between 1967 and 1976 China’s aid reached
an average of 5% of government expenditure and by the end of the
1970s the level of aid and the number of costly projects initiated
during the Cultural Revolution “had far outpaced China’s capacity”
(Brautigam, 2009: 51). Zhou Enlai and Mao Tse-Tung had embraced
19 enormous “100 million RMB” projects (each worth about US$50
million in the 1970s) during their terms in power. Chinese teams had
completed some 470 projects in the Third World between 1970 and
1977 and as the Cultural Revolution wound down, China’s foreign
policy began to lose its strong ideological inflection, although it did
continue to make active efforts to export its domestic experience to
foreign clients (Harding, 1994). China’s own “four modernizations”,
announced by Zhou Enlai in the mid-1970s, required enormous
resources, leaving little extra for overseas aid. In March 1978 China
announced an ambitious ten-year plan that focused on 120 key
modernisation projects domestically, including 30 electric power
stations, seven trunk railroads, eight coal mines, ten new steel plants,
five harbours and ten new oil and gas fields (Brautigam, 2009: 45).
This experience was to prove highly influential in the infrastructurally

oriented foreign aid programmes China has since begun to roll out in
contemporary Africa (see chapter 7).
China often supported schemes which the West had rejected on
narrowly economic grounds or which were important to African
states for political or psychological reasons and made a point of
“doing something” for districts which the Europeans had been con-
tent to leave as “backwaters” (Snow, 1988). The principles for aid
and cooperation reflected China’s own experience as an aid recipient
itself over the preceding 60 years where the Chinese had not
appreciated their “client” status (Snow, 1988). Chinese aid would
serve not as “a kind of unilateral alms but [rather] something mutual”
(MFA, 2000; see Figure 4.11). Projects would use high-quality
materials, have quick results and boost self-reliance whilst Chinese
experts would transfer their expertise “fully” and live at the standard
of local counterparts (Power, Mohan and Tan-Mullins, 2012). Aid
also became an important geopolitical tool for China in the contest
with Taiwan (itself an aid donor) where it was used to restrict the
FIGURE 4.11 Chinese propaganda poster (1972) entitled “The feelings of

friendship between the peoples of China and Africa are
deep”. Source: Stefan R Landsberger collection, Interna-
tional Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.
international recognition of Taiwan’s sovereignty. China saw its aid

as a way to expose the limits of its opponents, both Soviet and
Western, and was often reluctant to coordinate efforts with other
foreign powers, having a tendency to “go it alone” (sometimes
resulting in active hostility to other aid personnel) or to “launch
spectacular rescue operations” (Snow, 1994: 288). China came for-
ward, for example, to build the massive Tanzania–Zambia Railway
Authority (TAZARA) project and funded it with a US$450m loan
after Western donors, including the World Bank and the UN, rejected
initial approaches to back it. TAZARA was built between 1967 and
1975 at a cost of over US$600 million (more than the Aswan Dam
had cost the USSR) with the labour of 50,000 Tanzanian and 25,000
Chinese workers (Monson, 2009). The news was greeted with alarm
in the West as the Wall Street Journal warned that “the prospect of
hundreds and perhaps thousands of Red Guards descending upon an
already troubled Africa is a chilling one for the West”. One US
Congressman even described it as a “great steel arm of China
thrusting its way into the African interior” (United States Congress,
1973: 286). The construction, use and operations of the TAZARA
line however mirrored those of colonial administrations, despite
TAZARA being framed as an anti-colonial project (Monson, 2009).
Following readmission to the UN in autumn 1971 (which had
much to do with the diplomatic relations it had forged in the Third
World), China supported the emergent “subaltern nationalism” of the
New International Economic Order (NIEO) and continued to present
itself as the natural leader of the Third World. By 1978 some 74
countries were receiving aid from China, the largest group of which
were in Africa and by then China had aid programmes in more
African countries than the US. By the early 1980s nearly 150,000
Chinese aid technicians had been sent to Africa “in a call to Chinese
national glory and sacrifice” (Power, Mohan and Tan-Mullins, 2012:
47). In 50 years of cooperation China built some 900 infrastructure
and public benefit projects in Africa alone, many of them small or
medium sized (Brautigam, 2009). Throughout the 1980s and well
into the 1990s, however, China focused the bulk of its aid on
rehabilitating the dozens of former aid projects that had collapsed or
were barely limping along and began developing ways to make their
initial benefits more sustainable. For every new project launched
during this period, three were being consolidated (repaired, renovated
or restored) (Brautigam, 2009). Further, many Chinese projects
struggled with issues around skills and technology transfer and
long-term sustainability and there were cases where China failed to
cooperate sufficiently closely with African countries about the detail
of the planning processes involved (Brautigam, 1998). PRC leaders

also failed to grasp the significance of regional antagonisms and
cultural and historical differences between the various countries
while trying to apply a general model of revolution to all African
liberation movements (Neuhauser, 1968). In Angola, Mozambique
and South Africa, for example, China “backed the wrong horse in all
three cases” (Cheng and Shi, 2009: 89). Similarly, Snow (1994)
argues that the Chinese were not especially interested in domestic
developments in African countries, let alone in actively propagating
communism there. Issues of race, ethnicity and assimilation together
with the regional role of South Africa were key in Angola, for
example, but China failed to adequately grasp these as “no analogous
controversies had existed in their own revolution” (Jackson,
1995: 392).
US FOREIGN AID AND THE COUNTERING OF

INSURGENCY
Fundamentally, A.I.D.’s purpose is national security. By
national security, we also mean a world of independent
nations capable of making economic and social progress
through free institutions. Economically, we’re not aiming for
standards of living; we’re aiming for internal dynamics, self-
sustaining growth. (David Bell, USAID administrator, 1962–
66, quoted in Norris, 2014)
In order to administer and implement the “bold new programme”

for the “underdeveloped world” that Point Four had announced,
in the early 1950s President Truman sought to consolidate the
management of US aid programmes which had been scattered
across several agencies. This included the Economic Cooperation
Administration (ECA), set up in 1948 to administer the Marshall
Plan but increasingly involved in an expanding number of
programmes in the Far East, the Technical Cooperation Admin-
istration (TCA) established within the Department of State in
1950 and the International Development Advisory Board estab-
lished in the same year (initially chaired by Nelson Rockerfeller)
to consult with the Secretary of State. Military assistance and
related economic aid were administered by the Department of
State and the Department of Defense (DoD) with the former
trying to coordinate the efforts of the different agencies to ensure
overall coherence.
Under the auspices of the TCA, American experts and advi-

sors were dispatched to various countries around the globe where
they implemented, in collaboration with NGOs and local counter-
parts, a diversity of technical projects (Berger and Borer, 2007).
By the end of 1952 TCA development projects were underway in
35 countries and had a budget of US$153 million (Butterfield,
2004: 37). Most of the projects were in Central and South
America or in Asia with only Libya, Liberia, Egypt and Ethiopia
represented in Africa, much of which was still under colonial rule.
The formation of the Mutual Security Agency (MSA), set up
under the Mutual Security Act of 1951, sought to bring America’s
military assistance programmes together with the economic aid
being provided to “underdeveloped areas” under the umbrella of
Point Four (Berger and Borer, 2007), making explicit the link
between the two (Beall, Goodfellow and Putzel, 2006). The MSA
administered economic and technical aid programmes in countries
that were also receiving US military aid whilst the TCA adminis-
tered aid to countries receiving only technical and economic
assistance. The creation of the MSA heralded a major programme
of American foreign aid between 1951 and 1961, to numerous
countries, aimed initially at shoring up Western Europe as the
Cold War developed but, as the 1950s wore on, intended to secure
a growing number of East Asian “partners” thought to be on the
frontlines of the Cold War (Setzekorn, 2017).
Some 95% of all US aid in 1954 was military and between
1949 and 1960 the US provided nearly US$24 billion worth of
military aid to more than 40 nations around the world (Birtle,
2006). By 1956, the US was also supervising the training of nearly
200 military divisions worldwide whilst 20% of all US Army
officers had served as military advisers to foreign forces (Kuz-
marov, 2017). Initially, much of this effort focused on creating
conventional armed forces to resist Soviet or other external
aggression but “internal” subversion, either indigenously gener-
ated or assisted by external communist forces, soon became
“equally as menacing” (Birtle, 2006: 23). US soldiers first began
to contemplate measures to combat socialist revolutionaries as
early as the 1880s and classical counter-insurgency techniques
were subsequently tried out by the US in the Chinese Civil War
(1945–49), during insurgencies in Greece (1945–49) and the
Philippines (1945–55), the Indochina war (1945–54) and the
Korean civil war (1945–54), in Vietnam (1965–73), Thailand
(1962) and the Dominican Republic (1965). Counter-insurgency
tactics originally developed to suppress earlier anti-colonial
insurrections were also seen as readily adaptable (Pimlott, 1985),

particularly the British and French experiences. During the decade
and a half following World War II, Britain had become enmeshed in a
succession of counter-insurgency campaigns involving different
environments (urban and rural as well as jungle and mountain)
against a variety of opponents (anti-colonialists, communist revolu-
tionaries and ethno-nationalist separatists) in places as diverse as
Palestine, Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus (see Figure 4.12). In Malaya,
the British first coined the term “hearts and minds” to describe the
process of winning the loyalty of the people through developmental
initiatives (Thompson, 1966). French experiences with countering
insurgency in Algeria and Indochina also provided important refer-
ence points, as did their model of the “agroville”, a forerunner of the
strategic hamlets later used by the US in the Vietnam war (see
Figure 4.13).
In addition to deploying 85 counter-guerrilla mobile training
teams to 14 countries between 1955 and 1960 to help foreign
governments plan and organise counter-insurgency efforts, the
Eisenhower administration set up the top-secret “1290-d” project
to train foreign police in counter-subversion and established a
FIGURE 4.12 Troops of A Company, 3rd (Kenya) Battalion, King’s African

Rifles, search an abandoned hut in Malaya for signs of
terrorists during the Malayan Emergency (1948–60). Minis-
try of Information Second World War official collection,
Courtesy of Imperial War Museum.
FIGURE 4.13 A mocked-up Vietnamese hamlet at the US Army Training

Camp at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Viet Cong suspects are
rounded up for questioning during a simulated search and
destroy operation in 1966. Granger Historical Picture
Archive/Alamy.
police aid programme, the Civil Police Administration (CPA), in

1954, guided by the belief that police units were the best mechan-
ism (rather than employing direct military force) for defeating
local insurgencies and addressing problems of internal security.
The CPA began operating in Guatemala, for example, after the
1954 CIA-backed coup that removed the democratically elected
government of Jacobo Arbenz. Eisenhower’s policies for Latin
America, codified in 1953, sought to ensure Latin American
support for the US at the UN, to work to protect the hemisphere
from communist invasion, to continue to have the region produce
raw materials and to eliminate the “menace of internal communist
or other anti-US subversion” (Taffet, 2007: 14) although they did
not underwrite a major economic aid programme to promote Latin
America’s economic development and were primarily focused on
inter-American military cooperation (Rabe, 1988, 1999).
Between 1952 and 1968 the US spent US$687 million in
military assistance to Latin America in addition to arms sales valued
at US$187 million (Kuzmarov, 2017). Thousands of Latin American

military officers (including several future dictators such as Manuel
Noriega) were also trained at the US Army School of the Americas
(SOA) founded in 1946 in Panama before relocation in 1984 to Fort
Benning in Georgia, with a curriculum centred on counter-insur-
gency. This approach began to be questioned, however, following
Khrushchev’s “economic offensive” in 1955 which appeared to
involve a more sophisticated Cold War strategic use of development
assistance. In August 1958, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
declared US military and development assistance to be inadequate
given world realities and argued that the US needed to stop the
Soviets from supplanting it as the primary aid donor throughout the
world (Taffet, 2007). Through the CIS, Walt Rostow, Max Millikan
and others increasingly underlined the importance of economic aid
programmes to the pursuit of US foreign policy objectives (Millikan
and Rostow, 1957), with Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth
(1960) arguing that a well-funded economic aid programme could
provide a sharp stimulus and quickly usher Latin American countries
into the take-off phase.
The MSA was replaced first by the International Cooperation
Administration (ICA) created in 1955 and eventually by USAID
in 1961, created by the Foreign Assistance Act which had called
for a separation of military and non-military foreign aid pro-
grammes and emphasised wide-ranging economic and social assis-
tance efforts in the “underdeveloped world”. USAID would bring
together the work of various agencies and programmes including
the Marshall Plan, the MSA and ICA, the Foreign Operations
Administration (1953), the Food for Peace programme (1954) and
the Development Loan Fund (1957). JFK had outlined how
“collapse” in developing countries would be “disastrous to our
national security” and “harmful to our comparative prosperity”
(quoted in McMahon, 2006) and USAID explicitly intended to use
aid to fight the Cold War and pursue its emerging modernisation
agenda as another weapon in America’s strategic arsenal. In the
words of David Bell (USAID administrator from 1962 to 1966),
fundamentally the purpose of aid “is national security” (cited in
Norris, 2014), meaning both the national security of the US but
also the international security of recipient states. The 1959 Mutual
Security Act specifically encouraged military involvement in
nation building and in May 1960 the Eisenhower administration
gave the Army limited authority to promote “civic action” pro-
grammes overseas. In the same year the National Security Council
directed the DoD to develop a new counter-insurgency doctrine
and the Departments of State and Defence reaffirmed this decision

by informing all US embassies, unified commands and military
assistance groups that US policy “was to encourage foreign
military and paramilitary organizations to promote economic
development” (Birtle, 2006: 161). Accordingly, the global geopo-
litical imaginations of the American national security state played
a central role in “identifying regions and resources suitable for
programmes of technological intervention” (Sneddon and Fox,
2011: 452), creating new geographies of development in the
process.
For JFK, only the diffusion of technology and know-how
could help bring the Third World across the “dangerous” period
of uncertainty in which communism threatened. Further, the
receptivity of Third World countries to US technology would
imply an acceptance of the Americans’ leading role in the global
drive towards modernity. In this sense, as Westad (2006: 31)
notes, US aid sought in part “to make the world safe for capital-
ism” with assistance linked to recipients’ acceptance of market
access and export of profits, administrative restructuring and the
exclusion of communists and left-wing socialists from govern-
ment. US interventions were thus aimed at creating states that
could be both successful in their own capitalist development and a
part of American containment policies against the Soviet Union
and its allies. When JFK took office in 1961 the threat of armed
revolution became the main concern and the basis for military aid
shifted from “hemispheric defence” to internal security and pro-
tection against Castro-communist guerrilla warfare (Kuzmarov,
2017). At Rostow’s suggestion, JFK’s administration set up a
counter-guerrilla operations and tactics course at Fort Bragg in
1961 (Birtle, 2006) and according to Roger Hilsman, who was
responsible for counter-insurgency policy at the State Department
during the Kennedy administration, from the time that JFK took
office in January 1961, he was preoccupied not just with counter-
insurgency but with its “critical political element”, or with the new
political tactics required to counter communist revolution (Hoff-
man, 2006; Nagl, 2002).
JFK’s administration moved to build on the work of the 1290-
d programme and established a successor agency to the CPA
within USAID, known as the Office of Public Safety (OPS),
based on a template that originated in occupied Japan (Roy,
Schrader and Crane, 2015; Kuzmarov, 2017). The OPS mission
was clearly ideological; its director was from the CIA and CIA
personnel worked within many of its aid programmes, its purpose
was the development of covert intelligence networks and it taught

subjects such as communist tactics and ideology. It also provided
equipment that was subsequently used for torture and abuse,
mainly in Central America (Hills, 2006). In 1962, a Special
Group on Counterinsurgency was established within the OPS at
USAID with the intention that it would “develop the civilian
police component of internal security forces in underdeveloped
states” and “identify early the symptoms of an incipient subver-
sive situation” (quoted in Kuzmarov, 2009: 201). The OPS pro-
vided aid to police agencies in around 50 countries during its 12-
year existence, spending US$300 million on training, weaponry,
telecoms and other equipment (Spillane and Wolcott, 2012). The
goal of these US “public safety” programmes was to unify a
country’s police and military under a central command, overseen
by OPS advisors.
Within a few years, officers were operating out of US embassies,
police headquarters and safe houses in 15 Latin American countries
(Kuzmarov, 2017) and the OPS remit was soon extended beyond the
hemisphere into Asia and Africa. Across the Third World hundreds of
retired and active US police officers travelled to undertake the training
of tens of thousands of police officers in administration, riot and traffic
control, interrogation, surveillance and intelligence whilst thousands of
police officers from various Third World countries travelled to
Washington to receive training (Nadelmann, 1993). In practice, US
development aid, military aid and counter-insurgency were often
indistinguishable (Simpson, 2008) as in the case of Indonesia in the
1960s where USAID, the State Department, the CIA, US-based
capitalists and a host of other official and private actors tacitly and
even overtly supported the violent purge of communists and ousting of
Sukarno in favour of General Suharto’s New Order military dictator-
ship. Aid directed 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
[counter-insurgency] and civic action” (Simpson, 2008: 80), with
USAID and the CIA working closely together.
Six mobile teams of area-oriented, linguistically trained
experts called Special Action Forces (SAFs) were also created
(one each for Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle
East plus a reserve) in 1962 to supplement more conventionally
oriented military assistance advisory groups in helping foreign
armies perform unconventional warfare, counter-insurgency, civic
action and nation-building activities (Birtle, 2006: 199). Each
consisted of a Special Forces military group augmented by
engineering, civil affairs, psychological warfare, military police,

medical and intelligence detachments. US military forces also
widely used psychological operations (psyops) during situations
short of war to win popular support for intervention forces, “to
counter hostile propaganda and to convince the indigenous popu-
lation that America’s actions were legal, that its intentions were
benevolent, and that its presence would be temporary” (Birtle,
2006: 196). By 1965, 13 Latin American countries had US-funded
civic action projects as across the length and breadth of the
continent the US army cleared jungles, installed sewage systems,
repaired roads and built schools, whilst army doctors provided free
medical care and paratroopers assisted civilian aid agencies in
distributing food and clothing (Birtle, 2006). Army psyops specia-
lists also supported these activities through millions of printed
propaganda items and thousands of hours of loudspeaker and radio
broadcasts.
From the beginning, USAID and counter-insurgency were inex-
tricably linked (Essex, 2013). In Latin America throughout the 1960s
and 1970s, the agency’s efforts were directed towards social and
economic development to “combat communism and ‘Castroism’
across the region” (Essex, 2013: 46). In South Vietnam, the agency
played a pivotal role in American pacification efforts, including
addressing the “conditions that facilitated the successes of the Viet
Cong” (USAID, 2007: 5, quoted in Essex, 2013: 48). Under pressure
to develop a civilian economic and social component to the counter-
insurgency effort in Vietnam, USAID spearheaded the “other” war for
rural “hearts and minds” through two distinct, yet related suites of
spatial interventions (Phillips, 2008). In order to pacify insurgent
South Vietnam, USAID produced spaces that were designed to
physically and psychologically separate rural populations from
National Liberation Front (NLF) fighters. This archipelago of coun-
ter-insurgency spaces was secured through a policing effort that
“sought to assay and manage the diverse flows of bodies, commod-
ities, and capital constantly traversing the countryside of South
Vietnam” (Attewell, 2015: 2259). To this end, under USAID, Vietnam
became the site of an OPS programme that sought to turn the National
Police “into a modern professional law enforcement organization
capable of maintaining law and order and of constituting an effective
first line of defence against subversion, insurgency and guerrilla
activities” (OPS, 1966: 16). USAID advisors provided the South
Vietnamese police forces with training and technical assistance in
areas such as population control, prison management and the neutra-
lization of insurgents and civilian populations (Attewell, 2017).
The relocation of rural populations in “supervised” centres

with schools, clinics and other facilities (ostensibly to promote
their progress and “development” but also to restrict communist
influence) has long been a strategy used in counter-insurgency
operations. It was implemented by the US and the government of
South Vietnam to combat insurgency during the Vietnam war,
beginning with the Rural Community Development Programme
introduced by President Diem in Vietnam in 1959, which mod-
elled itself after the success of a similar programme used by the
British in Malaya (1940–60) and the “agrovilles” used by the
French in the First Indochina war (1946–54) in a policy called
“pacification by prosperity”. The plan was closely shaped by
Vietnamese actors and events and was not simply the product of
US interventions (Stewart, 2017). It first emerged in the mid-
1950s when Diem’s advisers proposed a civil service project in
the villages and hamlets aimed at pacification which was forma-
lised as Civic Action in 1955. This became the foundation for the
establishment of model villages in which cadres recruited and
dispatched from Saigon would assist local development projects
(Stewart, 2017). Unwilling to compromise national sovereignty by
inviting greater US military involvement to counter the commu-
nists, Diem first doubled-down on the model village concept by
forming “agrovilles”, but the formation of the communist NLF in
1960 raised new challenges which Diem’s government attempted
to meet by transforming the Civic Action plan yet again, this time
into the Strategic Hamlet Programme. Strategic hamlets required a
greater US military presence which further alienated peasants,
nudging them closer to the NLF and channelling “the forces of
modernization in Vietnam in a direction more conducive to wider
American Cold War interests” (Stewart, 2017: 218).
Pacification included local security efforts and a process of
restating governmental influence and control in areas beset by
insurgents but also efforts to distribute food and medical supplies
along with wider reforms like land redistribution. More than just
providing security, their goal was to facilitate “improvement” and
reform. This represented a tactical shift away from merely secur-
ing territory to securing and winning populations (cf. Ansorge,
2010). By July 1963 some 8.5 million people had been settled in
7,205 hamlets according to figures given by the Vietnam press
(Osborne, 1965: 25). The various efforts of US agencies around
security and development in Vietnam were brought together in
1967 in a further pacification programme called Civil Operations
and Revolutionary [later Rural] Development Support (CORDS)
(cf. Belcher, 2012). CORDS represented President Lyndon B

Johnson’s attempt to define the Vietnam conflict as a progressive
expression of the Cold War through modernisation theory (Fisher,
2006) where pacification had become the handmaiden of progress
and he filled his speeches with the vision of creating security
through development (Fisher, 2006: 31). CORDS was hailed by
many as a successful integration of civilian and military efforts to
combat the insurgency, despite being heavily contested and offer-
ing only the illusion of progress (Fisher, 2006: 31).
Beyond Vietnam, in the 1960s aid programmes in Latin America
“were a top, if not the top, US concern” (Taffet, 2007: 2). For JFK,
Latin America had become the “most dangerous area in the world”
(Rabe, 1999: 91) with the Cuban Revolution in 1959 triggering a
sharp increase in US aid to the region (Thérien, 2002). The main
vehicle for this was the Alliance for Progress (AfP), a ten-year US
$20 billion foreign aid programme that drew heavily on moder-
nisation theory and aimed at promoting economic growth and
political reform as a means of containing communism. Funding
would allow port facilities, hospitals, roads, housing, power plants
and schools to be built and in return Latin American governments
would commit to instituting tax reform, promoting land redistri-
bution and extending democracy and political freedom. The AfP
was not solely an economic programme, however, it was also “a
political program designed to create certain types of political
outcomes” (Taffet, 2007: 10). In addition to mobilising a response
to Castro’s Cuba, the AfP was also about building alliances and
spreading the positive vision at the heart of US democracy, fuelled
by the belief that ideas inherent in the foundation of the nation
could and should be exported and that money and technical
expertise could solve Latin America’s problems.
To create enthusiasm in Latin America, the United States
Information Agency (USIA) tried to promote Kennedy’s grand
vision for the AfP and narrate the progress generated using
several media including radio, TV, film, pamphlets and travelling
speakers as well as planting news stories to explain how the
programme would help ordinary people (Taffet, 2007: 43). Some
AfP comics ran stories about how the programme helped com-
munities, focusing on workers such as agronomists trained with
US funds that were helping people produce more food. Others
were designed to scare Latin Americans about the Cuban revolu-
tion. The USIA didn’t only focus on the AfP in their efforts in
Latin America, producing a stream of anti-Soviet propaganda
that circulated across the Third World as well as material on US
culture and society (Cull, 2008). The AfP struggled to meet its
objectives, however, in part due to “an inherent conflict between
lofty humanitarian goals and a desire to fight the Cold War”
(Taffet, 2007: 5). AfP funding was used in countries like Chile
and Brazil not to advance progress around development but to
stop the spread of communist political parties. There was little
connection then between aid distribution and levels of poverty in
recipient countries, with almost 60% of all funding going to just
four countries: Chile, Brazil, the Dominican Republic and
Colombia (Taffet, 2007: 7).
Beyond Latin America, the US also made southern Afghani-
stan a showcase of nation-building, providing approximately US
$600 million between 1955 and 1979 (Williams et al., 1988; see
Figure 4.14) and making the country one of the largest recipients
of US Cold War foreign aid (Attewell, 2017). A significant
FIGURE 4.14 Afghan Ambassador Mohammed Kabir Ludin signs an

agreement in 1954 providing US$18.5 million of credit
with Glen E Edgerton, President of the US Export-Import
Bank. The money was used primarily for investment in
irrigation and power projects in Helmand Valley. Courtesy
of the US National Archives Still Picture Unit. Photograph
by Joseph O’Donnell.
proportion of this went to the flagship Helmand Valley Project

(HVP), a dazzling top-down integrated rural development pro-
gramme intended to “reclaim” and modernise a swathe of terri-
tory comprising roughly half the country (Cullather, 2002; see
Figure 4.15). In part, this was inspired by domestic infrastructure
projects like the Salt River Project in Arizona (Caudill, 1969: 1)
and the belief that irrigation canals would enable farms to
produce food surpluses that could be exported for profit. It was
also a direct response to the Soviets’ development assistance
offensive in 1955 when over US$100 million in credits paid for
Soviet engineers to construct airports, roads, factories, dams and
irrigation canals. New schools, modern hospitals and recreation
centres would rise from the sand along with factories fed by
electricity from a generator at a dam upriver, funded by a US
Export-Import Bank loan of US$80 million (Cullather, 2002).
There would also be model towns built from scratch like Lashkar
Gah (known locally as “little America”) that would serve as an
example of a modern community, one that could be replicated,
whilst a 45-minute colour motion picture produced by the USIA
FIGURE 4.15 Afghans view photographs of Helmand Valley Authority

(HVA) initiatives at the 1956 Jeshyn Fair. The James
Cudney Collection: Photograph by James A Cudney.
featured the HVP prominently in globally narrating the benefits of

the economic development enabled by USAID (Cullather, 2002).
By the 1960s, Afghanistan had Soviet, Chinese and West
German dam projects underway (Nunan, 2016) and was receiving
one of the highest levels of development aid per capita of any nation
in the world. The Atlantic magazine called it a “show window for
competitive coexistence” (The Atlantic, 1962) whilst U.S. News
described it as a “strange kind of cold war”, fought with money
and technicians, instead of spies and bombs. Publicly, US officials
said this was “the kind of Cold War they wanted, just a chance to
show what the different systems could do in a neutral contest”
(Cullather, 2002: 530). Afghanistan had “become a new kind of
buffer, a neutral arena for a tournament of modernization” (Cul-
lather, 2002: 530). The country was also a key destination for Peace
Corps volunteers, with 1,652 arriving in the period 1962–79 (Meis-
ler, 2011) before the post was closed (along with other US aid
efforts) following the Soviet invasion in 1979. Much of this grand
development venture failed, however – the valley never became
Afghanistan’s breadbasket (although it did become the world’s
largest grower of opium-producing poppies). In Soviet-occupied
Afghanistan, US policy focused instead on the provision of exten-
sive weaponry to anti-Soviet insurgents with USAID providing
operational support to the mujahideen resistance through the con-
struction of a transnational logistics network designed to channel
development and humanitarian assistance to rural populations. By
1987 the US was aiding the mujahideen to the tune of US$700
million per year in military assistance whilst US covert aid to the
Afghan resistance virtually doubled each year from 1983 to 1987
(Cordovez and Harrison, 1995: 157) and during the 1980s cost
American taxpayers over US$3 billion (Hartman, 2002). By the
mid-1980s under President Reagan the US was ready to work with
anyone who opposed Soviet adventurism in the Third World: the
mujahideen in Afghanistan, the contra guerrillas in Nicaragua, Pol
Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, UNITA in Angola and
other insurgents challenging leftist regimes.
CONCLUSIONS: AN EMERGING
GOVERNMENTAL RATIONALITY OF
DEVELOPMENT
It is in many ways impossible to separate foreign policy from the Cold
War foreign assistance given by the US, the USSR and China as they
were inextricably connected. As the realist scholar George Liska noted

in 1960, foreign aid has served as an “instrument of political power”
(Liska, 1960: 14) and it was widely used to fight the Cold War. Within
the JFK administration, for example, it was regularly framed (particu-
larly by Rostow who later played a key role in determining how
USAID would operate) as another “weapon” in America’s strategic
arsenal. It would be used to win friends and strategic alliances, to
create an enabling environment for the pursuit of wider foreign policy
objectives and to sponsor (or counter) different kinds of revolution. It
enabled donors to advance their quest for international recognition but
also, in the case of China’s relations with Taiwan, to restrict it.
Vast sums were spent in the name of foreign assistance and
modernisation – at the end of the twentieth century the World
Bank (1998: 2) noted that since the late 1940s “developed coun-
tries” had allocated around US$1 trillion to development coopera-
tion (to say nothing of emerging South–South flows of
development assistance). The establishment of domestic welfare
states in the 1930s and 1940s paved the way for the foreign aid
regime and the willingness to consider governmental programmes
of assistance to people overseas but the idea that aid can be used
as a foreign policy tool to create a particular kind of world can
partly be traced to perceptions of the success of the Marshall Plan
and the idea that aid led to stability, which inspired many leaders
to recreate the programmes elsewhere. Aid allowed the US gov-
ernment to express a set of Judeo-Christian ideas held by most
Americans about the moral responsibilities the rich have to the
poor and demonstrated “that the country is not simply a powerful
nation, but a powerful nation committed to a higher purpose”
(Taffet, 2007: 3). In this sense, foreign aid also provides a valu-
able “window into the national political soul” (Taffet, 2007: 4).
The US government had long been interested in the improve-
ment of living conditions in poor countries and the creation of
effective economic systems around the world, but that interest was
not spread evenly. Cold War development assistance had very
particular political geographies then as “[s]ome poverty was
regarded as more important than other poverty” (Taffet, 2007: 2).
Aid sought to address “internal [political] dynamics” and became,
as in the case of JFK’s AfP, a set of political programmes
designed to create particular kinds of geopolitical outcomes. It
quickly became a tool, however, to reward allies and prevent
threats emerging and in the pursuit of wider geopolitical aims of
dominating, pacifying, protecting, strengthening or transforming
recipient countries. It also put in place important networks and
connections, linking donors and recipients, which for some critics

meant that it was little more than imperialism and would create
only dependency. The AfP, for example, was not an alliance and
“was not even always about economic progress” (Taffet, 2007:
196, emphasis in original) but it did enable the US to manipulate
its relations with Latin America to its own advantage as “decisions
about economic aid programs were part of every major US action
in the region” (Taffet, 2007: 197).
US policymakers believed that communism would be unable to
threaten countries with healthy economies and as such the simple
“task” of development for many US modernisation theorists was to
provide “an ethos and system of values which can compete success-
fully with the attraction exercised by Communism” (Watnick,
1952–53: 36). In addition to countering communism US aid also
sought to “make the world safe for capitalism” (Westad, 2006: 31).
Aid was the primary tool through which the US offered what JFK
promised Vietnam in 1956: “a political, economic and social
revolution far superior than anything the Soviets had to offer”
(JFK cited in McVety, 2012: 164). This competitive logic behind
foreign aid meant that many recipient countries became “tourna-
ments of modernisation” (Cullather, 2002: 530) as competing global
powers sought to enact their different conceptions of revolution,
progress and development, often through large-scale “showcase”
projects (such as the HVP in Afghanistan or the TAZARA railway
in Africa). In particular, the Third World witnessed a rapid prolif-
eration of river basin development projects during the Cold War and
even though they were often represented as purely technical exer-
cises, they were nonetheless “rife with geopolitical calculations”
(Sneddon and Fox, 2011; Sneddon, 2015). Along with a surfeit of
Cold war dam projects there were also a huge number of infra-
structure projects focused on roads, railways and airports, schools
and hospitals, along with a raft of factories, textile mills and state
farms (many inspired by similar schemes developed by donors
domestically). Each would seek to show how the donor’s particular
combinations of technology and know-how would vanquish under-
development in the Third World.
In 1982 a report by the US National Intelligence Council
examined the question of what makes superpowers attractive to
“less developed countries” (LDCs) and noted that “[m]ost LDCs
will seek support wherever they can best meet their needs,
regardless of ideology” (National Intelligence Council, 1982: 4).
Reviewing 30 years of US–Soviet competition in the Third World,
the report argued that the Soviets held several “advantages”
including continuity, faster arms delivery with fewer strings,

assistance from allies like Cuba, Moscow’s ability to identify
itself with widely held positions on the key issues of self-determi-
nation for Palestinian Arabs and black majority rule in Southern
Africa, the Soviets’ use of subversion and military intimidation to
“force” LDCs to cooperate and their freedom from parliamentary
and public opinion constraints. The report also noted the percep-
tion that the US was linked to the colonial policies of its Western
European allies and that the Soviets’ centralised, authoritarian
political model was regarded as more suitable to the Third
World, even though the USSR had “mismanaged” its relations
with LDCs. Two years later a CIA report on the USSR and the
Third World (Central Intelligence Agency, 1984: 3) scripts the
latter as a “volatile arena of US-Soviet political struggle” where
the Soviets’ advance had bolstered their claim to be a global
power, noting that the “inherent instability” of the Third World
and the “inhibitions of US policy in the post-Vietnam period” had
created tempting opportunities for Soviet gains.
Around this time there were concerns expressed in several
popular geopolitical texts that the Soviets were running rampant in
the Third World, which solidified support for increased military
spending in the US. The film Red Scorpion (1989), for example,
tells the story of Nikolai, a Soviet Spetznaz operative played by
Dolph Lundgren, who is sent to a Marxist Southwest African state
called Mombaka (a country modelled on Angola) to kill an African
resistance leader named Sundata (loosely modelled on UNITA
leader Jonas Savimbi) who switches sides and helps the rebels as
he cannot accept the brutal tactics used by the Russians and Cubans
against the local people. Discarded by his communist bosses for
failing in his mission, he is rescued in the desert by bushmen who
nurse him back to health and initiate him into the group, turning the
Hollywood anti-Soviet action film into a conversion narrative
(Robinson, 2007). During the Cold War, foreign aid was all about
conversion – transforming recipient states into a model of the
modern fashioned in the donor’s own image, persuading them of
the pitfalls of communism or capitalism and transforming their
economies, infrastructures and state institutions in the process. The
pursuit of modernisation through foreign aid was also all about
convergence as industrialisation and the transfer of technology and
modern values would pull all recipient nations towards a common
point (modern, industrial societies), enabling them to “catch up”.
The Cold War was highly cartographic and numerous maps
were produced that articulated spatial ideologies of containment
and liberation, mapping the Third World but also projecting the
power of the US or Soviets within it (Barney, 2015). Vast swathes
of the Third World were coloured red for communism as alarmism
about the “dangers” of its diffusion was commonplace, but the
reality was a far more complex and dynamic patchwork of
allegiances that were never as simple, constant, uniform or uni-
lateral as the projections of power and influence created by Cold
War cartographers implied. The “Communist world” in particular
was never as unified and cohesive as the mapmakers suggested
(Nunan, 2014; Friedman, 2015). Cold War geopolitical alignments
were often fluid and dynamic (especially in the case of Afghani-
stan which regularly shifted allegiances between the US and the
USSR) and there was also lots of discontinuity in Chinese, Amer-
ican and Soviet engagements with the Third World as their interest
peaked and troughed at different historical moments and was
always subject to a wide range of national, regional and global
geopolitical dynamics.
Foreign assistance did not simply reproduce a single model of
political economy around the world – in the case of US aid to
Taiwan, often touted as an exemplar of non-communist develop-
ment practice, Cullather (2001) has documented how US aid and
advice often responded creatively and in an experimental fashion to
particular threats, local crises and opportunities. To an extent, aid
projects were also demand led and were not simply driven by
superpowers seeking to export their wares (although aid was in
various cases tied to the use of donor services, companies, techni-
cians etc.). Neither was it always a straightforward core–periphery
transfer of aid – Soviet assistance to the Third World, for example,
was often mobilised by Moscow from parts of the Soviet Union’s
internal periphery (e.g. from Azerbaijan to Afghanistan). In prac-
tice, modernisation projects funded by foreign assistance also fre-
quently struggled with issues of implementation and were often
resisted and reworked by recipients and intended beneficiaries
whilst their reception “on the ground” was far more complex than
anticipated by the planners and developers who dreamt them up.
Although many aid projects made a significant difference in
recipient countries, there were a catalogue of expensive failures
and white elephants which often revealed how little donors
understood about the cultural, economic and political contexts
in which they operated. The British politician Shirley Williams
claims in her autobiography, for example, that the Soviet Union
sent snowploughs to Ghana along with roadmaking equipment
(Williams, 2010). Similarly, in Angola the Soviets found it
difficult applying a revolutionary ideology based on class to a

revolution whose protagonists saw their struggle largely in terms
of race, whilst the Chinese struggled to comprehend the sheer
complexity of liberation struggles in Southern Africa. Promoting
anti-capitalism “had been one thing when Moscow’s allies were
in Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest. It was another thing entirely
when they were in Luanda, Addis Ababa, and Kabul” (Nunan,
2014: 6). Further, the “experts” that most often came with the aid
were also often resented because “they created a social sphere
over which the recipient country had little control, even when
they came from countries with which the regimes had close
relations, such as the Soviets in Angola or the Americans in
Iran” (Westad, 2006: 96).
Around the world, whilst presenting itself as the antithesis of
empire, the US “lavished billions on corrupt regimes that ignored
poverty” during the Cold War (Engardio, 2001: 58). The 2011
revolution in Egypt drew attention to the historic role that US aid
had played in Third World state-building and in helping a recipi-
ent government to win and maintain legitimacy, propping up
unsavoury administrations like the illegitimate Mubarak regime.
During the uprising Egyptian riot police were photographed in the
streets of Cairo hurling teargas canisters labelled “Made in the
USA”, whilst tanks, rifles, helicopters and fighter jets funded by
US aid and manufactured by US companies were used by the
Mubarak regime to quell the protests. As Mitchell (1995) has
argued with respect to USAID’s operations in Egypt, the “forget-
ting” of certain forms of engagement (such as these kinds of
military aid) is as significant to the framing of development as
the assertion of “new” (aid) relationships. One of the main
consequences of Cold War foreign assistance was a massive
militarisation of the Third World. Over time the Soviets increas-
ingly prioritised military over economic assistance and the US
provided grants amounting to over US$90 billion in military
equipment and training to some 120 countries before the end of
the Cold War (Kuzmarov, 2017). Vietnam alone received US$16
billion in military assistance from the US between 1955 and 1975
(Kuzmarov, 2017).
A “strange kind of Cold War” unfolded, fought not just with
military hardware but with competing models of the modern and
different ideas of the correct pathways to development, with loans
and grants, with technicians and planners. There was also a
propaganda war for hearts and minds where donors sought to
narrate the “progress” their assistance was enabling through
popular geopolitical texts including films, radio programmes,

comics, posters etc. and which created significant affective com-
munities, as in the idea of “Red Africa” created in Soviet propa-
ganda (Nash, 2016). This was also not a just a simple
confrontation between the US and USSR: Soviet attempts to
organise the Third World existed in contention with projects
organised out of places like Belgrade, Havana, Beijing and Algiers
(amongst others). Shubin (2008) argues that Soviet support to the
Third World was not determined by a competitive rivalry with the
US, but by Moscow’s desire to respond to Third World demands
for emancipation, but so much of what China, the USSR and the
US sought to do in the Third World through foreign assistance
was shaped by their interactions with each other and by the
competition for strategic influence. China, for example, entered
Africa locked in combat with the US (and later the USSR).
Similarly, Soviet support certainly influenced ZAPU intelligence
cadres in Zimbabwe in the 1960s, but it did so in negotiated,
pragmatic and, at times, surprising ways, which were shaped by
interactions with many other foreign hosts (Alexander, 2017).
US Cold War foreign aid was, in particular, heavily focused
on the countering of communist insurgency and consequently
development became increasingly central to the goal of not just
securing territory but securing and winning populations as pacifi-
cation was directly linked to prosperity. Counter-insurgency was
increasingly framed as what David Kilcullen (a senior US counter-
insurgency advisor in Iraq) has termed “armed social work”.
During the Cold War development increasingly came to be fash-
ioned as a set of biopolitical compensatory and ameliorative
technologies of security (Duffield, 2006b), that sought to “accom-
plish or attempt to accomplish, stable rule through certain sorts of
governable subjects and governable objects” (Watts, 2003: 12). In
this way development has historically served as a locus of dis-
ciplinary (bio)power whose primary concern is with violently
fixing potentially insurgent populations within an extended archi-
pelago of highly securitised space (Duffield, 2007a, 2008, 2010a).
This emerging governmental rationality of development is parti-
cularly evident in the work of USAID which was centrally
involved in the project of countering this communist “contagion”,
championing increasingly “total” forms of rural development as
the key to transforming populations of potential insurgents into
“governable subjects” (Attewell, 2017). In a range of contexts
such as Vietnam, Palestine or Afghanistan, USAID increasingly
practiced development as a form of governmentality, its
interventions becoming ever more concerned with the government

and management of restless rural populations (Attewell, 2017).
This question of the emerging governmental rationalities of devel-
opment and the management and countering of insurgency is now
taken up in the next chapter, which considers the state as a key
point of entry for thinking about geopolitics and development.
Chapter 5
The State and

Development
INTRODUCTION: THE STATE IS DEAD, LONG

LIVE THE STATE
A LTHOUGH many discussions of the history of development begin
with President Truman’s Cold War announcement of a “bold new
programme” for the underdeveloped world, the origins of develop-
ment as an idea can also be traced to other, earlier periods of
military conflict, such as in the power struggle that began to unfold
among emerging states in a turbulent and industrialising Europe
during the nineteenth century (Cowen and Shenton, 1996). Secur-
ity-motivated state intervention has historically played a large and
significant role in European history, both in periods of industrialisa-
tion and welfare and in periods of economic depression and war
(Hettne, 2010). As Foucault noted in his lectures on governmental-
ity, the idea of security emerged in a period of transition in the
history of French statecraft, as “old” approaches to rule based on
repression and extraction (criticised for their tendency to create
periodic shortages and disruptive crises) were replaced with tactics
designed to foster productivity and trade (Dwyer, 2014). In the
nineteenth century, heavy industries were regarded as a means to
achieve national strength and security, one that required a strong
interventionist state (Hettne, 2010) whilst economic doctrines
viewed wealth creation as directly linked to order and state security.
Indeed, with its in-built sense of design, “development” has always
represented forms of mobilisation associated with order and secur-
ity (Hettne and Odén, 2002) and the state has consistently been
regarded as central to that. The general aim has remained that of
attempting to reconcile the inevitable disruption of progress with
The State and Development 169
the need for order (Cowen and Shenton, 1995: 27–43); an objective
that it has failed to achieve (Duffield, 2001). In many ways state
sovereignty “constitutes a precondition for Development” (Tickner,
2003a: 318) and it has often been argued that the inverse is no less
true; economic well-being and wealth are important enabling fac-
tors for the realisation of sovereignty (Tickner, 2003a: 318).
During the Cold War, the primary focus for both the main
superpowers was on supporting and allying with Third World
states and particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, both development
and security were primarily framed as inter-state affairs. Foreign
aid, inspired by the dream of modernising the Third World,
centred on enhancing security by strengthening the state apparatus
and creating and securing a “steady state” in the periphery as a
means of promoting development and making the world safe for
capitalism. In “theorising back” (Slater, 1993) against the grain of
modernisation discourses during the 1960s and 1970s, the depen-
dency scholars also placed the state at the forefront of their
analyses in arguing that the periphery’s global insertion had
harnessed state-building processes to global capitalist dynamics
in ways that had hampered the consolidation of the state’s basis
for internal legitimacy and that active state intervention would be
necessary in the country’s economy to refocus the industrialisation
process. Theories of modernisation implied that, in order to “catch
up” or to capture the secret of (or mimic) the success of wealthier
states, countries of the Third World should internalise within their
domains “one or other of the features of the wealthier countries,
such as industrialisation and urbanization” (Arrighi, 1991: 40).
State institutions in the Western world were also offered up as
models that the newly emergent states of the Third World should
seek to internalise and replicate. By the 1980s many countries of
the Third World had “internalized elements of the social structure
of wealthier countries through ‘modernization’ but had not suc-
ceeded in internalizing their wealth” (Arrighi, 1991: 40). Conse-
quently, many lacked the means of fulfilling the expectations and
accommodating the demands of the social forces that they had
brought into existence through modernisation and “as these forces
rebel a general crisis of developmentalist practices and ideologies
begins to unfold” (Arrighi, 1991: 40). This chapter seeks to
examine the historically central role of the state in development
theories and practices, arguing that states and the crises, resis-
tances and insurgencies that they engender lie at the very heart of
the geopolitics–development nexus.
170 The State and Development
One group of states that managed to internalise many features

of the wealthier Western countries in the name of modernisation
were the “developmental states” of East Asia (such as Japan,
South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore) that provided strategic part-
ners in the Cold War balance of power. Drawing on classical
statist political economy, the literature on “developmental states”
(Amsden, 1989; Evans, 1995; Wade, 1990; Johnson, 1999; Woo-
Cumings, 1999) emphasised how, contrary to prevailing free-
market explanations, the “catch-up” development of much of East
Asia was more the result of a high level of state intervention. The
goal of a developmental state was conceived as building markets
but then “deliberately distorting them to serve specific national
development objectives through the judicious use of incentives,
tariffs, subsidies and especially control of finance” (Bishop and
Payne, 2017: 1). The label itself is now variously applied, some-
times very loosely, to a vast array of countries as diverse as
Indonesia, Brazil, Mozambique, Mauritius and Botswana (amongst
many others) (Bishop and Payne, 2017; Ovadia and Wolf, 2018).
Even some Western states that claimed to have developed via open
markets, did precisely the opposite and were (and in some cases
still are) to an extent “developmental” states themselves (Chang,
2003). Further, neoliberal actors often try to “retro-fit” their theory
to the South Korean context whilst typically ignoring the historical
importance of the “development state” approach in achieving
growth (Chang, 2003).
Typically, however, there have been far too few efforts to
understand the East Asian developmental states within the geopo-
litical and historical contexts in which they emerged (Berger,
2004; Yeung, 2017). In particular, examining the historical inter-
sections of the Cold War, development and security in the making
of East Asian developmental states can be richly suggestive
(Glassman and Choi, 2014). The US (and, later, Japan) invested
substantial resources into these East Asian economies in an
attempt to shape the development of their political institutions
and create alliances with “strong” states. It can even be argued
that US aid indirectly helped create the actual developmental state
apparatus since its financial contribution and market support to
East Asian development, as indispensable parts of the US-led Cold
War imperative, were necessary conditions for underwriting the
initial emergence of the developmental state (Yeung, 2017). The
modern post-colonial Korean state was in many respects “no less
an externally created structure than the colonial state it replaced”
(Pirie, 2008: 62) as its new institutions were constructed around
the old structures of the colonial state and its “fiscal base” was US
aid whilst the first Korean president was a “US placeman” (Pirie,
2008: 62). Perceived geopolitical threats in the East Asia region
spurred the emergence of developmental states led by “authoritar-
ian strongmen” (Yeung, 2017), several of whom struggled to
maintain security within their own borders (Doner, Ritchie and
Slater, 2005) and by the late 1980s, major social and political
movements had prompted the decline of the authoritarian state in
countries like South Korea and Taiwan (Yeung, 2017).
As the Cold War ended, development discourses that envi-
saged the “engineering” of states in the South diminished and
there was a paradigm shift towards a more non-interventionist
approach (see chapter 6), guided by a “post-national” logic with a
humanitarian focus on “human security” (Hettne, 2010), incorpor-
ating a transnational assumption of responsibility, as if one could
no longer rely on states to fulfil their duties for their citizens
(Hettne, 2010: 34). Some scholars also implicitly or explicitly
posit the decreasing relevance of states in driving development
processes and in shaping development outcomes by reference to
the increasing import of “horizontal” and relational processes of
connectivity, such as transnational commodity chains or develop-
ment programmes, along with migration, governance or NGO
networks, philanthropic foundations (like those of Bill Gates and
George Soros) and wider informal social and economic networks.
These are seen to possess logics, causalities or mechanisms of
coordination that cut across and to an extent “transcend” states.
The murky concept of “failed states” also became prominent
during this period (Call, 2008). This chapter argues that discourses
around the weakness, fragility and failure of states in the South
need to be understood in historical and geopolitical context and
despite forecasts of its demise the state remains the primary site of
development interventions. States remain the main institutional
realm for addressing political and economic grievances and
claims, as they legislate and have obligations towards their citi-
zens and under international legal frameworks. States also play a
vital role in the wider diplomacy around development whilst
international governmental organisations along with a range of
non-state actors and para-diplomatic entities (e.g., governments in
exile, secessionist movements and sub-national or regional gov-
ernments) can also “mimic” conventional state diplomacy
(McConnell, Moreau and Dittmer, 2012; Mamadouh et al., 2015).
However permeable to global and transnational social processes,
state institutions “still decisively filter the flows of commodities,
people and ideas unfolding across and beyond them, and states
continue to be central vis-à-vis the specific ways in which global
development interventions are defined and implemented” (Novak,
2016: 491). Contrary to neoliberal development paradigms which
promised to roll it back, the state was, to an extent, “smuggled
back in” again through the “security and development” rubric
(Luckham, 2009) (see chapter 6).
James Scott’s (1998) pivotal work, Seeing like a State, is
hugely relevant here and has been foundational in shaping my
own understanding of states in the South. Scott provides a host of
examples, from state forestry to villagisation and other “grand
schemes” for infrastructure and large-scale or “high modernist”
environmental-developmental changes that could be considered as
definitional to states. In this sense, development serves as a key
means through which states seek to create a “legible” society to be
governed (Scott, 1998), both through measuring and codifying a
population (e.g. their landholdings, their harvests, wealth, volumes
of commerce etc.) but also in creating standard grids through
which this could be centrally recorded and monitored. Scott
(1998) articulates these practices (establishing territorial bound-
aries, controlling movement across them, policing, border control
etc.) as the “state simplifications” and “schematic categories”
needed for grasping a “large and complex reality”. These grids
and grand schemes are key to geopolitical imaginations of devel-
opment. As Luke (1996) has argued, states have often sought to
establish their power by in-state-ing themselves in space, imprint-
ing a mark of their territorial presence (cf. Call, 2008). One of the
ways they do so is through infrastructure and large-scale rearran-
gements of socio-natural environments (e.g. through dam projects)
enabling states to demonstrate and project their strength and
power. There is thus a continuing need to detail how state
practices transform environments and how the state is consoli-
dated, and constituted, in relation to “nature” (Mitchell, 2011)
since the “process of mapping, bounding, containing and control-
ling nature and citizenry are what make a state a state” (Neumann,
2004: 202). A key part of the way in which states come into being
is through these claims and assertions of control over territory,
resources and people. Infrastructure development has also been at
the heart of recent South–South cooperation initiatives led by
China and other (re)emerging powers in Africa (see chapter 7)
and is central to China’s “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) initiative
launched in 2014, with US$1 trillion worth of infrastructure works
planned or already underway. Infrastructures thus represent an
important political terrain, the critical analysis of which provides a

useful point of entry into further understanding the geopolitics–
development nexus.
The chapter also considers the ways in which neoliberalism
has impacted on conceptions of the role of the state in develop-
ment but also the many forms of insurgency and resistance that
the pursuit of neoliberal state-led models of development has
given rise to. Neoliberal development discourses advocated
giving resources to governments to make markets work so as to
reduce poverty or disaggregate and marketise the state (Craig and
Porter, 2006), breaking up existing forms of state rule (corrupt,
patrimonial) and then “using markets to replace and reconstruct
the institutions of governance” (9, 100), whilst re-embedding
markets in regulatory and constitutional frameworks such as the
rule of law or freedom of information (Mosse, 2011). As a term
neoliberalism is “promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently
defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested” (Brenner,
Peck and Theodore, 2010: 184). Rather than being a static homo-
geneous ideology with a uniform outcome, it results from complex
and dynamic processes of “neoliberalisation” (Peck and Tickell,
2002) which are “contextual and contingent” (England and Ward,
2007: 250). Similarly, simplistic binary distinctions are often
drawn between “neoliberalism” and “developmentalism”, yet
development almost always embodies in practice, even if not in
theory or ideology, a complex mix of state–market interactions
(Bishop and Payne, 2017). Neoliberal deepening was itself a state-
led process, just as developmentalism relies on market mechan-
isms and countries can and do exhibit characteristics of both
simultaneously (Bishop and Payne, 2017). States are central to
the reforms prescribed by neoliberal development policy (such as
the “shock therapy” or privatisation and market deregulation
required by Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and the
more recent Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers or PRSPs which
seek “country ownership” of neoliberal prescribed pathways to
poverty reduction) and rather than “hollowing out” the state, such
interventions exemplify the use of state power to impose market
imperatives across societies.
Brazil’s current socioeconomic policy regime, for example, is
a hybrid of economically liberal policy goals and instruments
associated with the Washington Consensus and more developmen-
talist objectives (e.g. to eradicate hunger and extreme poverty) that
have their roots in the so-called “national-developmentalist” para-
digm of the 1930s and 1940s and the work of the Economic
Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) (Ban, 2013; Dauvergne

and Farias, 2012). This “neo-developmentalism” entails a new
form of state activism and rather than rolling back its interventions
in leading sectors of the economy, the Brazilian state has con-
solidated its presence not only as a regulator, but also as owner
and investor (Ban, 2013). More generally, Latin America has also
seen a recent rise in “post-neoliberal” developmental states (such
as Bolivia and Ecuador) that are today heralded by some observers
as contributing alternative practices around development with
potentially positive impacts on state–society relations.
The development processes that unfold within as well as
across and beyond states intersect and entangle with each other
around borders, which constitute important points of contact,
division and articulation between various geographies of develop-
ment (Novak, 2016). While borders attempt to shape space along
state-centred scales of discourse and practice they are today
increasingly the focus of a series of intense and wide-ranging
interventions by state and transnational actors, with several neo-
liberal agencies arguing that integrating national economies into
world markets means that borders need to be restructured or
“thinned” through multilateral institutional alignment, the reduc-
tion of tariffs and restrictions, the liberalisation of capital markets
and the establishment of new governance authorities and bodies
(Novak, 2016). Similarly, de- and re-bordering strategies, whereby
territorial jurisdictions are redefined in regional, cross-border and/
or sub-national terms have also been aggressively promoted,
leading to a proliferation of “growth corridors”, Free Trade Areas
(FTAs) and Special Economic Zones (SEZs). By creating territorial
governance units among, across and within states, these “political
technologies” (Elden, 2013) are increasingly seen as important in
fostering FDI, regional cooperation and trade-led growth. In this
sense it is useful to examine the “borders–development nexus”
since a variety of disparate neoliberal development policies can be
reinterpreted as instances of border management interventions
(Novak, 2016).
As the devastation caused by neoliberalisation has proliferated,
so the increase in the number of social movements has gathered
pace. As Paudel (2016: 1047) notes, “[s]ubaltern political possibilities
are always present and inherent in the historical material processes
of development” and it is important to examine how subaltern
struggles have contested hegemonic conceptions of state, citizenship
and society or sought to defend places and ecologies, how they
have generated alternative projects, practices and imaginaries of
development and challenged the anti-politics of the neoliberal devel-

opment regime. As states have retreated in the wake of neoliberal-
ism the number of NGOs has also grown significantly. Founded
largely on values of “world citizenship and universal human kin-
ship” that were also promoted by the labour movement (Lumsdaine,
1993), NGOs were initially focused on charitable giving and short-
term humanitarian aid, but their remit gradually extended during the
inter-war years to include long-term development projects in the
areas of health, education and agriculture (Duffield, 2007a). During
the Cold War, NGOs were at pains to position themselves as
operationally outside of states; their selling point was the promotion
of “bottom-up” community-based development as opposed to the
bureaucratic “top-down” efforts practiced by states and multilateral
development agencies (Jones, 1965). NGOs are now less likely to be
outside of states looking in, but rather on the inside looking out
(Hulme and Edwards, 1997), even building or extending state
capacity or acting as its surrogate (Duffield, 2007a). There are
concerns however that NGOs often depoliticise and blunt the edges
of resistance, interfering with self-reliant social movements whilst
turning confrontation into negotiation and defusing political anger
(Roy, 2014b).
This chapter is divided into four sections. The first sets out a
theoretical framework for conceptualising the state and its rela-
tions to development and examines the concept of governmental-
ity before considering the theorisation of African states in
particular. The second argues that infrastructures are key sites
around which the meanings of development are contested and
that they help create, destroy, expand or limit the contours of the
state. It also argues that a focus on resource geographies and the
“resource–state nexus” (Bridge, 2014) can reveal a great deal
about the role of states in shaping the political geographies of
development. The chapter then considers how post-colonial state
formation in the South has often been beset with insurgencies of
various kinds (and explores some of the strategies used by states
to counter them) before a final section examines the ways in
which state power, imaginaries and narrations of development
have been contested by a range of social movements.
THEORISING THE STATE

It [the state] should be examined not as an actual structure,
but as the powerful, metaphysical effect of practices that
make such structures appear to exist. In fact, the nation state

is arguably the paramount structural effect of the modern
social world. . .. By approaching the state as an effect, one
can both acknowledge the power of the political arrange-
ments that we call the state and at the same time account for
their elusiveness. (Mitchell, 1991b: 95)
Despite long-standing calls to rethink the state “as a social

relation”, reified understandings that view the state as a differ-
entiated institutional realm separate from civil society have
persisted in academic and political debate (Painter, 2006). Stein-
metz (2008) and Ferguson and Gupta (1997) have shown how the
state, insofar as “it” can be said to “exist”, is a mythologised,
contradictory and constantly challenged entity (Manchanda,
2017). Despite the almost unavoidable tendency to speak of the
state as an “it”, the domain we call the state is “not a thing, a
system or subject, but a significantly unbounded terrain of
powers and techniques, an ensemble of discourses, rules, and
practices” (Brown, 1995: 174). Feminist, anthropological and
poststructural approaches to the state have steadily reoriented
attention away from a focus on formal state institutions toward
the more socially embedded processes through which ideas of the
state are reproduced. Rather than conceptualising the state as a
self-generated and governing stable structure, Mitchell (1991b),
for example, advocates rethinking the state as a “rhetorical
effect”. States do not simply exist; rather, they are accomplish-
ments reified and reformulated through a variety of prosaic and
quotidian activities and mundane practices (Painter, 2006). Such
an approach reveals the “heterogeneous, constructed, porous,
uneven, processual and relational character” of states (Painter,
2006: 754) and can bring to light the uneven geographies of state
power with greater complexity and subtlety, which is particularly
useful in the global South context where state power can be
fragile and contingent. The state emerges as an imagined collec-
tive actor “partly through the telling of stories of statehood and
the production of narrative accounts of state power” (Painter,
2006: 761) and the ideas, imaginaries and practices of develop-
ment play a key role in the telling of these stories and in the
wider narration of state power. The focus on “statisation” can
help us then in understanding the perpetual process through
which the state comes into being by attending to the mundane
social and material practices of “development” through which
stateness is actualised.
Foucault’s concept of governmentality is also useful here in

illuminating the diverse political rationalities of government, its
“technologies” and the bringing into being of the things, people and
processes to be governed through development programmes (Watts,
2003; Li, 2007). In exploring questions of governmentality and
practices of rule in development, attention focuses on how state
power operates to shape the conduct of conduct, as tactics and
technologies are deployed to control, subdue and oppress the citi-
zenry. Here the state no longer stands as an unquestioned source of
power, but, rather, as its effect. Despite concerns in some quarters
about the applicability of Foucault’s thought, Death (2011) argues to
the contrary that it is precisely in spaces of contragovernmentality,
ungovernability, anarchical governance or in the borderlands of
global politics that a governmentality approach can provide illumi-
nating insights into the contemporary operation of politics at various
scales. Africa in particular has increasingly been identified by the US
military as having many such spaces of ungovernability and disorder,
seen as having the potential to fuel Islamist insurgencies (see chapter
6). The governmentality approach thus has the potential to map the
fragmented, uneven, heterogeneous, overlapping and fractured
spaces of global politics as well as to make sense of the various
attempts to counter insurgency there. Another example of spaces of
contragovernmentality is the favelas of Brazil where state institu-
tions, in preparation for a series of mega-events culminating in the
2016 Summer Olympics, tried and repeatedly failed to reclaim these
spaces to ensure security and social order (see Figure 5.1). The
Brazilian state has attempted to retake territories that have been
controlled by drug gangs and regarded as largely off-limits for as
long as 30 years through a series of aggressive interventions invol-
ving military occupation, infrastructure provision, beautification and
selected removal (Freeman, 2014). The practices of “legibility and
simplification” associated with these programmes are often justified
as something that is to an extent “necessary” for residents to fully
participate in modern society but these measures also expose resi-
dents to predatory aspects of the state and capital (Freeman, 2014).
Such urban peripheries of devastating poverty and inequality have
also increasingly become spaces of insurgent citizenship (Garmany,
2009; Holston, 2009).
The concept of transnational governmentality (Ferguson and
Gupta, 2002) is also useful here in capturing how the state is
composed of multiple relations within and beyond national borders
and enables a better grasp therefore of the multiple movements and
complex spatialities of governance and how they are shaped by
FIGURE 5.1 A Brazilian police pacification unit (Força de Pacificação) on

patrol in Favela Mare in Rio de Janeiro on July 12th, 2014.
Courtesy of ITA-TASS news agency/Alamy.
transnational actors (e.g. corporations and the IFIs), alliances and

networks. This focus on governmentality can also be very productive
if supplemented by assemblage thinking. Abrahamsen (2017: 134)
notes that many analyses of the state typically try to “apply” theory to
Africa, seeking to fit its institutions and practices into an already
existing model “and constantly finding it wanting”. Africa here is
only ever acted upon. Assemblage thinking however usefully draws
attention to the multiple forms and sources of agency, and the
different forms of power, resources, and capacities that different
actors and actants possess. It also involves approaching the state and
social orders not as fixed or static, but as something to be discovered,
as contingent and evolving. Since no two assemblages are the same
this gets away from the need for an explicit or implicit comparison to
a Western state norm. Some recent anthropological scholarship on
post-colonial African statehood similarly sees the state not as a finite
entity – an apparatus of borders, personnel, budgets and bureau-
cracies – but rather as always emerging, becoming, incomplete or “an
always-emergent form of power and control identifiable at multiple
societal levels” (Bertelsen, 2016: 3).
Due to their lack of internal legitimacy, Third World states
were typically regarded as having been constructed from the out-
side, by means of international recognition of their sovereign
status (cf. Jackson, 1993; Jackson and Rosberg, 1982, 1986). This
is particularly true of how African states have been regarded in
some academic literatures. The debate about the state in Africa
remains a highly contested domain, however, as conceptions and
theories of African states present a series of questions that have
“haunted the continent’s place in IR” (Harman and Brown, 2013:
73), given a perceived lack of “fit” between IR’s theoretical
constructs and African realities (Harman and Brown, 2013: 73).
African states are typically depicted as public façades behind
which power operates through clientelistic networks (Bayart,
1993), as marginal actors in the international economic and
political order, as violent and corrupt and as having economies
and societies that have been profoundly and predominantly shaped
by external interventions and resources. Many contemporary scho-
lars have claimed that African states are governed by a pervasive
“patrimonial” logic, which encourages clientelism, corruption and
economic stagnation, blurring the lines between party and state.
These range from “developmental patrimonial” states (Kelsall and
Booth, 2010) to those reliant on violent political bargaining (de
Waal, 2010; Booysen, 2011) or the “instrumentalisation of disor-
der” (Chabal and Daloz, 1999). As Bach (2013: 6) notes, the
“standard depiction” is of African countries as quasi-states
“devoid of the empirical components of statehood”, where the
essentials of statehood are missing, or it is often “juridical” (i.e.,
de jure recognised by international actors) rather than “empirical”
(a de facto ability to exercise sovereignty).
Africa is also typically represented as home to an assortment
of “weak”, “failed” and “fragile” states as if there are states in the
world that conform to an “ideal-type” when in reality nowhere
does (Brown, 2006). The grammar around “failure” and “lack” in
IR has been somewhat unreflexive (Manchanda, 2017) – weak
states are typically described as those in which a solid national
identity, or an “idea of state”, is absent, or contested by a diverse
array of societal actors; socio-political cohesion is especially
weak; consensus on the “rules of the game” is low; institutional
capabilities in terms of the provision of order, security and well-
being are limited; and the state is highly personalised (Tickner,
2003a: 314). Talk of state failure is, as Manchanda (2017: 388)
demonstrates in relation to Afghanistan, “often laden with the
same normative assumptions that accompanied the more explicit
racial biases and ethnocentric baggage intrinsic to colonial propa-
ganda and conceptualisations of world order”. In a variety of ways
then, imperial hierarchy and Eurocentric modes of thought
underpin notions of “statehood” (Grovogui, 1996; Hobson and

Sharman, 2005) and colonialism has a direct bearing on today’s
international relations since “fragile state discourse reproduces
some of the key assumptions and relations of colonial bureau-
cracy, in particular the liberal practice of indirect rule or Native
Administration” (Duffield, 2009: 116). Indeed, many of the funda-
mental assumptions that fortify discourses of statehood, state fail-
ure and good governance have a fundamentally orientalist make-
up (Hill, 2006; Gruffydd-Jones, 2014). The specific post-colonial
circumstances of African statehood are also important here (and
something that many theorisations of the state in Africa have
struggled to adequately comprehend). African states are a
“hybrid” blend of informal and formal institutions, institutional
and patrimonial forms of rule, democratic/authoritarian predisposi-
tions and modern and charismatic sources of political authority (de
Waal and Ibreck, 2013). It is thus necessary to “re-examine the
utility of the state concept itself, rather than attributing its limited
applicability to the shortcomings of the periphery” (Tickner,
2003a: 315).
STATES, INFRASTRUCTURES AND RESOURCE

GEOGRAPHIES
Transforming the logic of research on state–society relations from
seeking to understand the effects of the state on society to
considering the processes and technologies through which the
concept of the state emerges and appears as a discrete object
(Mitchell, 2011) means tracing the production of state power to a
variety of different everyday spaces and practices where it is
enacted (and contested). As Meehan (2014: 216) argues, “the
everyday spaces of state power are products of an entangled
thicket of objects and practices: from dams to discourses, meters
to mapmaking, pixels to bureaucrats”. Whilst work on everyday
and capillary experiences of states, on the microphysics of power
and on banal nationalisms has usefully shown how symbolic acts
and gestures are important to, and constitutive of, states, it is also
important to focus on large-scale changes to landscapes and
economies and on grand schemes of social engineering, centralisa-
tion or territorialisation and their connections to states and state-
ness (Harris, 2012). For the state to take on meaning and
importance in the lives of rural residents, “it not only has to be
enacted through festivals or parades but must also command the
attention of citizens through large-scale [infrastructural] efforts as

part of what characterises the state as something that stands apart
from society” (Harris, 2012: 39). Harris (2012) locates the “sites”
and “spaces” of the Turkish state in the differentiated experiences,
narrations and spatialities of large-scale infrastructural works in
Turkey’s waterscape which are read as pathways through which
the Turkish state emerges as a “socio-natural” effect. Large-scale
infrastructural works (such as the building of centralised electri-
city networks and hydropower dams) constitute an important way
in which states demonstrate and project their strength and power
and perform and narrate the state’s presence and role, with
important implications for state–society relations and distinctions.
In a variety of ways then, infrastructure “helps create, destroy,
expand or limit the contours of what we call the state” (Meehan,
2014: 216). Infrastructures have played a significant role in
processes of nation-building, modernisation and development
(Calvert, 2016) and in the production and reproduction of geopo-
litical imaginaries of territory, nationhood and sovereignty (Huber,
2015). State power is in part the capacity of infrastructures to
order, arrange and make legible (Scott, 1998) and they are key to
“seeing like a state”. Similarly, for Chatterjee (2004) the post-
colonial state deals with its people primarily as governed popula-
tions (rather than as full rights-bearing citizens), or as subjects to
be constantly divided and rearranged by government as targets of
policy and one of the key ways this mode of operation is
reinforced is through programmes of “development” focused on
infrastructure. Consequently, access to infrastructures is often a
key issue in struggles for inclusive citizenship and political rights.
Accordingly, it is important to attend to the ways in which
infrastructures (such as those around electricity and water) are
institutionalised within biopolitical missions like “development”
(Winther, 2008; Bakker, 2013). In Africa, electricity infrastruc-
tures, for example, enable the state to extend the power and reach
of state institutions, particularly in contested peripheries (Power
and Kirshner, 2018). Electrification (see Figure 5.2) is part of the
“will to improve” underpinning development interventions and
exemplifies the practice of “rendering technical” (Li, 2007),
where energy access is depicted as a series of technical “pro-
blems” responsive only to a “development” intervention, while
rendered non-political as experts concerned with improvement
exclude political-economic relations from their diagnoses and
prescriptions through a subliminal and routine “anti-politics” (Fer-
guson, 1999).
FIGURE 5.2 Electricity infrastructures overloaded with illegal and infor-

mal connections in Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh, India. Tim
Gainey/Alamy.
For Ferguson (1999), the deterioration of the electricity system

in Zambia was an icon of how people’s expectations of modernity
came to falter, which he includes alongside the examples of the
“disconnection” that accompanied the collapse of the national air-
line (Zambia Airways) and the declining demand for copper-wired
telephone cables in the age of fibre optics and satellite communica-
tions, as metaphors for the wider decline and disjuncture of the
Zambian Copperbelt, of which so much had been expected at the
zenith of modernisation (see Figure 5.3). Infrastructures have
become key sites around which the meanings of development are
contested, with multiple social movements and justice-seeking
groups in the South naming it as an object of struggle and a crucible
in their work towards socially just and environmentally sustainable
futures (Cowen, 2017). Mobilisation around oil pipeline projects,
dam construction and toxic water, for instance, has continually
challenged corporate and state conceptions of development (see
Figure 5.4). In many parts of the South universal provision of public
services (like electricity or water) is a panacea and consequently the
under-provision of (and exclusion from) public services plays an
important role in shaping contemporary geographies of develop-
ment. The idea of a single national space in which state power is
FIGURE 5.3 An image from Christina de Middel’s project “The Afro-

nauts” which blends fact and fiction in remembering some
of Zambia’s early post-colonial dreams. In 1964 (the year of
Zambia independence) a Zambian science teacher named
Edward Makuka decided to train the first African crew to
travel to the moon and then Mars using an aluminium
rocket to put a woman, two cats and a missionary into
space using a catapult system. Makuka founded the
Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and
Astronomical Research to train his “Afronauts” near Lusaka.
Courtesy of Christina de Middel/DMB creatives.
exercised and rights are enjoyed in a consistent and homogeneous

way by all residents has been shattered by a variety of insurgencies,
leading to a kaleidoscopic array of micro-sovereignties and diverse
enclaves of authority and social service provision (Gilman, 2016).
Across the North–South divide reports of infrastructural obsoles-
cence, failure, crisis and struggle are a mainstay of the daily news and
mark the volatility and vulnerability of the socio-technical systems
FIGURE 5.4 Medha Patkar (leader of the Narmada Bachao Andolan

movement, NBA) and Indian writer Arundhati Roy visit Bhil
communities at Domkhedi village along the Narmada river
in Madhya Pradesh in September 2000. The village was
submerged as part of the construction of the Sardar Sarovar
dam project. Joerg Boethling/Alamy.
upon which people come to depend (Cowen, 2017). Access to vital

public services such as water, electricity, health, housing and transport
is also often spatially fragmented, particularly in urban spaces where
populations experience water supply services, for example, as elite
“urban archipelagos” rather than homogeneous networks (Bakker,
2013). Access to “public” goods and services is thus usually incom-
plete and a plethora of alternative strategies of service provision arise,
including illegally tapping into existing networks, as with the “mid-
night plumbers” and “comrade electricians” operating in South Afri-
ca’s townships (Bakker, 2013), and unregulated private alternatives or
services provided by NGOs. In some cases, communities come
together to provide themselves with the services that their governments
are unable or unwilling to provide such as cooperative water supply
systems and sewerage networks or self-built housing (Bakker, 2013).
Some of the literature on infrastructure and biopolitics has exam-
ined state interventions to ensure the health of populations, resources
and the economy and the ways in which these were predicated upon,
for example, techniques of surveillance, statistical representation and
the discursive mediation of individual subjectivities (Cooper and

Stoler, 1989; Corbridge et al., 2005; Legg, 2007, 2008; McFarlane
and Rutherford, 2008; Bakker, 2013). This work views governmental-
ity as simultaneously material and discursive, inscribed in physical
space as well as in social relations and given the partiality and
fragmentation of infrastructures (and access to them) it has shown
how the extension of biopolitics through the “public” (governmental)
sphere is necessarily uneven. Access to services such as water thus
becomes the subject of continuous political negotiation or “a question
of political struggle, often enacted by self-organised community
groups operating outside the bounds of traditional pathways of demo-
cratic representation in permanent negotiation with governments over
demands for political recognition via the provision of public services”
(Bakker, 2013: 283). The resistance of “ungovernable” populations
implies nuanced negotiations between the “governed” and “govern-
ing”, which Li (1999) argues result in “compromised governmental-
ities” rather than the “mastery of territory”.
Alongside a focus on states and infrastructures, the resource–
state nexus (Bridge, 2014) can also be highly instructive in analyses
of geopolitics/development. Work on resource geographies (Hayter,
Barnes and Bradshaw, 2003; Bridge, 2010; Sheppard, 2013) has
highlighted the ways in which states have sought to mobilise and
manage natural resources or enabled various forms of accumula-
tion. This is particularly timely given that extractive industry is
expanding into new resource peripheries and unconventional loca-
tions (Bridge and Le Billon, 2013), including “ungoverned” or
“undergoverned” and marginal spaces and conflict zones (Magrin
and Perrier-Bruslé, 2011). Resource peripheries however have been
treated not only as peripheral places but as peripheral to disciplinary
thinking in Economic Geography and other social sciences (Hayter,
Barnes and Bradshaw, 2003: 16). Sheppard (2013) thus raises the
possibility of “theorising back” on the relationship between
resources and economic geography from places outside global
capitalism’s core. More broadly, extractive economies have been
associated with a proliferation of enclave spaces which represent
important “spaces of postdevelopment” (Sidaway, 2007) and such
intersections of enclosure and enclavisation demand and reward
careful scrutiny (Sidaway, 2012; Kirshner and Power, 2015), espe-
cially given the numerous social conflicts over land and territory
that lie at the heart of the extractive model (Bebbington, 2012).
Words like “scramble” (Carmody, 2011) and “grab” are narra-
tive figures that loom large in recent research on the political
economy of natural resources (Bridge, 2014), especially in relation
to the global South and where the “rising powers” and “emerging
economies” (e.g. China, India) are concerned following recent
macroshifts in the geography of accumulation. Africa is one of
the “epicentres” for this (Bridge, 2014). Some work on resources,
however, particularly that on “land grabs”, paints a picture of
national landscapes throughout the global South being reimagined
as “needed” resources for the rest of the world, in ways that
downplay the significance of place, history and local context.
Further, sovereignty is often imagined as the exclusive control of
national states over internal natural resources in opposition to
foreign capital, yet sovereignty must be understood in relational
terms so as to consider the global geography of non-state actors that
shape access to and control over natural resources (Emel, Huber and
Makene, 2011: 70). In their work on gold mining in Tanzania, Emel,
Huber and Makene (2011) adopt such a relational approach and
raise important questions about the role of the colonial state but also
about the post-colonial places of dispossession that specific sites of
resource extraction create. Similarly, in a study of Chinese agribusi-
ness in Laos, Dwyer (2014) argues that the political-economic
approach exemplified by the neo-primitive accumulation literature
on resource and land grabs (in which enclosure, displacement and
dispossession loom large) could usefully be complemented with
historically grounded, place-specific ethnographic investigation.
This focus attends to questions of “micro-geopolitics” in consider-
ing local histories (rather than just international relations) and the
Cold War geopolitical legacies that have shaped state–community
relations in particular places (Dwyer, 2014).
THE STATE AND INSURGENCY

The impulse to classify, to standardise and to arrange populations
as objects of development can be traced to the 1860s when
“colonial bureaucracies became concerned with classifying
people and their attributes, with censuses, surveys, and ethnogra-
phies, with recording transactions, marking space, establishing
routines, and standardising practices” (Copper and Stoler, 1989:
611). This took on renewed importance in the 1940s, when
imperial powers began seeking to make their empires more pro-
ductive and orderly and to justify their rule on the basis of the
“development” they were bringing to colonial peoples. A raft of
colonial development and welfare legislation followed as colonial
states were pressed into service as arbiters of national progress
and development, shaping resource geographies and raising expec-

tations. Colonial development interventions spanned a wide regis-
ter of fields, from health and education, via community
development and resettlement schemes, to agricultural modernisa-
tion (Worby, 2000; Beusekom, 1997; Smyth, 2004). Along with
the education of nationalist elites (which played a key role in
fomenting insurgency in Africa and the struggle to take control of
the state), this “reformist urge” may have sown the seeds of its
own destruction, hastening its own demise as:
state-controlled development projects, making new demands

on people, reallocating resources and access to power, and
creating expectations on which colonial authorities could not
deliver, fostered the resistance such policies were intended to
avoid and focused it on the question of control of the state.
(Cooper and Stoler, 1989: 619)
As an idea development quickly became central to colonial and

Cold War expressions of what Routledge (1998: 245) calls “anti-
geopolitics”, a kind of “permanent assertion of independence from
the state” or an “ethical, political and cultural force within civil
society. . .. [that] challenges both the material (economic and mili-
tary) geopolitical power of states and global institutions”. These
expressions of “geopolitics from below” emanate from subaltern
(i.e. dominated) positions and Routledge (2003) includes within this
a wide variety of anti-colonial national liberation struggles but also
struggles against US imperialism (as in Vietnam) and a series of
peasant guerrilla movements in Central and Latin America fighting
against authoritarian rule. Development was central to many of these
struggles but also subsequently to the articulations of post-colonial
statehood pursued in many areas of the global South. Unlike other
justifications for empire, “development came to have as strong an
appeal to nationalist elites as to colonisers” (Cooper, 1997: 64). The
challenges involved in transforming an inherited colonial state were
numerous and complex, however. Nationalism had to transform from
a “restive and reactive, what-we-are-not, separationist ideology to a
persuasive image of a natural, organic, what-we-are, historic com-
munity, ready for deals, development, and practical alliances”
(Geertz, 2010: 240). How better then to define “what-we-are” as a
community than through a collective, national pursuit of progress and
development? There were a multiplicity of challenges the “prototy-
pical new state”, just emerging from a colonial past into a world of
intense great-power conflict, had to address from “a standing start”:
It had to organize, or reorganize, a weak and disrupted,

“underdeveloped” economic system: attract aid, stimulate
growth, and set policies on everything from trade and land
reform to factory employment and fiscal policy. It had to
construct, or reconstruct, a set of popular (at least ostensi-
bly), culturally comprehensible political institutions – a pre-
sidency or prime ministership, a parliament, parties,
ministries, elections. It had to work out a language policy,
mark out the domains and jurisdictions of local administra-
tion, elicit a general sense of citizenship – a public identity
and a peoplehood – out of a swirl of ethnic, religious,
regional, and racial particularisms. It had to define, however
delicately, the relations between religion, the state, and
secular life; train, equip, and manage professional security
forces; consolidate and codify a thoroughly pluralised,
custom-bound legal order; develop a broadly accessible
system of primary education. It had to attack illiteracy,
urban sprawl, and poverty; manage population growth and
movement; modernise health care; administer prisons; collect
customs; build roads; shepherd a press. And that was just for
starters. A foreign policy needed to be established. A voice
in the expanding and proliferating system of trans-, super-,
and extra-national institutions needed to be secured…
(Geertz, 2010: 240)
The process of post-colonial state formation has also, in many

cases, been beset by the challenge of maintaining security and
containing insurgencies of various kinds. Governance and state
capacity are key issues in the onset of insurgencies (Jones and
Johnston, 2013) which themselves often develop in rugged, diffi-
cult-to-govern areas or in situations when a government’s capacity
to tamp down or co-opt opposition groups is in decline. During the
Cold War and fuelled by superpower rivalry and the massive
militarisation that ensued, the number of civil wars in the Third
World rose inexorably to peak at around 50 or so in the early 1990s
(HSC, 2005). As a result, the erstwhile Third World was increas-
ingly “remapped” as a series of “borderland” spaces (Duffield,
2002) and a view of state failure leading to a breakdown in
development, conflict, criminality and international insecurity
began to take shape among metropolitan actors. That underdevelop-
ment increases the risk of conflict while development reduces it was
the basic rationale here in ways that are highly reminiscent of Cold
War geopolitics as underdevelopment had once again become
dangerous. Conflict in these “borderland” spaces is depicted as the

result of a “regressive developmental malaise” (Duffield, 2002:
1066) characterised by illiberal and often corrupt or criminalised
economies and state structures. Poverty, resource competition,
environmental collapse, population growth and so on, in the context
of failed or predatory state institutions, are now widely seen as
fomenting non-conventional internal, regionalised and criminalised
forms of conflict and insurgency. Such discourses, reminiscent of
imperial claims to “civilise” spaces of “barbarity”, carry a series of
implicit “them” and “us” dichotomies establishing a formative
contrast between “borderland traits of barbarity, excess and irration-
ality” with metropolitan “characteristics of civility, restraint and
rationality” (Duffield, 2002: 1052).
Having once been regarded as justifiable on the basis of
national liberation, the political violence of civil wars was, from
the 1990s on, increasingly delegitimated and reinterpreted in terms
of irrationality, the breakdown of order and the growth of crimin-
ality in the South (Duffield, 2008). This has been accompanied by
a resurgence of state-led humanitarian, development and peace
interventionism in spaces of crisis and conflict as aid actors have
since expanded into a wide range of demobilisation, reintegration
and reconstruction activities (Duffield, 2008). Here, development
agencies reposition themselves “as a defence against the border-
land forces of chaos and anarchy” (Duffield, 2002: 1064), with aid
practice itself redefined as a strategic tool of conflict resolution
and social reconstruction (Duffield, 1999), as a means to alter the
balance of power between social groups in the interests of har-
mony (Uvin, 1999) or to produce desired political outcomes.
Some of the liberal practices of development that have tradition-
ally been associated with NGOs have also increasingly been
rediscovered as forms of counter-insurgency (Slim, 2004). In this
context and faced with the crisis of state-based security, develop-
ment itself has been “rediscovered” and “reinvigorated”, providing
a new sense of purpose, a “second chance to make modernity
work” (Duffield, 2002: 1064). Duffield (2002: 1065) writes that
development has “come to acquire a new strategic role” but, as we
have seen in the previous two chapters, development had long
since acquired this kind of strategic, geopolitical significance,
particularly during the Cold War and the links between develop-
ment and counter-insurgency are far from novel.
States within the global political economy today face a “twin
insurgency”, from both above and below (Gilman, 2016). This
includes both a plutocratic insurgency, in which globalised elites
seek to disengage from traditional national obligations and respon-

sibilities, and criminal insurgencies in which drug cartels, human
traffickers, computer hackers, counterfeiters, arms dealers and
others resist, co-opt and “route around” states as they seek ways
to empower and enrich themselves in the shadows of the global
economy by exploiting the loopholes, exceptions and failures of
governance institutions. Unlike classic twentieth-century insur-
gents, who sought control over the state apparatus to implement
reforms, criminal and plutocratic insurgents do not seek to take
over the state but rather to carve out de facto zones of autonomy
for themselves by crippling the state’s ability to constrain their
freedom of (economic) action:
what both insurgencies represent is the replacement of the

liberal ideal of uniform authority and rights within national
spaces by a kaleidoscopic array of de facto and de jure
microsovereignties. Rather than a single national space in
which power is exercised and rights are enjoyed in a consis-
tent and homogeneous way by all residents, the cartography of
the dual insurgency represents diverse enclaves of political
authority and of social service provisioning arrangements.
(Gilman, 2016: 54)
This has led, Gilman argues, to a multiplication of various forms

of authority between the full-blown modern state and outright
anarchy, symbolised by the blurring lines between police, mili-
tary and private security contractors which are themselves
plugged into wider global security assemblages (Abrahamsen,
2017). In the space of the dual insurgency, citizenship “no
longer signifies the liberal ideal of an identical package of
rights for all, but instead means very different things depending
on where individuals are in physical and social space” (Gilman,
2016: 54). This proliferation of exceptional and unique micro-
sovereignties is typical of contemporary spaces of development
(Ong, 2000; Sidaway, 2007), as are the enclavic spaces of social
service provision that Gilman refers to. The paradigmatic case
for plutocratic spatial segregation and secession is the so-called
gated community but the enclaves of criminal insurgents are
more precarious, temporary and less secure spaces (like Brazil’s
favelas) in which:
some notionally social modernist state may claim authority,

but in which true power is wielded by warlords, gangsters, or
other kinds of organized criminals, who take de facto control

over local security and whatever meager social service provi-
sioning may be on offer. . . (Gilman, 2016: 55)
In contrast to an earlier inter-state norm, wars in the South

today weave back and forth across borders to form regionalised
systems of instability; they are not state-based wars in the tradi-
tional sense (Duffield, 2002). Major wars for state power in sub-
Saharan Africa are now rare but there has been an increase in low-
level insurgencies involving mobile rebel groups which work across
national borders like the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) (which
operates in Uganda, South Sudan, the DRC and the Central African
Republic), Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) (across the
Sahel region south of the Sahara Desert), Boko Haram (Northeast
Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon) and Al-Shabaab (Kenya,
Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia, Tanzania and Uganda) (see chapter
6). There is no simple dichotomy between war and peace here and
instead it is more productive to conceptualise war as an:
ongoing, more or less “permanent” process of militarized power

and conflict, varying in intensity over space and time from banal
occupation and low-level warfare to sudden and terrifying bom-
bardments and displacements, but premised ideologically on a
distinct horizon of peace, and the closure of war as a discrete
event. (Kirsch and Flint, 2011: 5)
The way in which different assemblages of intervention (including

those of the state) are mobilised in war reveals a great deal about
the contemporary operation of power (Bachmann, Bell and
Holmqvist, 2015) and is important in understanding the geopoli-
tics–development nexus.
One of the ways in which states have historically sought to
counter insurgencies is through the deployment of “development”
projects involving electrification, road and dam building, villagisa-
tion and population resettlement. In contemporary Asia this includes,
for example, the use of transnational economic zones to promote
cross-border trade among geographically remote population groups
with transnational links, and the establishment of interstate highways,
railways and commercial sea transportation links intended to promote
trade, encourage economic growth and discourage the discontent that
may give rise to insurgencies (Odgaard and Nielsen, 2014). For
example, in the Greater Mekong, SEZs and infrastructure projects
have been created to promote development in continental Southeast
Asian countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand.

After the civil war in Laos fought between the Communist Pathet
Lao and the Royal Lao government (1959–75), “population manage-
ment work” was conjured to meet the strategic tasks of defending the
country and building socialism (Dwyer, 2014). Wrestling with the
ghosts of Soviet collectivisation, China’s Great Leap Forward, and
Cambodia’s “Year Zero”, the population management led by Laos’s
Council of Ministers emphasised the need to control the activities of
Laos’s citizenry, especially its upland population, through a series of
state simplifications and schematic categories (Scott, 1995) such as
issuing identification cards, recording and monitoring overall popula-
tion statistics, organising population relocation and arranging dom-
icile patterns (Dwyer, 2014). State officials and foreign development
experts also turned to “focal sites” in an effort to corral a shifting-
cultivation-dependent population out of economically and politically
sensitive forest areas without driving them over to the anti-govern-
ment resistance, which was active at the time:
Focal sites embodied the counterinsurgency-style panopticism

embodied in strategic hamlets and socialist villagization
schemes, but also emphasised the provision of state services
like roads, schools and health clinics, as well as, eventually,
formal land allocation to households. (Dwyer, 2014: 388)
Spatial tactics like focal site development were designed to

achieve political and economic security. Resettlement of the popu-
lation from mountainous and/or remote areas was commonplace
during the Laotian civil war of the 1960s and 1970s. After the
victory of the Laotian People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) in
1975, some upland and highland populations who lived in sensi-
tive areas were relocated into “safe” areas to prevent them provid-
ing any support to the Royalist movement and further internal
resettlement programmes were implemented between the mid-
1990s and early 2000s, again heavily motivated by security con-
cerns (La-Orngplew, 2012). Indeed, in many parts of Southeast
Asia, agricultural expansion has often been part of the state’s
geopolitical strategy, enabling control and consolidation of both
frontier spaces and populations (De Koninck and Déry, 1997: 2).
Upland areas in particular have often been constructed as spaces
where levels of “civilisation” and “development” are still low and
agricultural practices there (e.g. various forms of shifting cultiva-
tion) have regularly been used to justify the labelling of such
people and places as “backward” or “primitive” (McElwee, 2004;
Duncan, 2004a; Cramb et al., 2009), requiring “civilisation” from

the core (Hirsch, 1989; Li, 2007). Schemes claiming to eliminate
the “backwardness” of frontier spaces often enabled a “soft”
control of them through agricultural expansion and intensification,
aimed at a state-led process of “civilising the margins” (Duncan,
2004b) and those people and places “on the outer boundaries of
modernity” (Hirsch, 2009: 125). In the 1980s large-scale planta-
tions were rehabilitated in a southern region of West Java, for
example, where the promotion of commercial crops to peasants
was strongly made in those areas that had experienced uprisings
against the government (White, 1999: 237). In Thailand the clear-
ing of new forestland for commercial crops in mountainous areas
was largely driven by security concerns and a desire to prevent
people from joining the communist movement (Uhlig, 1988: 15)
whilst road networks were also developed in remote areas of
Thailand, helping both to facilitate the penetration of the market
and to maintain national security near its border with Laos and
Myanmar (Thomas et al., 2008; Fox et al., 2009).
In recent years, insurgencies relating to a variety of religious,
ethnic and nationalist concerns have been common in several parts
of Asia including China, India, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and the
Philippines. In Buddhist Myanmar’s Rakhine state the Rohingya
community, stripped of their citizenship in 1982 and categorised as
“nonnationals”, as stateless people, have waged an insurgency
whilst in response the military has attempted “ethnic cleansing” of
the Rohingya Muslims in 1992, 2012 and 2016–18, with many
killed and displaced as a result (cf. Cheesman, 2018; see
Figure 5.5). The conflict has its genesis in control of the country’s
natural resources, namely the land occupied by the Rohingya where
over the past few decades and in the name of “development”, the
military junta has been acquiring land from small-scale farmers
without due compensation. Myanmar has been a key focal point of
China–India rivalry (who both have significant natural resource
interests there) and so the state has a strong vested interest in
clearing land to prepare for further “development”. China itself has
faced violent social unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang and has been
developing counter-insurgency strategies in response (drawing
upon a range of experiences, including that of the US in Afghani-
stan), with some observers suggesting that Chinese interests in
unstable areas may lead it to co-opt insurgents, militias and other
sub-state actors who control territory (Odgaard and Nielsen, 2014).
China’s OBOR initiative also has to be understood in the context of
its domestic objectives which, in addition to advancing China’s “Go
FIGURE 5.5 Rohingya refugees fleeing a military operation in Myanmar’s

Rakhine state take shelter in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh on
September 7th, 2017. Rehman Asad/Alamy.
West” initiative focused on the development of provinces such as

Gansu, Guangxi, Ningxia, Shanxi, Yunnan and Xinjiang, aim to help
produce a more favourable regional/domestic security environment
in China’s western areas that confront the challenges of religious
extremism, separatism and terrorism (Blanchard and Flint, 2017).
In tracing the emergence of the Maoist revolution in Nepal in
the 1990s, Paudel (2016) argues that in some peasant societies of
the South the geographies of developmental empowerment and
subaltern rebellion have unexpectedly overlapped and expanded
rapidly in recent years. The uprising emerged from the Rapti
region of Nepal, the focus of international development interven-
tions since the 1950s and a series of financial and technical
investments aimed at showcasing it as a model of development.
Given the country’s strategic geopolitical location between China
and India, the Cold War had a strong influence on Nepali politics
and development (Levi, 1954; Mihaly, 1965) with fears that
peasants in the Rapti region were particularly vulnerable to com-
munism because of their geographical remoteness and relatively
autonomous economic practices. In 1952 the US Government’s
“Mutual Security Program” noted that “under current conditions,
the agrarian sector offers a major target for communist subversion
in South Asia” (cited in Mihaly, 1965: 32). In response, the Nepali

state first strengthened the bureaucratic and police presence in the
region and implemented integrated rural development programmes
with the goal of systematic transformation of peasant communities
(Fujikura, 2013). Development through agrarian transformations
was conceived by the West as the only way to achieve economic
and political stability in the region in order “to resist internal and
external communist aggression” (Mihaly, 1965: 31). With funding
from USAID, the Rapti Integrated Development Project (RIDP)
was implemented, beginning in the 1970s, mobilising hundreds of
rural villages for the intensive implementation of development
activities such as adult literacy, rural infrastructure and community
forestry, ostensibly to contain an upsurge in rebellious sentiments.
Development projects can have unintended consequences, how-
ever, as Paudel (2016: 1030) shows how these increasingly con-
solidated movements at local and district levels provided a
foundation for the emergence of the Maoist insurgency, as pea-
sants in the Rapti region “enrolled themselves as development
subjects in the 1980s and emerged as a revolutionary force in the
1990s” (see Figure 5.6).
FIGURE 5.6 Nepalese troops from the Armed Police Force pause for a
break by a school building during counter-insurgency opera-
tions in Kathmandu, Nepal on December 19th, 2013. Photo by
De Visu/Shutterstock.
CONTESTING STATE POWER: SOCIAL

MOVEMENTS
Social movements, operating at a variety of scales, have also been
important in contesting hegemonic conceptions of state, citizen-
ship and society or in mobilising to defend particular places and
ecologies from interventions planned in the name of development.
Social movements in the global South have mobilised a wide array
of subaltern groups (including, for example, peasants and landless
workers, women, informal sector and unemployed workers, slum
dwellers, indigenous peoples, and marginalised youth) around sets
of radical claims and practices that have challenged the anti-
politics of the neoliberal development regime in significant ways
(see Motta and Nilsen, 2011; Nilsen, 2015). At the global level,
major summits (such as those for the G8 and G20) and meetings
of the IFIs have increasingly become the focus of protests by
social justice activists whilst transnational anti-capitalist social
movements like Occupy (see Figure 5.7) have demonstrated their
support for alternative futures to those promised by neoliberal
globalisation, promoting alternative geographic imaginaries that
contrast significantly with those at the centre of developmentalist
FIGURE 5.7 Portuguese protesters participating in the global “Occupy”

protests knock down police barriers and take the marble stair-
case in front of the Portuguese parliament building in Lisbon
on October 15th, 2011. Photo by Luis Bras/Shutterstock.
renderings of the spaces of globalisation (Nagar et al., 2002; Silvey

and Rankin, 2010). In addition, as Lubeck (2000) and Watts (2003)
have shown, the rise of Political Islam, understood as an “anti-
systemic movement”, is intimately linked with the implosion of the
secular nationalist Development project (Hart, 2010).
Several studies have demonstrated the significance of particular
spatialities such as place (Routledge, 1993), scale (Miller, 2000) and
networks (Featherstone, 2008) for social movement mobilisation,
with growing attention to the spatialities of contentious politics
(Jessop, Brenner and Jones, 2008; Leitner, Sheppard and Sziarto,
2008; Nicholls, Miller and Beaumont, 2013; Halvorsen, 2017). The
“material, symbolic and imaginary character of places can power-
fully influence the articulation of protest” (Routledge, 2017: 24)
since the “place of performance” has a significant bearing on where
and how social movements arise and the particular cultural, eco-
nomic and political milieu in which a protest emerges influences the
character and form that resistance takes (Routledge, 2017). In Apart-
heid South Africa, for example, resistance took a wide variety of
different forms shaped by the specific context including mass demon-
strations, marches, music, alternative press and advertising, flag
burning, graffiti, strikes, the wearing of symbolic clothing, “stay-
aways” organised by labour groups, rent boycotts, international
sanctions, divestment, hunger strikes by political prisoners and
student movements. There were also the many forms of defying
Apartheid regulations by sit-ins/occupying “whites only” spaces
such as buses and beaches and the destruction of key infrastructures
assembled by the Apartheid state (Kurtz, 2010).
Social movements are significant in understanding the geopo-
litics–development nexus because they have forged alternative
modernities, refused teleological models of socio-spatial progress
and sought to build coalitions attentive to diverse aspirations and
trajectories (Andolina, Laurie and Radcliffe, 2009; Sheppard et al.,
2009). They have, in many cases, rejected views of globalisation
that celebrate the diffusion of market principles and advocated
instead different ways of measuring and making value across non-
homogeneous places (Sparke, 2005). They have also rejected the
reductionism of logics of capital and commodification, defined
political formations in terms that extend beyond their relationships
to states and markets (Bakker and Silvey, 2008) or created
transformative political projects that include space for non-capi-
talist and also alternative capitalist models, narratives and prac-
tices (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Sparke et al., 2005). Some scholars
thus advocate taking seriously the “oppositional movement
spaces” constructed by social movements “as part of a justice-

oriented postdevelopment map that already exists” (Silvey and
Rankin, 2010: 700). The claims made by subaltern groups
frequently revolve around demands for redistribution or recog-
nition in some form or other (often related to questions of
citizenship) but their struggles often delegitimise dominant
meanings of development by calling attention to the discrepan-
cies between state ideologies and lived realities (Moore, 1998;
Nilsen, 2010). Social movements in the South however do not
always articulate their demands as expectations on “develop-
ment” or the money economy. The women that were central to
India’s Chipko movement in the 1970s and early 1980s, for
example, worked in subsistence agriculture in ways that have
been interpreted by ecofeminists as a critique of the prevailing
capitalist-, profit- and growth-oriented development paradigm
but the Chipko movement sought primarily “to preserve their
autonomous control over their subsistence base, their common
property resources: the land, water, forests, hills” (Mies and
Shiva, 1993: 303).
Post-development scholars have placed a great emphasis on
social movements and the alternative projects, practices and ima-
ginaries that they construct, arguing that a progressive future is not
to be forged through the construction of “development alterna-
tives, but in alternatives to development, that is, the rejection of
the entire paradigm altogether” (Escobar, 1995: 215). In post-
development literatures it is social movements that are crafting
these alternatives to development since their “anti-development
struggles may contribute to the formation of nuclei of problema-
tised social relations around which novel cultural productions
might emerge” (Escobar, 1995: 216). In a variety of ways, how-
ever, subaltern groups have appropriated “the rhetoric of develop-
ment” (Gupta, 2000: 16) and inflected it with meanings that
express their grievances, needs, interests and aspirations in order
to make claims on dominant groups, not just on states but also
NGOs and multilateral institutions (Nilsen, 2016). Various studies
both of the micropolitics of everyday development encounters
(Moore, 1998, 1999; Li, 1999; Gidwani, 2002; Shakya and
Rankin, 2008) and of large-scale social movements (Rangan,
2000; Nilsen, 2010; Vergara-Camus, 2014) have established that
subaltern groups do not always oppose or reject development in its
entirety, but rather often seek to negotiate and change the direction
and meaning of development. For Matthews (2017) post-develop-
ment scholars have failed to fully grapple with this question of the
desirability of development which has been all too easily dis-

missed simply as evidence of subaltern minds being colonised.
If development is seen simply as an apparatus of power, it
ends up disavowing people’s subjectivity (Kapoor, 2017) and
fails to acknowledge that “development is a desiring machine
. . . not only an apparatus of governmentality” (Escobar, 2008:
175). In the Lacanian/Deleuzean approach advocated by De
Vries (2007: 35), rather than being a rational, legal-bureaucratic
and hierarchical order, the development apparatus functions “as
a crazy, expansive machine, driven by its capacity to incorpo-
rate, refigure and reinvent all sorts of desires for development”.
Here, the focus is on the relations between the actual life-ways,
dreams and aspirations of local populations and the virtual
realm of development rhetoric, routines and procedures as the
desire for development “fills in a certain lack in its actualisa-
tion” (De Vries, 2007: 32). Paradoxically, the very idea of
development relies on the production of desires, which it
cannot fulfil and as such there is a certain “excess” in the
concept of development that is central to the functioning of the
development dispositif:
we have to scrutinise the disjuncture between the desire for

development and its banalisation in practice. . .. Foucauldian
post-structuralist theory fails to interrogate the very lack in
development itself, its inability to engage with the dreams and
fantasies it triggers. (De Vries, 2007: 32, 35)
In the 1990s, Latin America in particular witnessed the rise of

a plethora of social movements seeking to move beyond devel-
opmentalism and neoliberalism whilst today the region’s “post-
neoliberal” countries are widely celebrated as offering the most
visible alternative policies, programmes and mindsets which will
break the mould of development (Radcliffe, 2015). From the
Zapatistas, who seek non-violent ways to ignore or organise
around the state, to the rise of militant land movements such as
the Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil and a wave of struggles
unleashed by the privatisation of water and other basic services,
the region has become a key site for contestations of state-led
development (see Figure 5.8). The tension between top-down
neoliberal development and insurgent alternatives so characteristic
of the 1990s has to an extent, however, now been displaced by the
rise of Latin American countries that attempt to merge a strong
state with grassroots development models (Radcliffe, 2012). These
FIGURE 5.8 Social movements protest at Paulista Avenue in Sao Paulo,

Brazil on April 1st, 2016 against corruption within the coun-
try’s political parties. Photo by Al Ribeiro/Shutterstock.
moves to a more developmental state have been called forth by

electorates and widespread popular mobilisation against neoliber-
alism. Ecuador’s post-neoliberal development agenda, for exam-
ple, initially aimed to address the material and social exclusions
associated with neoliberal, capitalist development but in recent
years Petroamazonas (the state oil company) has been drilling for
oil in the Yasuní national park, an area of significant biodiversity.
Some of these countries initially attempted then to implement
“post-development” but found the practices, grammars and logics
of neoliberal governmentality hard to shift (Radcliffe, 2012: 248).
Buen Vivir (living well) has emerged as an influential socio-
political and identitarian concept (Altmann, 2015) lauded in
many circles as the realisation of post-development agendas and
widely taken up by social movements. The concept, which incor-
porates ideas of de-growth and a stern critique of extractivism, is
generally defined as forming part of the Andean indigenous
cosmology, representing a particular vision of society and relation-
ships with nature, entailing a radical questioning of colonialism,
the dominant development model and modern institutions (Acosta,
2008; Villalba, 2013). In Ecuador and Bolivia, it has recently
obtained a distinct symbolic, political and also legal status.
Scholars like Mignolo (2000) and Escobar (2007b, 2010)

have used the idea of decoloniality to understand and explain
some of the changes, transformations and future horizons in
Latin America. Decoloniality is not only a long-standing poli-
tical and epistemological movement aimed at liberation of (ex-)
colonised peoples from global coloniality but also a way of
thinking, knowing and doing. It is an approach that has been
particularly interested in Buen Vivir “due to the epistemological
and ontological rupture in relation to Western epistemologies
brought about by its emergence” (Florentin, 2016: 9). Due to
its indigenous roots and its philosophical and spiritual under-
pinnings, the concept of Buen Vivir is regarded as an alternative
to modernity and an ontological space from where alternative
epistemologies (to dominant Western ones) can be developed.
The primary premise here is that European colonisation and the
making of the capitalist world-system have been constitutive
elements of modernity in Latin America (Blaser, 2009), form-
ing part of a “coloniality matrix”, the application of which in
Latin America has resulted in a capitalist, Christian, colonial
and modern framework of society at the expense of alternative
world views and cultural models (such as Buen Vivir). This
does usefully draw attention to indigenous conceptions of
“development” and territoriality and the ways in which they
often conflict with those produced by states. Geographers have
often examined territoriality as the top-down assertion of power
over space but there is growing acknowledgement that territori-
ality is also produced from below by social movements (Rou-
tledge, 2015; Vasudevan, 2015), presenting overlapping (Agnew
and Oslender, 2013) and clashing (Zibechi, 2012) territorial
claims to that of the state and dominant institutions (Halvorsen,
2017). Thus, whilst it is important to examine the question of
how the state produces its space through territorialisation, as
Wainwright (2008: 27) does in noting the ways in which
colonial practices territorialised Mayan spaces and bound
together political identity with development and settlement, it
is also important to attend to indigenous counter-mappings to
colonial and post-colonial territorialisations of the Maya
(Peluso, 1995; Wainwright and Bryan, 2009).
The study of social movements is a somewhat neglected field
of research in African Studies. Not only does Africa remain
largely absent from social science research using a social move-
ment perspective but much of the theoretical literature focuses on
social and political movements in Europe, North and South
America and tends to neglect the African continent (Brandes and

Engels, 2011). With the notable exception of the South African
struggle against Apartheid, Africa has either been neglected by
theorists of non-violent political action against political repression
and injustice or been misread from a perspective of “western
. . .expectations and norms” (Larmer, 2010: 257). Typically, social
movements in Africa have been discussed in the framework of
“civil society” (Eckert, 2017) but de Waal and Ibreck (2013) argue
the case for specifying the relationship between social move-
ments and the character of African states. Beginning with the
so-called IMF bread riots and “austerity protests” in many parts
of Africa (and Latin America) in the 1980s that were subjected
to harsh stabilisation and structural adjustment measures, Africa
has long been a locus of protests against neoliberal models of
development. Structural adjustment, as Simone (2004b: 8)
notes, was never just about restructuring the economy but also
involved “the restructuring of the time and space of African
lives”. What followed these riots was the emergence of a new
discourse of entitlement that would ultimately crystallise in the
oppositional projects of the social movements that had consolidated
across much of the South by the early 2000s (Nilsen, 2015). South
Africa, which has heavily embraced neoliberal economic policies
(Walton and Seddon, 1994; Marais, 2011; Hart, 2014), has witnessed
significant mobilisation against neoliberalism since the early 2000s,
with grievances arising from “atomising neoliberal pressures” (Bond
and Mottiar, 2013: 284).
Writing about Johannesburg, Simone (2004a: 411) identifies
the ways in which residents themselves become “infrastructure”,
as the inner city “has been let go and forced to reweave its
connections with the larger world by making the most of its
limited means”, due to processes of fragmentation and state
abandonment. Today, poor people’s movements like the Landless
People’s Movement in Johannesburg, the Anti-Eviction Campaign
in Cape Town and Abahlali baseMjondolo (a shack dweller move-
ment in Durban and Cape Town) have mounted effective chal-
lenges to the post-Apartheid state and its neoliberal vision of
development. These protests, very much driven by grassroots
agency, are directed against the state’s failure to deliver basic
conditions associated with development (from access to flushing
toilets to decent housing and jobs) and not necessarily against the
notion of development itself (see Figure 5.9). They have often
been framed as “service delivery” protests (Alexander, 2010) yet
according to Pithouse (2011: 1), the “service delivery myth”
FIGURE 5.9 Residents of Hout Bay, South Africa protest on March 3rd,
2017 about their living conditions after broken promises to
provide adequate housing and sanitation. Photo by Charles
H B Mercer/Shutterstock.
presents people as “consumers or beneficiaries who just need to be

plugged into the grid of serviced life by a benevolent state” and
obscures the fact that these protests often represent “rebellion
against service delivery as it is currently practiced rather than a
demand for it to be speeded up”. For example, there are instances
where people living in informal settlements resist being relocated
to state housing because the housing on offer is not suitable or is
distant from employment opportunities or family and friends.
Here, protestors’ demands are less about “delivering already
determined services” and more about agitating for greater democ-
racy and for meaningful recognition of their citizenship (Mottiar,
2013: 605–606). The desire for “development” therefore is often
“tangled up with the desire for equality, dignity and redress”
(Matthews, 2017: 2658), something that has not always been
sufficiently acknowledged by post-development theorists. While
people “surely do want water and electricity for their own sake,
protests about service delivery are also about what access to water,
electricity, adequate sanitation and the like represent” (Matthews,
2017: 2658) which in the South African context is highly complex
and contentious.
CONCLUSIONS: SPACES OF SUBALTERN

STRUGGLE
This chapter has argued that a focus on states and on the different
geographies of resistance that emerge in response to state-led
discourses and imaginaries of “development” provides valuable
insights into how geopolitics intersects with development. Deleuze
and Guattari (2002 [1980]: 385) once wrote that “one of the
fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which
it reigns” and the governmentalisation of the “objects” of devel-
opment is key in tackling this task and in creating a “legible”
society to be governed (Scott, 1998). States themselves are under-
stood here as always emerging and becoming and therefore
incomplete but also as located and experienced at many sites and
across various scales, what Gupta (1995: 392) refers to as the
“translocality of state institutions”. The state is best approached then
not as a fixed and static entity and “not a thing, a system or subject”
but as an assemblage of powers and techniques, an ensemble of
discourses, rules and practices, as something to be discovered, as
contingent and evolving. States emerge as an imagined collective
actor partly through the “telling of stories of statehood and the
production of narrative accounts of state power” (Painter, 2006:
761) and development is a central part of the articulation of these
stories and narratives.
States can usefully be read in relation to how they are under-
stood, experienced and constituted through everyday spaces, prac-
tices and narrations. Infrastructures of various kinds have
historically helped create, destroy, expand or limit the contours of
the state (Meehan, 2014: 216) and represent important sites of
contestation where the meanings of development and the authority
of states have been contested. Infrastructure has also become a key
focus of SSDC where companies from an assortment of (re-)
emerging economies like China and India have delivered a number
of infrastructure-related projects (e.g. roads, airports, ports, rail-
ways, water, energy and housing) and are significantly impacting
on the infrastructural systems of recipient countries. Infrastructure is
central to China’s OBOR strategy in Africa too: this includes the
flagship project, a 290-mile railway from Nairobi to Mombasa (with
plans to extend that network into South Sudan, Uganda and Bur-
undi), a 470-mile electric railway running from Addis Ababa to
Djibouti port and the SEZ planned for an area south of the port city
of Bagamoyo in Tanzania which is regarded by some in China as a
“new Shenzhen” and that recalls the heady days of the TAZARA
railway project built during the age of Maoist, Third Worldist

cooperation (Van Mead, 2018).
Many states no longer even try to demonstrate concern with the
welfare of their populations and the symbolic efforts of discourses on
participatory governance “largely become performances deployed to
attract donor interest” (Simone, 2004b: 8). Development however
must enrol its subjects as always “becoming”, in order to continu-
ously legitimise the superiority of its ideology (Hart, 2002; Moore,
2005) and state-led development programmes and projects have been
key to that. Yet development has a “double life” (Paudel, 2016) in
that it always produces a subaltern relation between master (agents of
development) and follower (subjects in need of developing). Sub-
altern political possibilities are thus “always present and inherent in
the historical material processes of development” (Paudel, 2016:
1047), which means that its political outcomes are always complex
and usually unpredictable: projects intended to deflate rural rebellion,
for example, may stimulate new challenges to existing forms of
hegemony (Paudel, 2016: 1047).
Bordering practices and territorialisation also play an impor-
tant role in the process of becoming and seeing like a state and
attention to the “borders–development nexus” (Novak, 2016) and
to the ways in which territoriality is produced from the top down
(by states) and the bottom up (by social movements) is instructive
here given the recent proliferation of FTAs, SEZs and Growth
Corridors and other re-bordering strategies characteristic of con-
temporary development, whereby territorial jurisdictions are rede-
fined in regional, cross-border and/or sub-national terms.
Historically, development has often played a key role in the
process of laying claim to territory, particularly by states seeking
to control and consolidate both frontier spaces and populations in
the name of vanquishing rural “backwardness”. The resource–state
nexus (Bridge, 2014) is also highly significant here, particularly
given the rise of (re-)emerging economies like China, India and
Brazil where state-led developmentalisms (in which resources
figure prominently) return centre stage. It is necessary, however,
to avoid the tendency to subsume development interventions under
the imperatives of capital and/or the strategic responses of states
and to avoid overemphasising the role and power of states in
shaping development processes and outcomes (Novak, 2016). The
focus on enclosure, displacement and dispossession in the neo-
primitive accumulation literature on resource and land grabs, for
example, could usefully be complemented by more historically
grounded, place-specific ethnographic investigation and a focus on
the “micro-geopolitics” that shape how state authority is experi-

enced and encountered, involving an emphasis on politics (rather
than just economics); on local actors (rather than just investors
and their sovereign backers); and on “specific landscapes and
populations (rather than countries) on the receiving end of invest-
ment deals” (Dwyer, 2014: 386–387).
Duffield (2007a: viii) argues that “development has always
existed in relation to a state of exception”. Insecure, collapsed, weak
and fragile states provide the other against which model, steady states
in the periphery are imagined and constructed. This focus on state
weakness and fragility has its roots in colonial discourses about
governance and development but in a variety of other ways empire
has significantly shaped theories and practices of statehood in the
South. From the different colonial governmentalities and develop-
mentalisms and the resistances they engendered to the post-colonial
challenges of taking over and transforming colonial bureaucracies,
colonial constructions and spatialisations of the state have had
enduring consequences. As Manchanda (2017) has argued, colonial
spatialisations still structure the ways in which we experience and
think about the Afghan state today, which did not fully materialise as
a “principle for reading reality” or “scheme for intelligibility”,
despite the multiple interventions of USAID. The labels that are
variously applied to the Afghan state – “buffer”, “rogue” or “failed”
– along with the trope of the “frontier” which has played a formative
role in defining Afghanistan as a state and space are “essential
elements in a story of imperial sense-making” (Manchanda, 2017:
387) and part of Afghanistan’s long lineage of “constructed
deviance” (something many African states also have experience of).
Indeed, many of IR’s core concepts have been closely shaped by
empire and require provincialising and decolonisation. Although
sovereignty, for example, “carries the horrible stench of colonialism”
(Barker, 2005: 26) it has also been rearticulated to mean altogether
different things by indigenous peoples.
It is useful to retain the concern with the dynamics of power
and resistance that has been central to the radical critique of
development since the 1990s but modify it by understanding
power in less absolute and unitary terms than post-development
(Nilsen, 2016: 273). Although power is constantly exercised
through discourses of development, it is also constantly challenged
and consequently reshaped since “the power of development does
not simply mould the global South in its own Eurocentric image”
(Nilsen, 2016: 273). Resistance and insurgency is also not simply
an assertion of otherness that rejects development but “is a
practice of meaning- and claims-making that hinges on opposi-

tional appropriations of dominant symbols and idioms” (Nilsen,
2016: 273). As Mitchell (2002: 77) has argued, the effects of
policy and expertise do not arise from preformed designs imposed
from outside, nor from their own logic, but are wrought through
the ruptures and contradictions they effect in existing social,
political and ecological systems. These ruptures and contradictions
are highly significant for the study of the nexus between geopo-
litics and development. Following Mosse (2007) we might move
away from the approach taken in some critical treatments of
development discourse that privilege the products of public
policy process materialised as text or focus on the intended and
unintended effects of interventions on populations, regions and
communities, to instead explore the internal dynamics of develop-
ment’s “regimes of truth” and the political communities and
knowledges of development that they generate. How policy ideas,
models and frameworks travel across networks and assemblages at
various spatial scales is important here and, in this sense, anthro-
pological approaches and methodologies may offer a way forward
(Mosse, 2005, 2007).
As noted in previous chapters, the Third World has long been
constructed as a space of insurgency. Colonial and Cold War
forms of “anti-geopolitics” (Routledge, 2003) provided significant
challenges to modernisation discourses of development and repre-
sent important chapters in the history of rebellion and resistance.
In some ways social movements have built upon the legacies of
popular mobilisation and today represent important forms of
insurgency that continue to reject the normalising power of
(state-led) development. It is the tensions between the “discourses
of control” (articulated by states in a hegemonic inflection) and
“discourses of entitlement” (in an oppositional inflection as articu-
lated by social movements) that require further attention since the
encounter “between such discourses in and through conflicting
political projects in turn gives shape and form to development as
a trajectory of sociohistorical change” (Nilsen, 2016: 272). Social
movements have historically constituted important spaces of resis-
tance and destabilisation of the development project (cf. Escobar,
2008) but do not always seek an outright rejection of development
in its entirety, often instead seeking rather to negotiate and change
its meaning and direction (Nilsen, 2016).
The spaces of subaltern struggle and the imaginaries, dis-
courses and practices created by social movements can tell us a
great deal about the contested geopolitics of contemporary
development. As Silvey and Rankin (2010: 700–701) have argued,

“attention to the geographies and histories of these movements can
contribute to ongoing efforts to decolonise the political geographic
imaginaries of critical development studies”. In particular there is
a need to take the different imaginaries created by social move-
ments seriously as expressions of “the capacity to desire a differ-
ent kind of society that is not yet defined” (De Vries, 2007: 27).
Post-development has usefully called attention to the fact that such
movements have created valuable alternatives, crafting alternative
forms of collective ownership, for example, in the form of the
worker-run factories organised by the piqueteros (picketers) of the
Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados (Movement of Unem-
ployed Workers) in Argentina or the cooperatives of the MST in
Brazil. Social movements are skilfully linking localised struggles
to the dynamics of global power structures and mobilising to
achieve progressive changes across spatial scales but are also
playing a key role in democratising development and promoting
more participatory and deliberative forms of political decision-
making, for example, in and through the practices of movements
of the urban poor, such as the Comités de Tierra Urbana (Urban
Land Committees) in Venezuela and Abahlali baseMjondolo in
South Africa. There is also much we can learn from the study of
post-neoliberalisms (Elwood et al., 2016) although popular strug-
gles have often quickly been diminished and co-opted by states:
We also need to remember that, across space and time, elites

brought to power by the struggles of ordinary people have usually
moved very quickly to diminish these struggles by reducing
democracy from a day to day popular practice to the altogether
more anorexic conception of occasionally voting for one of the
elite groups contending for state power. (Pithouse, 2009: 3)
A case in point is the “Arab spring”, a wave of violent and

non-violent demonstrations, protests, riots, coups and civil wars in
North Africa that began in Tunisia, in December 2010 with the
Tunisian revolution but which spread to Libya, Egypt (see
Figure 5.10), Yemen, Syria and Bahrain where the regime was
either toppled or major uprisings and social violence occurred,
including civil wars or insurgencies. The Egyptian and Tunisian
protesters were able to generate “resonant collective action
frames” linking immediate material grievances with the demand
for systemic change and built upon more than a decade of protests
about material issues including water and bread shortages that had
FIGURE 5.10 Thousands of protesters flock to Cairo’s Tahrir Square,

Egypt on November 22nd, 2011 to protest against the
military junta that took power following the toppling of
President Mubarak. Photo by Hang Dinh/Shutterstock.
shaped “people’s consciousness and organisational capacities”

before the revolution (Ali, 2012: 16). In Egypt, as foreign aid
poured in, the uprisings were discursively reframed by the IFIs
within a pro-market discourse not as a revolt against several
decades of neoliberalism but rather as a movement against an
intrusive state that had obstructed the pursuit of individual self-
interest through the market and as due to the absence of capitalism
rather than its normal functioning (Ali, 2012: 16). Popular
demands to reclaim wealth, offer state support and services to the
poor, nationalise those industries that were privatised and place
restrictions on foreign investment, could be either disregarded or
portrayed as “anti-democratic” (Hanieh, 2011). Another example is
the Zapatista movement, hailed by post-development writers like
Esteva (1999: 173) as embodying a “radical democratic” struggle
focused not on “seizing state power” but on seeking to build
decentralised, autonomous spaces that can create “new political
relations”. For Žižek, the Zapatistas became not a counterpoint to
the state but its “shadowy double” (Žižek, 2012: 177) as its moralistic
protest now places it in an increasingly unthreatening, symbiotic
relationship with the state (and capital) (Kapoor, 2017) that could be
seen, not as posing a threat to NAFTA (Žižek, 2012: 178) – the

movement’s main objective at NAFTA’s inauguration in 1994 – but
as helping to facilitate NAFTA’s integration. The Zapatistas suc-
ceeded in gaining a degree of local autonomy but did “little to
transform wider sociopolitical power” (Kapoor, 2017: 2673).
The chapter has also argued that a focus on the spaces of
contragovernmentality, ungovernability, anarchical governance or
the borderlands of global politics is productive. One of the key
concerns of the counter-insurgency lobby has been that insurgen-
cies today no longer appear directed at “taking over a functioning
body politic, but dismembering or scavenging its carcass, or
contesting an ‘ungoverned space’” (Kilcullen, 2006a: 112). It is
to the contemporary scripting of failed states and other such
borderland spaces of ungovernability in the global South by the
US military (and their attempts to counter insurgency through aid
and development) that our attention now turns in chapter 6.
Chapter 6
The political
geographies of
contemporary US
foreign assistance
INTRODUCTION: RECONSTRUCTION AS WAR
D URING the announcement of his US Presidential candidacy in
2016, Donald Trump pledged to put “America first” and to “stop
sending foreign aid to countries that hate us and use that money to
rebuild our tunnels, roads, bridges and schools” (The Guardian,
November 13th, 2016). The US is the most generous global aid
donor in absolute terms, but relative to the size of the American
economy (total foreign assistance in 2017 amounted to approxi-
mately 1% of the total federal budget) it is less a case of “America
first” than “America twenty-second” (Konyndyk, 2017). Trump
suggested foreign aid was a waste of US tax dollars and subse-
quently proposed a budget prioritising “hard” vs “soft” power,
including a huge uplift in defence expenditure but also massive
cuts to current spending for US diplomacy and foreign aid. This
would have meant preserving US$3.1 billion in security aid to Israel
whilst cutting bilateral aid entirely to countries like Nicaragua and
closing USAID missions, reducing funding for the UN and reducing
spending on global health, humanitarian, refugee and international
disaster assistance. In June 2018 Congress pushed back however on
Trump’s proposed cuts and passed a budget bill that maintained
existing levels of funding of US$54.4 billion for foreign affairs
programmes (Saldinger and Igoe, 2018).
Just over a year previously, when Trump first proposed the aid
cuts as President, more than 120 retired US generals and admirals,
including some of the most prominent US military officers to
212 Contemporary US Foreign Assistance
serve in recent decades (such as General David Petraeus, the

former CIA director and commander of troops in Iraq and Afgha-
nistan), signed a letter urging Congress to set about elevating and
strengthening diplomacy and development alongside defence and
to fully fund them, since they were “critical to keeping America
safe”:
The State Department, USAID, Millennium Challenge Corpora-

tion, Peace Corps and other development agencies are critical to
preventing conflict and reducing the need to put our men and
women in uniform in harm’s way. . .. The military will lead the
fight against terrorism on the battlefield, but it needs strong
civilian partners in the battle against the drivers of extremism –
lack of opportunity, insecurity, injustice, and hopelessness.
(United States Global Leadership Coalition, 2017)
Whilst the US is certainly not the only Western donor

country considering cuts to its foreign aid budget in the context
of austerity and to suggest that the efficiency of aid could be
improved or that charity should begin at home, what is interest-
ing and significant about the proposed cuts is that so many senior
US military personnel were so heavily invested in defending US
aid (and its importance to US diplomacy and conflict resolution)
alongside defence. In order to secure aid funding, it is clearly
more effective to present ODA to the US Congress as a “strate-
gic defence system” that protects the homeland rather than as a
mechanism for poverty alleviation in the far-off countries of the
borderlands (Brainard, 2006). In recent decades and particularly
after shifts in the global security agenda following 9/11, aid has
more than ever become about the safeguarding and promotion of
donor interests (Woods, 2005). This chapter explores these recent
global trends in development assistance and in particular the
creeping securitisation and militarisation of contemporary aid,
with particular reference to US aid policy. Further, it considers
the recent revival of a long-dormant interest in development-
based counter-insurgency techniques ignited by US military set-
backs in Iraq and Afghanistan (in which lessons on pacification
were drawn from classical counter-insurgency doctrine) but also
the enrolment of USAID within its contemporary application.
The chapter is also concerned with the current configuration of
the US military assemblage in Africa and the contemporary
scripting of the continent as a “swamp of terror” infested with
Islamic terrorist insurgencies along with the use of civil affairs
Contemporary US Foreign Assistance 213
projects, reconstruction and capacity-building “security coopera-

tion” to counter them.
Threats to national security have often stoked a “geopolitics
of fear” that less developed areas will somehow “invade” or
“infect” donor countries, or that the South will “leak” into the
North, if adequate aid transfers are not provided. In this sense
states produce the threat of crises in order to authorise various
enforcement measures to eliminate them (Amoore, 2006; Sparke,
2006; Hyndman, 2007). As Hyndman (2009: 874) argues, public
anxiety “consequently sets in motion political demands for protec-
tion from often ill-defined, geographically diffuse threats: disease,
asylum seekers, transnational crime, terrorism, all ostensibly
linked through a global web of risk”. In this way the global
North attempts, quite unsuccessfully, to isolate itself from the
South by exerting control over migration and security matters
through a series of shared tactics (Amoore, 2006). Proponents of
American exceptionalism “paint the world as a hostile place, an
environment in which America must constantly strive to control
and eliminate evildoers before their malevolent acts hit the Amer-
ican homeland” (Holsti, 2011: 392). This “permanent aura of
exaggerated insecurity” (Holsti, 2011: 394) may also help create
and sustain the role and efforts of the US “to liberate others” and
guide them to the trappings of liberal democracy and capitalist
development. Aid is not just about maintaining the safety and
security of donors, however, it is also a tool that recipient govern-
ments use “to stabilize social relations at home and is often an
important part of domestic security arrangements” (Hyndman,
2009: 875). The question of whose security is being talked about
here is key, although within the liberal policy mainstream “one
finds surprisingly little serious interrogation of the concept of
security itself and of how, by whom and with what political
agendas security issues are framed and security functions are
exercised” (Luckham and Kirk, 2013: 2) (see also Buzan, 1983).
The US, the EU and other governments now regularly use the
rhetoric of “opposing terrorism” as a basis on which to allocate
aid whilst OECD rules governing how member states give aid
have been adjusted to include terrorism prevention and a range of
military activities (OECD DAC, 2003). The growing emphasis on
security and countering terrorism has also enabled several states in
the global South to attract and secure various forms of economic,
social and military assistance, as in the case of rotating members
of the UN Security Council (UNSC) who extract rents by trading
their votes for political or financial favours during the two years in
which they enjoy a boost to their diplomatic importance (Malone,

2000). Indeed, the US reportedly issued “promises of rich
rewards” to rotating members in exchange for their support
during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Renfrew, 2003)
and UNSC membership has a large positive effect on foreign aid
receipts, especially in years when the attention focused on the
UNSC was greatest (Kuziemo and Werker, 2006).
Aid agencies and NGOs are however concerned that the
increasing focus on security “will divert aid away from the poorest
countries and communities and weaken donors’ commitment to
poverty reduction” (Oxfam, 2005: 49) or that this trend represents
a “drifting back to the darkest days of the Cold War. . . when aid
was just as liable to prop up dictators and their regimes, as it was
to build hospitals or drill wells” (Christian Aid, 2004: 6). In this
view, the period between the Cold War and the War on Terror was
just a brief hiatus with US foreign aid policy seen as returning to
something like its Cold War past (Buzan, 2006). During the Cold
War, short-term foreign policy decisions driven by the State
Department strongly influenced the US aid programme (Zimmer-
man, 1993) and there have been concerns that such short-termism
in contemporary US foreign assistance priorities has resulted in
alliances with some rather unsavoury regimes, from Colombia to
Cameroon, in a manner reminiscent of the Cold War alliances
struck with anti-communist dictators such as Suharto in Indonesia,
Marcos in the Philippines and Mobutu in Zaire.
Although poverty reduction remains one of the stated goals of
US foreign assistance, the 2006 Foreign Assistance Framework
(FAF) defines the primary mission of US aid as helping to build
and sustain “democratic, well governed states that respond to the
needs of their people” and encouraging them to “conduct them-
selves responsibly in the international system” (United States
Department of State, 2017). The increasing inclusion of USAID
in the national-security structure along with its ever more ambi-
tious ventures into the domestic security environments of recipient
countries suggests that it has increasingly become a quasi-security
agency concerned with crafting particular kinds of states and
promoting political order and stability as a means of enabling
economic “take-off”. These long-standing geopolitical priorities
related to the promotion of security, democracy and liberal peace
have increasingly overlapped and intersected with the neoliberal
agenda around aid effectiveness (Duffield, 2008) but also with
wider projects of neoliberalisation that involve making countries
“safe” for the passage of US capitalism and creating opportunities
for US companies. USAID’s work is very much about the roll-out

of neoliberalism (Essex, 2013) where aid is allocated to countries
seen to have appropriately neoliberal state institutions or to have
sufficiently committed to the requisite neoliberal reform packages.
Aid is usually taken to refer to “all resources, physical goods,
skills and technical know-how, financial grants (gifts) or loans (at
concessional rates) – transferred by donors to recipients” (Riddell,
2007: 17). Foreign aid is not, however, a story featuring only
nation states as the actors and one-way coherent flows of money
as the objects of analysis (Roberts, 2014) and is about more than
just resource transfers since aid also represents “a dynamic bundle
of geographical relationships at the intersection of war, neoliber-
alism, nature and fear” (Hyndman, 2009: 867). It is important
therefore to consider the various ways in which US geopolitical
interests intersect with geoeconomic strategies through pro-
grammes of foreign aid and development. One useful approach to
doing this that will be drawn upon here is to conceptualise aid as a
set of complex networks, networked elements or assemblages,
constituted by flows of capital, knowledge, influence, practices,
material objects and people (Roberts, 2014). Key network or
assemblage elements in US foreign assistance for development
include various and multiple government agencies, contractors
(firms of many different kinds, NGOs and individuals, including
consultants), industry organisations and lobbyists, and actual con-
tracts, sub-contracts, grants and procurements (Roberts, 2014).
Following interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has
undertaken large-scale assistance programmes intended to stabilise
both countries, rehabilitate their economic infrastructure and intro-
duce representative government, among other objectives. Such
reconstruction efforts are in part intended to enhance political
stability and secure and inoculate against the contagion of insur-
gency but also to make Iraq and Afghanistan safe for the advance
of Western capitalism. In Afghanistan, aid and development inter-
ventions have often sought to promote the advance of neoliberal-
ism and to discipline the population “into their peripheral position
within the global neoliberal economic structure through moderni-
zation and capital-driven privatization” (Fluri, 2009: 987). The
American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq indicate a significant
departure from previous models of geopolitical engagement (Dahl-
man, 2011) in that instead of upholding a threatened state or
rebuilding a failing one, the model of breaking and then remaking
the state suggests a different model of militarised power, that of
“reconstruction as war” (Dahlman, 2011; Kirsch and Flint, 2011).
Post-war reconstruction constitutes an important and fertile arena

for pursuing a critical analysis of geopolitics but also for under-
standing the intertwining of geopolitics and development (see
Figure 6.1).
As noted in chapters 3 and 4, the engagement of the US
military in the provision of aid has a long history. Reconstruction
activities were institutionalised within the US military during World
War II in response to the devastation of European infrastructure and
FIGURE 6.1 “How neocolonialism works” by Andy Singer. http://www.

andysinger.com
additionally became a prominent tool in Western warfare, from the

decolonisation struggles to Vietnam, and most recently in Iraq and
Afghanistan. This militarisation of development, where humanitar-
ian language has increasingly been recruited to justify military
operations and where military actors (and technologies like drones
etc.) are increasingly involved in the design and delivery of foreign
assistance, embeds processes of reconstruction within combat bri-
gades and subsumes post-war tasks as explicit tactics for countering
an insurgency (Dahlman, 2011). Here, as Patrick and Brown (2007)
argue, the military is regarded as more “nimble” than civilian
agencies in reconstruction and development efforts and has the
ability to force projects but “often remains overly concerned with
narrow, short-term security interests rather than transformational
development” (Essex, 2013: 120). As a result of focusing too
heavily on security as understood by the DoD and State Depart-
ment, the economic and political objectives that previously formed
the core of USAID strategies “have been subsumed within immedi-
ate strategic and military concerns that only contingently support
development progress, and may even undermine it rather than
laying the foundations for accountable governance and sustainable
development” (Essex, 2008: 1633).
In Iraq and Afghanistan the DoD has operated schemes like
the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP), which
has provided immediate reconstruction and humanitarian assis-
tance at the local level to support the work of US military
commanders, providing them with on the ground “walking around
money” intended to win hearts and minds and buy short-term local
support through small-grant funding for infrastructure projects
(e.g. for roads, wells, sanitation, railways and schools) and agri-
cultural support or the provision of micro-grants to businesses
(Tarnoff, 2009). Here, as Gilbert (2015) argues, aid money (e.g.
micro-finance) becomes a “weapons system”, an “entrepreneurial
way of war” that promotes marketisation and neoliberalism. The
US has also deployed Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs)
bringing together small teams of military and civilian agencies to
address how the lack of security and the lack of reconstruction
feed into each other to exacerbate instability. Overwhelmingly
military in scope and operation (Patrick and Brown, 2007), PRTs
typically consist of 80–100 soldiers, under the direct command of
a military officer and are focused heavily on force protection and
security assistance alongside a handful of individual representa-
tives from the Department of State, USAID and the Department of
Agriculture (USDA). The DoD has also deployed Business Task
Forces to help stimulate private sector growth and investment in

both Iraq and Afghanistan (Berteau et al., 2010). In Africa, the US
military is increasingly making use of related “civil affairs”
operations (United States Army, 2006) that attempt to foreground
development and are engineered to improve US visibility, access
and influence with foreign military and civilian counterparts but
also to promote the security and foreign policy interests of the US
in the “ungoverned” spaces of the continent (Bachman, 2014,
2017).
In 1980 the total amount of US foreign economic and military
aid stood at US$9.69 billion (of which US$2.12 billion was
military) with just under half (US$4.06 billion) coming from
USAID (United States Census Bureau, 2012b). By 2017 this total
had reached US$45.21 billion (United States Department of State,
2018). For the most part, aid is disbursed by the DoD, USAID and
the State Department along with a slew of other agencies (includ-
ing the Peace Corps, the US Export-Import Bank, the Department
of Homeland Security, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the
US-African Development Foundation and the USDA). In 2017,
just under a third of all US aid (US$14.5 billion) was spent on
peace and security. New security imperatives have increased flows
of US foreign assistance to countries deemed to be of geostrategic
importance and since 9/11 the revised list of countries that receive
US military aid now includes several previously ineligible states,
including Armenia, Azerbaijan, India, Pakistan and Tajikistan.
Pakistan went from being a nuclear pariah state, ruled by an
unelected military dictator and languishing on the world aid black-
list, to America’s closest ally in the global War on Terror, receiv-
ing some US$3.5 billion in 2011 (Ali, 2016), up from just under
US$88.5 million in 2000. In recent years, however, the US has
substantially cut aid to the country and in 2017 the combined total
for economic, development and security assistance was US$376.35
million (United States Department of State, 2018). In January 2018
President Trump announced further cuts in security assistance to the
country, claiming it had not done enough to counter terrorism and
that the US had “foolishly given Pakistan more than US$33 billion
in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies
and deceit” (quoted in Zakaria, 2018).
In addition to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the list of major
recipients includes seven African countries (Nigeria, Ethiopia,
Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique and Zambia) together
with long-standing regional partners like Jordan and Israel. US
aid flows to Africa are increasingly focused on countering the rise
of Islamic insurgencies there and the US military assemblage on

the continent has been considerably expanded in recent years. US
assistance in Africa is of course not just about countering terror-
ism but also involves geoeconomic concerns with the security of
US access to hydrocarbon resources and the potential commercial
opportunities for US firms. The 2017 US National Security Strat-
egy noted that “Africa contains many of the world’s fastest
growing economies, which represent potential new markets for
US goods and services” (United States, 2017: 52), even though
attempts to realise this potential have only been backed by
relatively modest investment from the US Export-Import Bank
(of about US$6.6 billion since 2009) (Ismail, 2018).
The geographies of US foreign assistance reflect the recent
prioritisation of conflict zones where the US has been active (such
as Iraq and Afghanistan) and the emerging centrality of Africa to
American foreign policy priorities concerning global security and
stability but also underline the continuing importance of major
historical recipients like Israel, Egypt and Jordan. Israel alone
receives about US$3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year
and is both the largest annual recipient of direct US economic and
military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since
World War II, with total cumulative US aid between 1949 and
2010 estimated at US$109 billion (Sharp, 2010). US Cold War
foreign policy was geared towards supporting the development of
oil-producing countries, maintaining a neutral stance in the Arab–
Israeli conflict while supporting Israel’s security, and preventing
Soviet influence from gaining a foothold in Iran and Turkey. The
“special relationship” between the two countries is based around
the perception of shared strategic interests (including oil in the
Middle East and North Africa), but also on Israel’s democratic
status, the idea of Israel as “Western” and the influence of the
Jewish lobby in the US (Riech, 1996). In December 2017 the US
Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, warned General Assembly
members not to vote against the US decision to recognise Jerusa-
lem as Israel’s capital and that the US “would be taking names” to
learn which of its supposed allies was really on its side and still
deserving of US assistance (Novak, 2017).
The chapter is divided into four main parts. The first traces the
emergence of the “security–development” nexus and the (re)ima-
gining of underdevelopment as “dangerous” and explores the
intrinsic relationship between development, security and contain-
ment. The next section then investigates the role of USAID and
the ways in which the agency seeks to advance neoliberalisation.
The chapter then moves on to consider the recent rediscovery of

development-based counter-insurgency techniques and the enrol-
ment of USAID within this before moving on to examine the
current configuration of the US military assemblage in Africa and
US attempts to counter Islamic insurgency there.
THE SECURITISATION OF DEVELOPMENT

Rather than development leading to international security. . .
development is part of a deepening and ultimately unwin-
nable global civil war. This war is not being fought
between armies, it is embodied in the developmental agen-
cies, relations and networks that seek to proselytize the
attitudes and behaviour that liberal states deem to reflect
acceptable as opposed to unacceptable ways of life. . ..
From communism to terrorism, through its marginalizing
effects and its ability to foster resentment and alienation
among common folk, poverty has been monotonously redis-
covered as a recruiting ground for the moving feast of
strategic threats that constantly menaces the liberal order.
(Duffield, 2010a: 57, 61)
With its promise of redemption through making full and whole-

some what would otherwise remain incomplete (Duffield, 2008),
development has arguably functioned as a technology of security
since the dawn of industrial capitalism (Cowen and Shenton,
1996). The link between development and security is not particu-
larly new (for some it is even intrinsic to modernity) (Watts, 1995)
but since the end of the Cold War, as Duffield (2008, 2010a)
argues, there has been a rediscovery of poverty as recruiting
ground for the strategic threats “menacing the liberal order”, this
time terrorism rather than communism. There has also been
greater recognition of the interdependence between poverty in the
global South and insecurity in the global North and consequently a
“renewed emphasis on the need for social cohesion at home while,
at the same time, urging a fresh wave of intervention abroad to
reconstruct weak and fragile states, or remove rogue ones” (Duf-
field, 2008: 162). This post-Cold War merging of developmental-
ism and securitisation has been legitimised in part by the blending
of discourses of humanitarianism and human security with neo-
colonial metaphors of tutelage and protection (Doty, 1996) and is
suffused by ideas of Western economic and political liberalism.
This “development–security nexus” can itself be understood as a

dispositif or “constellation of institutions, practices, and beliefs
that create conditions of possibility within a particular field”
(Slater, 2008: 248). It constitutes a field of development and
security actors, aid agencies and professional networks, complete
with their own forms of subjectivity, that call forth the conditions
of need and insecurity to which they seek to provide solutions
(Duffield, 2008, 2009).
For Duffield (2008: 162), what is at stake here is the West’s
ability to contain and manage international poverty and the perva-
sive security risks of globalisation’s “unruly borderlands” while
maintaining the ability of mass society to live and consume
beyond its means. In the post-Cold War period it is now common-
place for policymakers to assert that development and security are
interconnected and that you cannot have one without the other but
Duffield (2008) argues this remains incomplete without the third
category of containment, including all the interventions and tech-
nologies that seek to restrict or manage the circulation of “incom-
plete” or “threatening” life. As such, “an expanded nexus would
add the proviso that you cannot have development or security
without containing the mobility of underdeveloped life” (Duffield,
2008: 146). Following decolonisation, the direction and perception
of global migration changed (Balibar, 1991) from a North-to-
South dynamic positively associated with exploration, escape and
fortune, to a South-to-North dynamic with various negative con-
notations (Balibar, 1991). While development has a long history as
a strategic response to various threats (including those posed by
migration), this role is still not widely appreciated since as a
practical technology of security, development exists in the here
and now and its benefits are always cast as a future yet to be
realised (Easterly, 2002; Duffield, 2008). It is in this context and in
response to the crisis of containment, especially as a means of
“capturing and securing non-insured life”, that the underdeveloped
state “has once again moved to the centre of development policy”
(Duffield, 2008: 160). Rather than focus on the reasons why poverty
persists, however, it is important to examine the political function
that its constant rediscovery serves – especially how it validates and
revitalises a “liberal will to govern” (Duffield, 2010a: 61).
Humanitarian and development agencies have also been
brought together with political and military actors through the
UN’s “multidimensional integrated stabilisation missions” currently
operating in places like Mali and the Central African Republic.
These integrated missions represent a new kind of humanitarianism
which demands that international enforcement (rather than mechan-

isms of entitlement or redistribution, for example) be mobilised
regardless of the consent of its “recipient” populations (Amar,
2012). Contemporary Western humanitarian intervention, state-
building and development initiatives differ significantly from pre-
vious imperialisms then in “being conducted in the name of the
international community”, including not only powerful states but
also the “entire panoply of international organisations, international
financial institutions, aid agencies and global civil society organisa-
tions” (Luckham and Kirk, 2013: 4). Besides conflict resolution, the
development–security nexus was initially mainly concerned with
practical issues relating to the transition from humanitarian relief to
sustainable development but through the medium of integrated
missions eventually became integral to much more ambitious and
complex programmes of disarmament, institutional reform, capacity-
building, economic development, and societal and state reconstruc-
tion. In the UK, under the New Labour government (1997–2010)
much of this effort was focused on the “securitisation” of Africa, as
dealings with the continent moved from the realm of development
and humanitarianism into one of “risk/fear/threat” (Abrahamsen,
2004: 677). Some of the literature on the “security–development”
nexus has, however, yet to sufficiently address how the increasing
focus on securitising development has been “adapted into a variety of
national/institutional policy settings” (Friis, 2014: 6). This has at
times “overplayed the coherence of the securitisation project and
underestimated the conflicts and tensions between the major political,
military and humanitarian players in global and national security
marketplaces” (Luckham and Kirk, 2013: 4) (cf. Selby, 2013).
Despite not specifically writing on themes of colonialism or
development (Stoler, 1995), Foucault’s work on biopolitics (Fou-
cault, 1975–76, 1976, 1977–78) is very useful in understanding
the intrinsic relationship between development, security and con-
tainment because of the way it drew attention to the liberal idea of
“government of the population and the imperatives that are
derived from such an idea” (Dean, 1999: 113). Since the begin-
nings of modernity, “a liberal rationality of government has
always taken the protection and betterment of the essential pro-
cesses of life associated with population, economy and society as
its object” (Duffield, 2008: 145). Today the effectiveness of
modern states is now typically defined in terms of how well they
support the life and well-being of their populations. Typically,
development experiences non-Western peoples as somehow
incomplete or lacking in the essentials for a proper existence
(Mehta, 1999; Duffield, 2008) including a lack of education, an

absence of capacity, the inability to save properly or the need for
greater gender awareness, all absences that mean life cannot be
lived properly. As a response to this experience of inadequacy,
development seeks to provide solutions in the form of a moral or
educative trusteeship and the rule of experts (Mitchell, 2002),
aiming to bring incomplete or underdeveloped life to its full
potential and to make it wholesome through education and
empowerment (Duffield, 2008, 2010a). During decolonisation,
development was “reconfigured as an inter-state relation of gov-
ernance”; it moved from the colonial bureaucracy into the institu-
tions of external expertise arranged “to help and support the newly
discovered underdeveloped state” (Duffield, 2008: 148).
Through this “will to improve” (Li, 2007) and the idea of
bettering non-Western peoples and spaces through changing beha-
viour and attitudes, development has always been a way of
governing others, functioning as a liberal technology of security
(Duffield, 2008). This liberal way of development (Duffield, 2008,
2010a) privileges local and adaptive self-reliance and has histori-
cally favoured the encouragement of community self-reliance and
local entrepreneurship based upon the small-scale ownership of
land or property (Cowen and Shenton, 1996: 266–267), today
recognisable as “sustainable development” (Duffield, 2008: 148)
and visible, for example, in a significant recent proliferation of
land titling programmes in Africa. Development has thus long
served as a kind of “educative trusteeship” (Duffield, 2008: 148)
and there are clear lines of continuity between its colonial and
post-colonial histories. The Millennium Villages Project (2004–
15) conceived by Jeffrey Sachs has received a great deal of
attention in recent years as a demonstration project that claimed
to use an integrated approach to rural development to achieve the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) but the design of devel-
opment around demonstrative village-level interventions can be
traced back to the Baptist “free villages” of 1830s Jamaica (Hall,
2002: 120–139). In this sense, following Duffield, it is possible to
trace a clear continuity from colonial missionary projects right
through to today’s focus on human security and integrated and
sustainable development, although he makes an important distinc-
tion between this “liberal way of development” and the state-led
modernisation and economic catch-up strategies pursued in the
early post-colonial period.
Two factors distinguish the configuration of the development–
security nexus today (Duffield, 2010a): the global outlawing of
spontaneous or undocumented migration and the shift in the focus

of security from states to the people living within them. There
have “never been so many frontiers, checkpoints or restrictions for
undocumented migrants” (Duffield, 2010a: 62) and this trend has
been accompanied by the growing surveillance and policing of all
forms of international circulation. While the geopolitics of border
control identifies and seeks to neutralise the threat of unmanaged
migration, Duffield argues that the biopolitics of development,
“through self-reliance, basic needs and community support, seeks
to manage in its natural habitat the risks posed by underdeveloped
life” (Duffield, 2010a: 63). There has also been a “biopolitical turn
within aid policy” (Duffield, 2010a: 55) where policy discourse
now conceives development and underdevelopment biopolitically
or in terms of how life is to be supported and maintained, within
what limits and level of need people are required and expected to
live, rather than according to economic and state-based models.
As a result of these trends, the soft power of development has
found a new premium as a technology of security and counter-
insurgency.
REINVENTING USAID: THE SECURITY–

ECONOMY NEXUS
USAID’s significance as a tool of US foreign policy is certainly
not new. In the 1980s, during the Reagan administration’s aggres-
sive strategy of containment in Ethiopia, for example, USAID
officials used disaster relief (over US$500 million and 800,000
tons of food) as an instrument to weaken Mengistu Haile Mar-
iam’s socialist government, to discredit its troubled feeding pro-
gramme and to discourage Ethiopian land reform plans that
involved the resettlement of people onto collective farms (Poster,
2012). Despite this and being one of the more deeply internatio-
nalised institutions within the US state, relatively scant attention
has been paid to the logics and frameworks that shape USAID’s
inner workings and external relations (Essex, 2013; Bhungalia,
2016). USAID initially floundered during the post-Cold War years
(see Figure 6.2) as development duties splintered among a dozen
federal departments and as successive administrations sidelined it.
However, particularly since the Bush administration (2001–09)
which played a key role in reshaping US aid policy (Lancaster,
2008), development has become a central plank of US national
security and a pillar of US foreign and economic policy, receiving
FIGURE 6.2 American Marines guarding food aid distribution in Moga-

dishu during “Operation Restore Hope”. In December 1992
US Marines landed near Mogadishu ahead of a UN peace-
keeping force sent to restore order and safeguard relief sup-
plies. The US forces withdrew in 1993 following the debacle of
the infamous “Black Hawk Down” battle. Photo by Paul Lowe,
Panos Pictures.
extensive treatment in the 2002 and 2006 National Security

Strategy (NSS) (United States, 2002, 2006).
As a “soft power” asset USAID was more firmly placed inside
the State Department in 2006, losing its policy division in the process
and with its human resources shrinking dramatically. In 1980,
USAID had 4,058 permanent American employees but by 2008 the
number had dropped by 45% to 2,200, causing “a dramatic loss of
expertise” (Atwood, McPherson and Natsios, 2008: 127) as there
were just six engineers and sixteen agricultural experts when “it had
hundreds in the 1980s” (Natsios, 2010: 25). USAID remained a
relatively minor player in foreign policy, however, being framed as
a crucial but definitely subsidiary partner in the “3 D’s” approach
(defence, diplomacy, and development) and increasingly operating in
the shadow of the DoD (Hart, 2010; Roberts, 2012), its operations
increasingly guided by military strategy, specifically counter-insur-
gency (Bachmann, 2010: Hodge, 2011). Today, USAID regularly
draws direct connections between economic liberalisation, develop-
ment progress and US national security, with developing states
understood as sources of, and focal points for combating, global

terrorism, although interest in and strategising around development
policy has considerably broadened out to include multiple federal
agencies and departments beyond USAID.
In 2006 there were more than 40 US government agencies
involved in giving “foreign aid” of some kind (Moss, Roodham
and Standley, 2005) and an interagency budgeting and strategy
process has subsequently emerged focused on a more “compre-
hensive approach to managing aid, built around country-based
strategies and long-term development planning” (Essex, 2013:
32). The DoD in particular has taken a more active and expansive
role in development policy and strategy, with its share of ODA
rising from 3.5% in 1998 to 22% in 2013 (Charny, 2013). The
Pentagon’s involvement in ODA-eligible activities spans several
distinct activities and challenges, “from providing humanitarian
relief to training and equipping border and customs services, and
from HIV/AIDS programmes for foreign militaries to technical
assistance aimed at drug interdiction and counter-narcotics pro-
grammes” (Patrick and Brown, 2007: 4). The DoD is increasingly
preoccupied with addressing the roots of instability and extremism
in weak and failing states and preventing their collapse into
conflict (Patrick and Brown, 2007), inspiring programmes to
build counterterrorism capabilities in “developing countries” and
including several activities that might in principle be undertaken
by the State Department, USAID and other civilian actors.
In 2004 USAID outlined a programme designed to redefine
the objectives of its foreign aid programmes, reassert the connec-
tions between development, economic openness and security, and
re-establish the relevance of both the agency and foreign assis-
tance within US foreign policy (Essex, 2013: 90). This strategy
(USAID, 2004) laid out “five core operational goals” for the
agency and US development assistance which included: “promot-
ing transformational development”; “strengthening fragile states”;
“providing humanitarian relief”; “supporting US geostrategic
interests”; and “mitigating global and transnational ills” (USAID,
2004: 5). For USAID (2004: 13) the world of developing states
can be subdivided into “relatively stable developing countries”
(where the basis for political will and development progress
already exists and must be maintained or enlarged) and “fragile
states” (where basic governance and stability are perilous and
where it remains questionable whether aid can adequately promote
development progress) (Essex, 2013: 117). As it has done for
many years, USAID plays a normative role here in scripting
exactly what form these states should take. The level of deserved-
ness is determined by “criteria of need, commitment by the host
government and/or nongovernmental actors to reform, feasibility
of achieving results, and foreign policy importance” (USAID,
2004: 20). USAID’s Fragile States Strategy has also attempted to
categorise state fragility as “failing”, “failed” and “recovering
from conflict” (USAID, 2005).
The Foreign Assistance Framework (FAF) agreed in 2006
which guides foreign aid allocation is similarly built around a
taxonomy of developing states that reconfigures aid criteria of
need and deservedness and represents the emergence of what
Essex (2008: 1634) calls a new “statist cartography of develop-
ment” within and through the US state based on free market
capitalism and a narrowly defined conception of security. Here
deservedness and development remain “properties of states”
(Essex, 2013: 124) in an approach that “only contingently
addresses underdevelopment” (124). USAID has played a leading
role in constructing this taxonomy, in which the states most likely
to receive development assistance are those that are strategic
relative to US economic and security interests, but this also
“hinges on the particularity of the neoliberal state’s forms and
functions” (Essex, 2013: 118) – formal multiparty democratic
elections, liberalised economic governance that facilitates capital
mobility and security reforms that enhance the investment climate
and promote law and order. During the Cold War USAID was
centrally involved in US counter-insurgency efforts abroad and the
pursuit of modernisation but in recent years has become increas-
ingly embroiled in the machinations of the global neoliberal roll-
out (Essex, 2013: 118). Through USAID there is an increasingly
neoliberalised basis for aid allocation (urging societies to develop
in accordance with appropriately neoliberal state institutions) that
also aligns with US geopolitical objectives post-9/11. USAID’s
development interventions have thus sought to promote US geo-
political and security interests abroad while expanding capitalist
markets across the Global South.
Enduring geopolitical concerns in Washington with containing
security threats and nation building have increasingly been
rethought and remade from the Cold War onward through forms
of geoeconomics that emphasise global engagement, investment
and partnering (Essex, 2013), all of them in turn tied to the
economic forces, visions, practices and partnerships of market-led
globalisation (Sparke, 2016). Essex (2013: 4–5) argues that we
should not see this however as “a crude chronological progression
from the geopolitics of Cold War developmentalism to the geoe-

conomic rhetoric of ‘borderlessness’ that marks contemporary
neoliberal globalisation” and notes the error in any simplistic
geographical partitioning of geopolitical and geoeconomic space
(Sparke, 2016). Glassman (2018: 412) notes that “geopolitical
economy” has frequently been more a term than a concept but if
geopolitical and geoeconomic logics of power are grasped dialec-
tically it has the potential to bring to the fore “specific – and
sometimes unduly neglected – aspects of development dynamics”.
One way to do this is to examine how US geopolitical interests
intersect with geoeconomic strategies, or the “security–economy
nexus” (Coleman, 2005), in shaping American bilateral assistance,
considering the inter-articulation of ideational and material. Only
through close attention “to the evolution and circulation of geos-
trategic discourses in concert with the formation and exercise of
political and economic decision-making powers. . . can the spatial
assumptions and projects underlying and animating USAID be
understood in their full geostrategic importance” (Essex, 2013: 18)
A key element of the security–economy nexus shaping the
delivery of US bilateral assistance is the powerful contracting
assemblage at its heart which has seen a significant proliferation
of private development assistance providers in USAID’s work
(Roberts, 2012, 2014). In the period 2000–08 outsourcing at
USAID grew 690% (Roberts, 2014) whilst the development con-
tracting industry now handles more than US$12 billion a year
from USAID (Roberts, 2014: 1035), most of which goes to for-
profit US firms, some of which have origins in the Cold War and
have grown to be large corporations. Poised to deliver on the
promises of science and social science to execute development
efficiently, the firms embodied a distinctive Cold War US liberal
internationalism and an optimism about development that reflected
the times and places of their origins (Wolfe, 2013). Roberts (2014)
argues that the industry of contracting firms and the development
contracting “market” coevolved and co-constitute one another and
both lie at the centre of a “development–industrial complex assem-
blage” that has expanded dramatically in recent years. This contract-
ing assemblage has a specific regional geography centred on the
Beltway region in the greater Washington, DC area, a classic
agglomeration that is home to many US development contractor
firms (Roberts, 2014) but also includes a range of institutions that
sustain and are sustained by USAID’s contractor networks such as
trade associations, lobbying groups, policy think tanks, research
groups, professional societies and clubs, and information brokers of
various types (Roberts, 2012). American for-profit firms have been

major recipients of USAID funding and in a 2011 speech Rajiv Shah,
Obama’s USAID administrator, drew parallels between USAID’s
reliance on these firms and Eisenhower’s warnings about a military–
industrial complex, claiming that USAID was “no longer satisfied
with writing big checks to big contractors and calling it develop-
ment” and that development firms were more interested in keeping
themselves in business than seeing countries graduate from the need
for aid (Shah cited in Norris, 2012).
With the growing emphasis on security sector reform,
whereby development resources are used to train and equip
police in what is considered to be an appropriate democratic
fashion, USAID has continued its historical focus on police train-
ing programmes and the work of the OPS (see chapter 4) to
improve the capabilities of civilian police and paramilitary forces
through “training, technical assistance and equipment”, justified as
long-term “institution building”. The notion of using an organisa-
tion such as USAID to improve the counterterrorist capacity of
Africa’s police forces in the pursuit of US national security is,
however, seriously flawed (Hills, 2006: 631). USAID’s acceptance
of a security-oriented remit ensures that the state remains its
referent point, for development as for security, thus “making a
mockery of its stated commitment to individual security, local
ownership and similar developmental orthodoxies” (Hills, 2006:
642). USAID’s concern with the domestic politics, stability and
democracy of recipient states has also inevitably led to accusations
of meddling and interference. In 2014, shortly after civil society
activists demonstrated in Nairobi to protest against alleged gov-
ernment corruption, lack of safety in public places, high unem-
ployment and poverty, the Kenyan government claimed to have
evidence that USAID had been trying to “destabilise” the country
by financing anti-government demonstrations (BBC, 2014). In
Cuba USAID has been accused of political subversion and essen-
tially becoming a front for a carefully planned US intelligence
operation (The Guardian, April 3rd 2014), using social media to
wage cyber warfare against countries which do not abide by
Washington’s demands. As part of its “democracy promotion”
programme, USAID was accused of using a Twitter-like service
called “ZunZeo” to mobilise demonstrations that might trigger a
“Cuban Spring”. In addition to claims that it has sponsored and
encouraged insurgencies in the name of democracy, USAID has
also very much returned to its long-standing entanglement with
countering them.
THE REVIVAL OF DEVELOPMENT-BASED

COUNTER-INSURGENCY
At the end of the 1960s, JFK’s “decade of development”, some of
those involved in US technical assistance programmes of moder-
nisation were advocating an integrated “systems” framework for
the execution of rural planning. Earl Kulp’s (1970) Rural Devel-
opment Planning: Systems Analysis and Working Method provided
such an approach, tried by the Kenyan state amongst others
(Chege, 1972), and alongside sections dedicated to planning in
urban and rural spaces there is a chapter on basic counter-
insurgency principles. Kulp, a management consultant with
experience in US government rural development programmes in
Africa and Asia and later a member of the US Supreme Court,
noted that “rural development includes the paramilitary and civil
aspects of counterinsurgency, the environment and the planning
techniques of which are basically the same” (Kulp, 1970: 15). In
the early 1970s and for the US, they were the same and in a range
of contexts such as Vietnam, Palestine or Afghanistan, USAID has
increasingly practiced development as a form of governmentality,
its interventions becoming ever more concerned with the govern-
ment and management of restless rural populations and the
restoration of political order and stability (Attewell, 2017). Afgha-
nistan in particular has long served as a crucible where various
techniques for pacifying restless populations have been developed,
tested and refined (McCoy, 2009). Over time, USAID has
remained responsible for neutralising and dispelling perceived
threats in their place of origin, becoming the humanitarian and
developmental side to US interventionism. As a result, USAID has
increasingly waged “liberal” warfare in battlespaces such as Iraq
and Afghanistan but also been involved (alongside the DoD) in
programmes like Plan Colombia, a counter-insurgency strategy
devised in 1999 and framed as a crackdown on drugs.
In contrast to conventional warfare which seeks to control
territory and destroy the opposing military, counter-insurgency is
“population centric” in seeking to control society and targeting the
“capillary” level of social relations (Parenti, 2011: 23). This
“population centric” focus was one of the main recommendations
of the expanded research programme on counter-insurgency
funded by the RAND corporation in 1962, following the outbreak
of communist-inspired nationalist insurgencies in the wake of
decolonisation. RAND researchers focused on the issue of the
insurgents’ need for popular support and on the problems of
modernisation, with counter-insurgency seen as providing the

people with security from predations by states, insurgents and the
negative consequences of development (Hosmer and Crane, 2006).
As insurgency and civil war took root in Iraq and Afghanistan and
as the US ran out of options to stem the spiralling violence, there
have been attempts to revive the spirit of development-based
counter-insurgency, long repressed in military circles following
its failures in Vietnam (Belcher, 2012). Designed by its advocates
to address the pacification and governance of populations follow-
ing invasion and occupation, this involved revisiting and rework-
ing the principles of counter-insurgency, drawing lessons from the
Algerian War (1954–62) and the Malayan Emergency (1948–60)
to distil techniques for pacification that could be readily employed
in contemporary battlespaces.
As Greenburg (2018) notes through ethnographic observations
of training activities on US military bases, military instructors
specifically train troops to manage civilians by drawing on the
colonial history of a variety of “small wars” in ways that erase
differences between their specific historical geographies or that
fail to recognise that in counter-insurgencies it is typically “impos-
sible to determine where violence ends and power begins, and vice
versa” (Belcher, 2018: 102). Further, Greenburg (2018) notes that
Haiti's experience with disaster relief and recovery has also
provided an important reference point here for how humanitarian
response could serve as a particular theatre for rehearsing counter-
insurgency tactics (Greenburg, 2018). As noted in chapters 3 and
4, within the “classical” counter-insurgency campaigns fought at
the time of decolonisation, with its promise of progress and
inclusion, development was already a valued strategic component
(Duffield, 2010a) and it has again become central in this latest
rapprochement with counter-insurgency doctrine. Through unpre-
cedented collaborations involving officers, soldiers, policymakers,
academics and journalists, Army Field Manual FM 3–24 Counter-
insurgency was published in late 2006 (United States Army/
Marine Corps, 2006), which subsequently became one of the
most widely read and influential documents ever produced by the
US military (Belcher, 2012).
FM 3-24 was heavily influenced by the “classical” school of
Cold War-era counter-insurgency focused on defeating communist
and anti-colonial insurgencies by strengthening weak governments
that are seen by a critical mass of people in the host nation as
illegitimate (Cancian, 2017). It frames insurgency as a contest
between insurgents and governments over an undecided population,
a contest whose outcome is principally determined by the relative

capability of each side to govern people. The manual suggests that
an undecided civilian population will support the side that they
think can best provide services and advocates persuading civilians
that the counter-insurgent army can best shield them from hardship.
Classical counter-insurgency theory posits an insurgent challenge to
a functioning (though often fragile) state, typically regarding insur-
gency as primarily rural and as something that occurs within one
country or district, between an internal non-state actor and a single
government (Kilcullen, 2006a). While the field manual does state
that people might have grievances other than lack of state capacity,
operations are overwhelmingly targeted at deficient states (Cancian,
2017) whilst “successful” counter-insurgency efforts “comprehen-
sively address the host nation’s core political–economic and socio-
cultural problems” through a “synchronized application of military,
paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions”:
or, a productive form of “armed social work” (United States Army/
Marine Corps, 2006; see also Kilcullen, 2006a; Roennfeldt, 2011).
For Kilcullen, the problem of “weaning jihadist combatants
away from extremist sponsors, while simultaneously supporting
modernisation, does somewhat resemble pacification in traditional
counter-insurgency” (Kilcullen, 2006b: 113) and echoes colonial
campaigns but also includes a number of new elements, including
a shift from “revolutionary” insurgencies to “resistance” insurgen-
cies where the intent to replace existing governments or create
independent states is only partly evident and where, compared to
the classical insurgencies of decolonisation, the economic relation-
ship between insurgents and the population is very different
(Kilcullen, 2006b: 119). The classic Maoist doctrine of insurgency
likens the insurgent to a fish that swims in a sea constituted by the
people with the insurgent reliant upon the people for food, shelter
and information and in return, he or she identified with them and
supported their struggles (Duffield, 2008: 157), but this dependent
relationship has changed, even reversed, as insurgents draw on
complex global networks of support. Through the development of
adaptable trans-border shadow economies, remittances and dia-
spora networks, insurgents have become radically self-reliant, with
many routinely having access to “more wealth, hardware and
information than the impoverished populations amongst whom
they are embedded” (Duffield, 2008: 158).
War can and should be understood as occurring not simply in
the meeting of two adversaries on a battlefield but also through the
humanitarian regimes that have become the means for governing
the displaced, the refugee, the poor and the unwanted (Weizman,
2011). Humanitarian infrastructures, technologies and practices
thus constitute key sites through which a relation of war is
sustained and reproduced. Contemporary “humanitarianism”,
Weizman (2011) argues, has evolved into various technocratic
collusions among those who work to aid the vulnerable and those
who mete out state violence in the name of security. For Weizman,
violence and humanitarianism are entangled at their level of
constitution (see also Asad, 2015) and the collusion of these
humanitarian technologies with military and political powers
forms what he calls the “humanitarian present”. Weizman (2011:
11) observes that international humanitarian law, for example,
does not seek to end wars but rather “to ‘regulate’ and ‘shape’
the way militaries wage them” and by moderating the violence
they perpetrate, Western militaries hope they “might be able to
govern populations more efficiently”. Consequently, US imperial
endeavours tend to slip between “exemplary or performative
forms of violence meant to intimidate and more ‘humane’ and
developmental warfare intended to persuade” (Khalili, 2012: 4).
As Bhungalia (2012) has argued in relation to Palestine, this has
resulted in:
a proliferation of sites and diversity of means through which

US political and economic power is being articulated. Along-
side its military and diplomatic interventions, the US is
simultaneously extending its reach through a host of “devel-
opment experts,” humanitarian agents and “democracy pro-
moters” charged with filtering, sorting and policing the
Palestinian civilian population. While taking a new and per-
haps more sophisticated form, these contemporary practices
and strategies must not be dissociated from a longer history of
counterinsurgency in Palestine. (Bhungalia, 2012)
Palestine has historically occupied a central position in global

counter-insurgency and its experiences can be read contrapuntally
with those of US counter-insurgency practices elsewhere (Khalili,
2012). Under the British Mandate (1917–48), Palestine served as a
staging ground for the consolidation of British imperial policing
and pacification strategies, and following mandate rule, as a
testing ground for Israeli experiments in asymmetric warfare and
demographic engineering, often with considerable US diplomatic
and material support (Bhungalia, 2012; see Figure 6.3). In recent
years counter-insurgency and pacification practices have been
FIGURE 6.3 Activist graffiti adorns the Israeli separation wall in the West
Bank town of Bethlehem in July 2010. Photo by Ryan Rodrick
Beiler/Shutterstock.
mobilised by USAID in contemporary occupied Palestine through

humanitarian and development interventions and the networks of
aid governance (Bhungalia, 2015). The foreign aid regime in the
Palestinian territories has served to “mitigate the most deleterious
effects of military occupation and dispossession” but at the same
time has “further extended a regime of war and policing into ever-
more intimate spaces of Palestinian everyday life” (Bhungalia,
2015: 2308). The various NGOs and development contractors
through which USAID operates are thus “simultaneously tasked
with dividing, surveilling and policing the Palestinian population on
behalf of the US state” (Bhungalia, 2015: 2313; see Figure 6.4).
Contemporary US counter-insurgency doctrine aims both to
establish “security” within a host country as an a priori condition
for any political and economic reconstruction projects and to raise
“cultural awareness” within the US military to better understand the
root causes of an insurgency (Belcher, 2014). Such efforts have
sought to show US forces engaged in a kinder, gentler, culturally
sensitive occupation and thus a war Americans could feel good about
fighting (Belcher, 2014; González, 2015). This has involved embed-
ding social scientists in combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan
through the controversial Human Terrain System (HTS) initiative
FIGURE 6.4 A 2012 poster by Hafez Omar from the Palestine Poster
Project depicts the bloody aims of USAID. Courtesy of
Hafez Omar.
which, during its eight years of existence (2006–14), cost taxpayers

more than US$725 million, much of which went to two large defence
contractors, BAE systems and CGI Federal (González, 2015). This
was envisioned as an intelligence-gathering programme similar to the
US Army’s collection of ethnographic data on Vietnamese civilians
for CORDS – a pacification programme set up by the South Vietnam

and US governments in 1967 that then shared this ethnographic data
with paramilitaries working for Operation Phoenix, a secret branch of
CORDS (González, 2009). CORDS/Phoenix “census grievance”
teams collected census and ethnographic data and interviewed
people about their needs, complaints and sentiments toward the Viet
Kong in much the same way the Human Terrain Teams were
instructed to do in Iraq and Afghanistan (González, 2009: 28).
HTS personnel conducted a range of activities including data
collection, intelligence gathering and psychological operations
and used outdated anthropological concepts, theories and meth-
ods, mostly from the 1930s and 1940s, a time when many anthro-
pologists were employed by colonial governments to more
effectively control indigenous populations. Less than a year after
the first HTS was deployed to Afghanistan, the American Anthro-
pological Association issued a statement expressing disapproval
of the programme and an alternative “counter-counterinsurgency
manual” (Network of Concerned Anthropologists, 2009) was
produced whilst more than 1,000 anthropologists signed a petition
pledging non-participation in counter-insurgency work. In recent
years, there has been a gradual shift in the language, strategy and
concepts used by the US military-intelligence community from the
anthropology of human terrain to a growing interest in human
geography and geospatial intelligence (Wainwright, 2016).
More recently, efforts to showcase the “humane” side of
contemporary US counter-insurgency in Afghanistan and to
secure areas like Helmand and Kandahar have involved various
biopolitical reconfigurations involving varied development-related
interventions (such as rebuilding destroyed homes, crop substitu-
tion and food security efforts) that target Afghan households,
small farms and villages and the cultural institutions animating
rural life (Belcher, 2018). This turn to the informal and intimate
structures of Afghan life was a “rediscovery” of the scale on
which counter-insurgencies have always been most violently felt:
the colonised body and the home (Khalili, 2012; Belcher, 2018).
This has also included the reconstruction of villages like Taroke
Kalacha that seek to both confine and discipline Afghan bodies at
the level of the household and to coerce local people to recognise
the authority of local governing institutions and a foreign military.
Village destruction and reconstruction of course has many prece-
dents in US and British counter-insurgency operations, including
the strategic hamlet programme in South Vietnam and the New
Villages scheme in Malaysia (Scott, 2016; Sioh, 2010), but for
Belcher (2018) this phase of US-led operations (2010–12) marks a

dramatic shift in the counter-insurgency strategy in southern
Afghanistan. In such projects, fields and homes were rebuilt in a
way that maximised military surveillance rather than the needs of
the villagers themselves (Belcher, 2018: 103).
The counter-insurgency manual was updated and retitled in
2014 with even greater attention to culture and fewer references to
Algeria and Malaya, instead attempting to recognise the complex-
ity of Iraq and Afghanistan and that intra-state conflict takes many
forms – revolutions, rebellions, coups d’état, insurgencies and
civil wars (United States Army, 2014). The revised version also
alludes to the billions of taxpayer dollars often squandered on
futile reconstruction efforts. Instead, the manual insists that coun-
ter-insurgents not lavishly bestow aid projects on the local popula-
tion, but rather address the root causes of insurgency since
“deprivation that is not considered unjust is much less destabiliz-
ing than relative prosperity that is considered unjust” (United
States Army, 2014: para 4-16). Additionally, the US doctrine of
“stability operations” (FM 3-07) (United States Army, 2003, 2008)
both builds on and exceeds previous counter-insurgency thinking,
arguing that “the adversary is often disease, hunger or the con-
sequence of disaster” (United States Army, 2003: 6-1), that fragile
states unable or unwilling to provide for the most basic needs of
their people represent “the greatest threat” to US national security
(United States Army, 2008: vi) and that the weakness of these
states “threatens the success of any development effort” (United
States Army, 2008: para 1-44). Within the stability dimension of
the US military’s “full spectrum operations”, civil affairs forces
now pursue an “indirect” and “population-centred” approach and
play an increasingly important role in the US military’s preventa-
tive or peacetime engagements around the world, particularly in
Africa.
THE US AND COUNTER-INSURGENCY IN

AFRICA: DRAINING THE “SWAMP OF TERROR”
Historically, the US has always adopted a militarised foreign
policy towards Africa (Majavu, 2014). In March 1960, during a
year in which 16 European colonies in Africa became indepen-
dent, the US Secretary of State, Christian Herter, told the US
National Security Council that Africa had become “a battleground
of the first order” (cited in Gleijeses, 2013: 6). One month later,
Vice-President Richard Nixon stated that Africa was “potentially

the most explosive area in the world” (Gleijeses, 2013: 6) and the
incoming Kennedy administration agreed. In recent years, Africa
has once again been constructed in US foreign policy as an
explosive battleground and its underdevelopment has again been
framed as threatening, this time in terms of Islamic terrorist
insurgencies in the context of the War on Terror. Since the
bombing of US embassies in East Africa in 1998, which was
followed by a US retaliatory strike against Sudan, Africa has
increasingly been regarded by the US as the next front or battle-
ground in the war on terrorism (Majavu, 2014). In the aftermath of
9/11 US officials scoured the globe for these “ungoverned spaces”
with the potential, like Afghanistan, to foster anti-American extre-
mists and US policy has since become increasingly attentive to
emerging but not fully formed threats, many of which are seen as
evolving in regions like Africa that are deficient in both “develop-
ment” and “security” (MOD, 2009; United States Army, 2008) or
home to weak and failed states. Top US foreign policy, military
and intelligence leaders have constructed the idea of a Sahelian-
Saharan front in the War on Terror, representing it as a “swamp of
terror”, indeed a “terrorist infestation” which “we need to drain”,
or as a “magnet for terrorists” (Keenan, 2009: 3), fabricating a
fiction of the continent as a hotbed for terrorism where Islamist
extremism has metastasised.
Contemporary US engagement in Africa is now dominated
by security issues, particularly counterterrorism, counter-piracy
and efforts to resolve internal conflicts. US air and drone strikes
aimed at countering terrorist organisations in Africa have
increased considerably under the Trump administration with
multiple strikes against Al-Shabaab in Somalia and against
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen (see
Figure 6.5) along with pinpoint raids by small Special Forces
teams in countries like Somalia and Libya. Many of these
involve small-scale “secret wars” against Islamists, mainly
linked to Al-Qaeda and often carried out under the aegis of the
US Africa Command (AFRICOM). Over the last year alone, the
number of US forces in Africa has increased by nearly 1500 to
7500 (not including special forces) and the US now has 34
status of forces agreements (or similar treaties) with African
countries, 14 of which were signed or upgraded in the last
decade, whilst US troops were deployed in 50 out of Africa’s
54 states, many on clandestine missions (Booker and Rickman,
2018). Protests against US bases and troop deployments have
FIGURE 6.5 A man walks past graffiti, on a wall in Sanaa (Yemen),

denouncing US drone strikes on November 13th, 2014.
REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah/File Photo.
also become more common, however, taking place in Ghana,

Niger, Cameroon, Liberia and several other countries (Booker
and Rickman, 2018).
Some African countries (notably Somalia, Nigeria and Mali)
were identified among other “weak states” vulnerable to jihadi
influence spreading south from the Maghreb where locally formed
militias with a medley of grievances have in recent years morphed
into jihadi insurgencies that are viewed by the US as a threat to
regional stability and the economic resurgence of states key to US
interests such as Kenya and Nigeria. The radicalisation of Islamist
factions, and ultimately the spread of Al-Shabaab militants, was
however fuelled in part by the US-backed Ethiopian offensive in
Somalia in 2006 but has also been enabled by the US-backed
rebellion in Libya in 2011, which led to the overthrow of Muam-
mar Gaddafi but also to arms from Gaddafi’s regime circulating
around North Africa and ending up in the hands of jihadi
groups such as Boko Haram. Key to the US response to
Islamic insurgency is AFRICOM, created in 2007 and one of
six DoD “geographic combatant commands”. AFRICOM’s mis-
sion statement claims that, working with partners, it:
disrupts and neutralizes transnational threats, protects U.S.

personnel and facilities, prevents and mitigates conflict,
and builds African partner defence capability and capacity
in order to promote regional security, stability, and pros-
perity. (AFRICOM, 2017)
AFRICOM sees itself as advancing US national security inter-

ests primarily through joint military-to-military training and assis-
tance programmes with dozens of African and European militaries,
security cooperation activities and military operations. Military
training programmes are specifically designed to increase Africa’s
counter-terrorism capabilities and prevent the creation of terrorist
safe havens but also serve to protect US economic interests in the
region and to secure future energy and resources (Lyman and
Morrison, 2004). The US military has publicly insisted that its
efforts in Africa are small scale, no more than a “light footprint”
but by 2015 the number of missions, exercises, operations and other
activities under AFRICOM’s purview had more than doubled to
include some 75 joint operations, 12 major joint exercises and 400
“security cooperation initiatives” (Frontera, 2016). Brigadier Gen-
eral Bolduc, the former commander of SOCAFRICA (Special
Operations Command, Africa), claimed in 2016 that AFRICOM’s
activities were motivated by the fear that “Africa’s challenges could
create a threat that surpasses the threat that the United States
currently faces from conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria”
(Bolduc cited in Turse, 2016). At the time Bolduc also noted that
there were nearly 50 terrorist organisations and “illicit groups”
operating on the African continent but identified only the Islamic
State, Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, AQIM, and the LRA by name or
acronym, while mentioning the existence of another 43 groups
(Turse, 2016) (see Figures 6.6 and 6.7). The Africa Center for
Strategic Studies, a research institution under the DoD, now reg-
ularly publishes updated cartographic representations of the chan-
ging geographies of Africa’s militant Islamist groups.
In Africa US troops are now conducting around 3500 exer-
cises, programmes and engagements per year, an average of nearly
10 missions per day (Turse, 2017). Little substantive information
has however been made public about what exactly these missions
have involved and just whom US forces have trained. This is the
age of “the everywhere war” (Gregory, 2011) as the traditional
geographies of warfare have become increasingly blurred in an
age defined not by clear battlefields and officially recognised
combat zones (Moore and Walker, 2016), but by multidimensional
FIGURE 6.6 Nigerian soldiers hold up a Boko Haram flag that they had
seized in the recently retaken town of Damasak, Nigeria,
March 18th, 2015. REUTERS/Emmanuel Braun.
FIGURE 6.7 A Somali soldier holds a mortar gun at Sanguuni military base
on June 13th, 2018, where an American special operations
soldier was killed by a mortar attack five days previously, about
450 km south of Mogadishu, Somalia. More than 500 Amer-
ican troops have been working with the African Union Mission
to Somalia (AMISOM) and Somali national security forces in
counterterrorism operations and have conducted frequent
raids and drone strikes on Al-Shabaab training camps through-
out Somalia. Mohamed Abdiwahab/AFP/Getty Images.
and fluid “battlespaces” (Graham, 2009), shadowy campaigns

against non-state actors in “borderlands” and undisclosed loca-
tions, and “war in countries we are not at war with” (Ryan, 2011).
As Moore (2017) notes, this everywhere war is characterised by
complex geopolitical and geoeconomic entanglements given the
US military’s outsourcing and increasing reliance on private
companies that employ a global army of civilian labourers to
provide logistical support for operations around the world. In
Africa, private military and security contractors (PMSCs) increas-
ingly perform a variety of services, from transporting and housing
personnel, to shipping materials and food, to providing medical
support and conducting surveillance. Nigeria, for example,
brought in hundreds of South African mercenaries, with roots in
Apartheid-era security forces, to assist in its offensive against
Boko Haram (Varin, 2015).
There are various elements that make up the US military
assemblage in Africa which collectively facilitate the movement
of US soldiers and equipment across the continent (Moore and
Walker, 2016). Networks of physical sites within this assemblage
can be difficult to identify, however, and fluctuate as the military
constantly shifts resources, personnel and equipment (Moore and
Walker, 2016). The US military presence in Africa is also masked
by the extensive use of covert special operations forces, secret
facilities and PMSCs. Several FOLs (Forward Operating Loca-
tions) and drone bases have been established and discontinued in
Ethiopia, Kenya and Mauritania due to changing political consid-
erations, operational demands and resource limitations (Moore and
Walker, 2016). There is also a growing network of cooperative
security locations (CSLs) through which small numbers of US
troops periodically rotate as well as contingency locations (CLs)
(used only during ongoing missions) and a variety of logistics
nodes across the continent and beyond.
The US is also currently building a new US$110 million
military air base in Agadez, Niger, capable of deploying drones and
giving the Pentagon another surveillance hub for launching intelli-
gence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions against a plethora
of terror groups in Western and North Africa. Niger in particular has
positioned itself to be the key regional hub for US military opera-
tions whilst in Chad, the US Air Force has been flying drones and
other aircraft from a French military base to search for hundreds of
schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in Nigeria in April 2014.
Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso (which has been the scene of jihadist
attacks in recent years and sits between Al-Qaeda groups to the
north and Boko Haram to its east in Nigeria) has also been the
centre for a US programme code-named “Creek Sand” where US
spy planes have carried out surveillance missions across Northern
Mali and Mauritania, targeting fighters from Al-Qaeda and the
Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) (Whitlock, 2012). The US has also
established an alliance with the corrupt and authoritarian regime of
Cameroonian President Paul Biya (see Figure 6.8) to establish a
drone base at Garoua, enabling intelligence gathering on Boko
Haram (Hammer, 2016). The enrolment of West African regimes
into AFRICOM’s counterterrorism network has however arguably
“undermined governance and human rights and increased political
instability across the region” (Moore and Walker, 2016: 705). For
political and military elites in the Sahel, “binding themselves to
AFRICOM’s counterterrorism assemblage can be useful for better
securing their own authority and privileges against potential challen-
gers” (Moore and Walker, 2016: 705). This dynamic is not limited to
Africa, of course, as the US has “repeatedly collaborated with
murderous, antidemocratic regimes and ignored widespread evidence
of human rights abuses” in countries that it relies upon for overseas
bases of operation (Vine, 2015: 97).
There are also various bureaucratic and military practices that
are instrumental in “forging alignment” between the US and African
FIGURE 6.8 US Marines and sailors work with Cameroon’s Fusiliers

Marins and Compagnie des Palmeurs de Combat to increase
their capabilities to combat illicit activity and increase
security in the waterways and borders of Cameroon. Photo
by Cameroon’s Fusiliers, courtesy of US Marine Corps.
states and militaries, and facilitating flows of money, weapons,

knowledge, people and ideologies in the assemblage (Moore and
Walker, 2016). These include status of force agreements, overflight
permissions, multinational “military to military” training exercises
such as Flintlock and African Endeavor, security cooperation pro-
grammes like Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assis-
tance (ACOTA), and military assistance programmes such as the
Section 1206 scheme, which allocates billions of dollars to the DoD
to distribute to select countries to pay for equipment and training for
counterterrorism purposes (Moore and Walker, 2016; see Figure 6.9).
Key to many of these activities is Camp Lemonnier, a former French
Foreign Legion base leased from Djibouti in East Africa which
houses about 4,000 US military personnel and civilian contractors
along with conventional forces specialising in training African mili-
taries and several hundred special operations troops. It has become
the “backbone” of covert missions across Africa and the Arabian
Peninsula and one of the military’s most important bases for drone
missions in Somalia and Yemen (Turse, 2016).
US troops carry out a wide range of operations in Africa,
including airstrikes targeting suspected militants, night raids aimed
FIGURE 6.9 A US Marine instructor teaches Mauritian Fusilier Marin

soldiers how to fire an AK-47 automatic rifle during light
infantry training on February 26th, 2015 in Nouadhibou,
Mauritania. US Marines Photo/Alamy.
at kidnapping terror suspects, airlifts of French and African troops

onto the battlefields of proxy wars, and evacuation operations in
destabilised countries (Turse, 2014a). Above all, however, the US
military conducts training missions, provides mentoring to allies
and funds, equips and advises its local surrogates with whom it
seeks to work on counterterrorism. The mantra has been “muscu-
lar soft power” (Sengupta, 2013), the process of preparing states
to defend themselves while building up infrastructure and civic
institutions. One example is the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism
Partnership (TSCTP), which operates civilian and military projects
in Mali, Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Algeria, Morocco, Senegal,
Nigeria and Tunisia in the name of promoting regional “stability”.
The US has also been aiding France’s ongoing interventions in
West and Central Africa in a burgeoning Franco-American alli-
ance on the continent as both countries have steadily expanded
their presence in West Africa in response to the presence of
jihadist groups taking root in “weak” states, even setting up
neighbouring drone hangars in Niamey, Niger’s capital, to conduct
reconnaissance flights over Mali.
The US military is also deeply involved in the field of
reconstruction and development across the African continent,
regarding humanitarian assistance as a form of “security coopera-
tion”, “civil affairs” programmes and “stability operations”.
Across Africa, the US military is now engaged in a panoply of
aid projects with an eye towards winning the hearts and minds of
Africans and so reducing the lure of extremist ideologies asso-
ciated with groups such as Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab. Most
contemporary US civil affairs activities on the continent are
carried out in areas that US security strategists conceptualise as
being “ungoverned” or “undergoverned” and thus exploitable by
terrorists and other forces seen as contributing to instability
(Bachmann, 2008; Bradbury and Kleinman, 2010). The concept
of stability (or stabilisation) operations takes counter-insurgency
thinking to another level: it extends and normalises military
engagement in the fields of development and governance, even in
peacetime contexts (Bachmann, 2014; Collinson, Elhawary and
Muggah, 2010; Morrissey, 2015). The so-called civil-military
operations, or CMOs, include “humanitarian assistance” projects
like the construction or repair of schools, water wells and waste
treatment systems, and “humanitarian and civic assistance” (HCA)
efforts, like offering dental and veterinary care. Such efforts are
engineered to improve US visibility, access and influence with
foreign military and civilian counterparts in order to promote the
security and foreign policy interests of the US (Turse, 2014b).

These small-scale efforts are further divided into “community
relations activities” like the distribution of sports equipment, and
“low-cost activities” such as seminars on solar panel maintenance
or English-language discussion groups (Turse, 2014b). US military
personnel of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa
(CJTF-HoA) have, for example, carried out hundreds of small
projects in East African countries since 2003 (including Ethiopia,
Djibouti, Kenya and Uganda) which include constructing or refurb-
ishing schools or health centres (see Figure 6.10), providing medical
care wherein health experts offer short-term treatment for the popula-
tion, and completing veterinary assignments or projects related to
water access (Bachmann, 2017). In northern and north-eastern Kenya
the US military teams have implemented approximately 200 projects
over the last decade, with civil affairs projects almost exclusively
concentrated in the regions close to the Somali border where the
majority of the population is Muslim (Bachmann, 2017).
Compared to the scope and costs of other US military activities in
Africa, including large military-to-military training and manoeuvres,
FIGURE 6.10 US Navy Lieutenant Cory Cole from the Maritime Civil
Affairs team helps Kenyan students plant casuarina trees
at Mjanaheri primary school in June 2012. Combined Joint
Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HoA) planted 600 tree
seedlings at the school as part of World Environment Day.
PJF Military collection/Alamy.
secret operations and logistics investments (Bachmann, 2014; Turse,

2015), these civil affairs operations are “a relatively small but
important element of the US military’s post-counterinsurgency crisis
prevention strategy and its emphasis on stability operations” (Bach-
mann, 2017: 11). So far, however, critical scholarship has paid little
attention to this type of military practice, let alone the dynamics of
giving and taking in affected communities (Bachmann, 2017). Such
activities are however difficult to research, given that the little that is
known about US civil affairs operations in Africa often comes from
within the military establishment itself or from scholars close to it
(Farrell and Lee, 2015). Official news releases often include “feel-
good” stories about what the projects have achieved but many have
been deeply problematic. An investigation by the DoD’s Inspector
General found failures in the planning, execution, tracking and
documentation of such projects with military officials failing both to
identify how their projects even supported AFRICOM’s wider objec-
tives on the continent and to ensure that local populations were
equipped to keep the small-scale projects running or sustainable
(Turse, 2014b).
CONCLUSIONS: (RE)MILITARISING
DEVELOPMENT
USAID narrates its work as being about “supporting US national
interests” and “making Americans safer at home and abroad”
(USAID, 2017) and alongside diplomacy and defence efforts, it
claims to be tackling the things that foster “violent extremism,
instability, transnational crime and other security threats” by
addressing such challenges as “extreme poverty, food insecurity,
pandemic disease, conflict, violence, and poor governance”
(USAID, 2017). So much of what USAID does in the name of
aid, assistance and development, past and present, has been
geopolitically oriented and motivated – focusing on governance,
political stability and democracy and on securing states by defeat-
ing terrorism and countering insurgency. In many ways, USAID’s
current configuration illustrates both the increasing securitisation
of development and the power of the “security–development
nexus” but also the ways in which development is increasingly
framed as a technology of counter-insurgency. Feeding on a
geopolitics of fear and constructing narratives of “threat”, failure
and crisis in the borderlands, the nexus constitutes a growing field
of development and security actors, aid agencies and professional
networks, that call forth the conditions of need and insecurity that
they then seek to intervene upon. The aid given by these actors is
not simply about nation states or one-way coherent flows of
money, however, but involves complex networked elements or
assemblages, constituted by flows of capital, knowledge, influ-
ence, practices, material objects and people (Roberts, 2014). A
key part of this is the growing use of private military and security
contractors and the powerful contracting assemblage centred on
the Beltway region in the greater Washington, DC area (Roberts,
2014) which means that selected for-profit US firms benefit con-
siderably from the sums US agencies have spent in the name of
securing developing areas.
Alongside USAID, the DoD and State Department have
become increasingly important in the framing and delivery of US
foreign assistance and, as a result, US military operations
encroach ever more on domains traditionally associated with
development and diplomacy whilst military actors and objectives
have become increasingly influential in both the formulation and
delivery of aid programmes. In the process of reconstruction as
war, “non-traditional” military practices around development (e.g.
civil affairs programmes in East Africa) have proliferated in an
attempt to sustain new practices of civil–military integration
revived and advanced in the counter-insurgencies of Iraq and
Afghanistan. Such interventions have however been beset with
tensions and controversy and are a bundle of contradictions in
pursuing strategic-military objectives as part of stabilisation opera-
tions whilst simultaneously aiming to address immediate local
socio-economic needs. More research is needed to understand
how these development projects work in practice, how the US
military mobilises and affects the actors involved in different ways
and draws local populations into encounters with foreign militaries
and their strategic agendas (Bachmann, 2017). In Iraq and Afgha-
nistan in particular, the disbursement of US foreign assistance has
been plagued by allegations of fraud, corruption and abuse with
interventions characterised by poor planning, shoddy construction,
mechanical failures and inadequate oversight whilst billions of
dollars have been squandered on counter-insurgency failures with
“stories of ruined roads and busted buildings, shoddy school-
houses and wasteful water parks, all in the name of winning
hearts and minds” (Turse, 2014b).
Underdevelopment has long been scripted as “dangerous” by
USAID but the idea of poverty as a recruiting ground for mena-
cing strategic threats has been monotonously rediscovered by
USAID (and a wide range of other donor agencies) in and through

the global war on terrorism (Duffield, 2010a). Building on its Cold
War experience of assisting counter-insurgency efforts in places
like Vietnam, USAID interventions are increasingly concerned
with the government and management of restless rural populations
and the restoration of political order and stability (Attewell, 2017).
The historical focus of US assistance on large-scale iconic devel-
opment projects, conceived in the course of Cold War modernisa-
tion, has now been replaced by the pursuit of development as a
form of governmentality, with USAID increasingly focused on
neutralising and dispelling perceived threats in their place of
origin, particularly in battlespaces such as Iraq and Afghanistan
and increasingly in Africa, depicted as the new “swamp of terror”.
In this sense it is important to consider the biopolitics of counter-
insurgency and the ways in which such efforts seek to reconfigure
biopolitical landscapes, to discipline bodies or to coerce people to
recognise the authority of local governing institutions and a
foreign military (Belcher, 2018). USAID claims that “[s]trong
American leadership will promote development and provide life-
saving assistance” (USAID, 2017) but during the Cold War US
foreign assistance played a key role in supporting authoritarian
regimes and in creating conflict and instability. Today the US
remains the largest arms exporter globally (accounting for 33%
of global arms exports), offering a wide array of weaponry and
services and making arms deliveries to at least 100 countries
(SIPRI, 2017). Although Washington sold to a global market,
states in the Middle East (also some of the largest historical
recipients of US aid) received nearly half (47%) of all US arms
transfers between 2012 and 2016 (SIPRI, 2017). Enabling coun-
tries like Israel to consolidate and secure their statehood through
huge arms transfers and long-standing military training pro-
grammes makes a real difference to regional, national and local
balances of power and the result has not always been greater
security and stability.
USAID’s work is also very much about geoeconomics, about
making recipient states “safe” for the spread of capitalism and
enabling and accelerating their neoliberalisation, urging societies
to develop in accordance with appropriately neoliberal state insti-
tutions. In this sense, as Roberts, Secor and Sparke (2003) have
argued in conceptualising “neoliberal geopolitics”, it is important
to think about the inter-articulation between neoliberalism and the
violence of American military force, particularly given that the
recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq can be seen in part as a
form of neoliberal “roll-out”. It is the ways in which US geopoli-

tical interests intersect with geoeconomic strategies through a
“security–economy nexus” (Coleman, 2005) that are important
here. USAID has thus developed from and advanced both geopo-
litical and geoeconomic objectives and ideals while at the same
time reshaping the balance of political and economic forces and
institutional actors in the political structures of recipient states
along with the US state itself and the wider international system
(Simpson, 2008). In this sense it is important to remember that
practices of aid are co-constituted by international donors and
recipient states (Hyndman, 2009: 883). To get a better under-
standing of how this works in practice, however, more research is
needed on the messy realities of American aid, on how USAID
projects and practices articulate in specific sites and contexts and
around the ways in which populations targeted for development
negotiate, contest and/or co-opt American aid interventions (Bhun-
galia, 2016: 89).
Celebratory and redemptive narrations of the role of American
aid in spaces of insecurity like Afghanistan have been common in
some popular geopolitical texts like Three Cups of Tea (TCT),
which tells the story of the life and work of American mountai-
neer-turned-humanitarian Greg Mortenson, and his efforts to coun-
ter terrorism in Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan through the
creation of schools. Popular with the American public as a story of
humanitarian development, TCT embodies a depoliticised and
dehistoricised representation of Northern Pakistan and includes
essentialising narratives of terror, rural “ignorance”, backward-
ness, underdevelopment, “extremism” and global terrorism at the
same time as it promotes a liberal interventionism and reproduces
the West-affirming terms of development discourse (Ali, 2010).
TCT became implicated in a participatory militarism in which an
ethnographically sensitive military (along the lines of CORDS and
HTS) strives to “listen” and “build relationships” to “serve
people” in order to occupy more effectively and for longer. In
this sense, the story reflects the wider collusion between the
technologies of humanitarianism and military power that charac-
terises the “humanitarian present” (Weizman, 2011). Mortenson
has since faced accusations that the book contains multiple fabri-
cations and also that he mismanaged donations to the Central Asia
Institute, a non-profit community education organisation that he
co-founded (Goldberg, 2015).
In contemporary US foreign policy Africa’s “ungoverned
spaces” and “failed states” have increasingly been scripted as a
battleground in the war on terror, leading to an expanding, near-

continent-wide campaign utilising the core tenets of counter-insur-
gency strategy (Turse, 2014b). US foreign policy concerning
Africa has however often struggled to differentiate between con-
flicts and disputes that are localised in their remit and those that
present a threat to the US, but has also seen the US strike
agreements with autocratic regimes with dubious human rights
records (e.g. Cameroon) in pursuit of its anti-terror agenda. Half a
century ago, the US was concerned about “dangerous, pro-Com-
munist” African radicals and there remain concerns that US policy
towards Africa may mirror its “anti-communist” support for auto-
cratic regimes during the Cold War, with “anti-terrorist” support
for comparable regimes in the post-Cold War era (Adebajo,
2008b: 233–234; Rupiya and Southall, 2009).
Central to US interventions on the continent has been the
geopolitical assemblage of AFRICOM and an expanding network
of facilities such as Camp Lemonnier, drone bases, cooperative
security and contingency locations, along with a variety of logis-
tics nodes across the continent and beyond aimed not just at
advancing US security and foreign policy objectives but also at
protecting US economic interests in the region (e.g. around access
to hydrocarbon resources in West Africa). US officials often point
out, however, that AFRICOM’s activities are still “dwarfed” by
America’s non-military assistance to Africa including the Presi-
dent’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and Power
Africa, Obama’s programme to boost the electrification of the
continent. US drone strikes in Africa (e.g. against Al-Shabaab
militants) have become commonplace but have bred widespread
resentment due to the civilian casualties they often incur (e.g. in
places like Yemen and Somalia). In 2017 the Trump administra-
tion lifted the Presidential Policy Guidance rules put in place by
President Barack Obama to govern counterterrorism strikes away
from conventional war zones and with a view to preventing
civilian casualties. By designating regions as areas of “active
hostilities” where the Guidance rules do not apply, Trump lifted
restrictions on counterterrorism operations in Africa in April 2017
and the ensuing deaths of several US special forces troops soon
after drew attention to US counter-insurgency efforts on the
continent. In October 2017, Nigerien forces and American Green
Berets were ambushed by members of the Islamic State in the
Greater Sahel (ISGS) during an intelligence-gathering mission
along the border with Mali, with four US Green Berets killed in
the fighting and two others wounded (Fall and Koura, 2017).
Trump engaged in a politicised and widely publicised confronta-

tion with the widow of one of those killed over the words he used
in a “consoling” phone call, but the events underlined how little
the American public (and much of the political establishment)
knew of the missions conducted by the US State Department and
DoD in Africa.
Some commentators and observers have, sometimes rather
crudely, drawn out some of the contrasts between contemporary
US and Chinese policy towards Africa with the former seen as
ideological and the latter as pragmatic (Copley, 2014). Turse
(2014a), for example, discusses the case of Mali where US Special
Operations forces have been teaching infantry tactics to Malian
troops whilst the Chinese have invested heavily in developing
national infrastructure:
For the Chinese, Africa is El Dorado, a land of opportunity

for one million migrants. For America, it’s a collection of
“ungoverned spaces”, “austere locations” and failing states
increasingly dominated by local terror groups poised to
become global threats, a danger zone to be militarily managed
through special operations and proxy armies.
Some of these points of contrast have, however, perhaps been

overstated. There have been a number of incidents involving the
kidnapping or killing of Chinese labourers in places like Ethiopia,
Mali, Nigeria and Sudan that have raised awareness about the
political risks around Chinese investment in Africa and the profile
of security issues in China–Africa relations. In fact, the deeper
Beijing ventures into the African continent the more it is begin-
ning to stumble upon various security challenges (Holslag, 2009).
Further, China’s own history with significant political interven-
tions around economic development since the inception of the
CCP under Mao’s rule has resulted in a strong belief in the
necessity of economic growth to maintaining internal order whilst
China’s “views on how to contribute to international peace and
security are very much influenced by a development-security
nexus” (Benabdallah, 2016: 21). China is also no stranger to
post-war reconstruction through its recent engagements with sev-
eral African countries, including Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan,
Angola and the DRC. China similarly runs capacity-building and
vocational training programmes with African high-ranking army
officials, police forces, peacekeepers and private security person-
nel who participate in Beijing-sponsored annual training exercises
and military-to-military exchanges as an essential part of China’s

Africa security strategy. China has also transferred arms and
provided training to the Nigerian and Cameroonian militaries for
their operations against Boko Haram and supported the AU mis-
sion against Al-Shabaab in Somalia. Further, China has its own
domestic experiences of countering insurgency to draw upon and
has participated in a range of counter-insurgency exercises, includ-
ing jungle warfare training (Wayne, 2008). There is also the
likelihood that China will support insurgents – and counter-insur-
gents – as part of its foreign policy (Odgaard and Nielsen, 2014).
China’s military spending has increased almost every year
since 1989 from US$21 billion in 1988 to US$215 billion in
2015 (SIPRI, 2017) and indirectly China also plays a key role in
shaping the contemporary geographies of peace and security in
Africa in that Chinese military equipment is now being used by
more than two-thirds of African countries (IISS, 2017). There are
also increasing obligations for China as a self-styled “responsible
world power” to play a greater role in peace and security on the
continent. In July 2017 China opened a new support and logistics
base in Djibouti intended to assist with China’s growing number
of peacekeeping and humanitarian missions and as part of China’s
wider OBOR initiative, with around 1,000 personnel to eventually
be stationed there. There have also been suggestions that Beijing
has plans to build an overseas naval supply and recuperation
facility in the Seychelles to assist its resource exploration and
anti-piracy efforts, raising considerable alarm in India which has
significant interests in the country and itself had plans to build a
military base there (although the agreement was cancelled by the
Seychelles in June 2018). Beijing’s new naval port, if completed,
will be located in close proximity to the Pentagon’s strategic
military establishment, Diego Garcia, owned by the British and
located in the central Indian Ocean. It is to this question of the
expanding role of China (and other so-called “rising powers” or
“emerging economies”) in the global South that we now turn in
chapter 7.
Chapter 7
The Rise of the South
INTRODUCTION: THE REVIVAL OF SOUTH–

SOUTH DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION
The South has risen at an unprecedented speed and scale. . .
collectively bolstering world economic growth, lifting other
developing economies, reducing poverty and increasing
wealth on a grand scale. . . Global economic and political
structures are in flux. . . the principles that have driven post-
Second World War institutions and guided policy makers need
recalibration, if not a reset, to accommodate the growing
diversity. . . and to sustain development progress. . . (UNDP,
2013: 1–2)
I N recent years several UN agencies have suggested that the South

is on the rise. A 2004 UNCTAD secretariat report, for example,
declared that “a new geography of trade” was “reshaping the global
economic landscape” with the South “gradually moving from the
periphery of global trade to the centre” (UNCTAD, 2004: 1). In
2013 the UNDP even entitled its annual Human Development
Report (HDR) The Rise of the South (UNDP, 2013), noting that
the value of trade between developing countries (South–South
trade) had overtaken that of developing country exports to the
global North in 2012, a trend that was “radically reshaping” the
twenty-first-century world. The share of global GDP generated in
the South has grown significantly along with the demand for
mineral and energy resources needed to fuel the domestic growth
of emerging hegemons like China and India. The global geogra-
phies of aid and investment are shifting too as (re-)emerging
The Rise of the South 255
economies become major sources of outward FDI flows to other

parts of the global South. Asia alone is now home to some 197 of
the Fortune 500 companies for 2017, more than any other continent.
Emerging economies have also increasingly begun to develop an
internationalist profile and to assert themselves as humanitarian,
peacekeeping, peacebuilding and “policekeeping” actors on the
world stage. As a result, the nature of both aid and international
development cooperation is slowly being “reset” and “recalibrated”.
This has further raised the spectre of South–South development
cooperation (SSDC) articulated at Bandung in 1955 and spurred on
by the dependency debates of the 1960s and by calls for a New
International Economic Order (NIEO) in the 1970s. SSDC was
institutionalised by the UN with the opening of a special office
within the UNDP in 1974 (UNOSSC) which, in the true spirit of
modernisation, framed cooperation as a largely technical exercise.
Countries of the South that have experienced significant
economic growth in recent decades not only espouse the cause
of “developing countries” (which they claim to be champions
of) but are also keen to emphasise that they themselves belong
to this group and that they are articulating progressive visions
of horizontal, less hierarchical and more equal interaction and
cooperation that are mutually beneficial or “win-win”. Many of
these claims and the narratives of solidarity that they rely on
are reminiscent of Third Worldist coalitions of the past (Narli-
kar, 2013: 603), even leading some to suggest that “the world
is witnessing a refurbishment of China’s old Three World
Theory” (Chan, 2016) or that China’s rise brings the possibility
of a “new Bandung” (Arrighi, 2007). A stringent positive
definition of SSDC is hard to find, however; the concept
remains broad and indeterminate although historically “self-
reliance” and “self-help” have been regarded as central ele-
ments (Chaturvedi, 2013). Further, SSDC suggests a “natural”
congruity between states across the Global South that are in
fact very different (McEwan and Mawdsley, 2012). SSDC
practices should thus not “be understood as an unproblematic
unitary force, but as constituted by complex and often contra-
dictory national prerogatives and interests” (Gray and Gills,
2016: 564).
This chapter explores the recent revival of SSDC and exam-
ines some of the different conceptions of aid and development
assistance being formulated by (re-)emerging donors from the
South. It focuses on how both the framing and delivery of this
assistance are shaped by geopolitical agendas, discourses and
256 The Rise of the South
imaginations but also on Africa’s growing significance in interna-

tional relations and the ways in which four (re-)emerging econo-
mies (China, India, Brazil and South Korea) have vociferously
courted the continent. Since many of these (re-)emerging donors
have opted out of the international regime put in place by Western
governments after World War II to track overseas development
finance activities, it can be difficult to get reliable data on the
precise levels of assistance being provided. Many of these donors
have also blurred and loosened the definition of what constitutes
“aid”. What is becoming clear, however, is that globally ODA from
OECD countries is, in relative terms, of declining importance and
attraction and represents a shrinking proportion of transnational
transfers (Shaw, 2014), although this changing picture is subject to
significant regional variation. The old order of global development,
predicated upon a vertical donor–recipient relationship, is in decay
and key institutions like the OECDs Development Assistance
Committee (DAC) are facing a “crisis of legitimacy” that sees
criticism from recipients, non-state actors and emerging donors,
thus “challenging its very nature as the pre-eminent donor forum”
(Fejerskov, Lundsgaarde, and Cold-Ravnkilde, 2016: 14). A
number of new sources of finance have further undermined the
power of the IFIs including transfers from faith-based organisa-
tions and new private foundations (e.g. Gates, Clinton, Mo Ibra-
him) (Moran, 2014), along with remittances from diasporas,
carbon taxes/trading, climate change funds, Sovereign Wealth
Funds, controls on money laundering and of course aid and private
investment flows from (re-)emerging donors themselves (Shaxson,
2012; Shaw, 2014). Such trends have even led some observers to
proclaim the “end of development” (Brooks, 2017).
The “Asian financial crisis” of 1997–98 was also billed by
some observers as ostensibly a harbinger of the “end of late
development” (and a reassertion of the West’s political and eco-
nomic dominance over the global South) but ten years later the
2008 global financial crisis, having originated in the West itself,
arguably turned that narrative on its head, undermining the cred-
ibility of the IFIs to prescribe the pathway to successful economic
growth (Gray and Murphy, 2013). The 2008 economic crisis was
also seen by some to be part of a “global rebalancing process”
whereby the established global North–South axis is being super-
seded by an East–South turn, one that “holds significant emanci-
patory potential” (J N Pieterse, 2011: 22). The crisis also opened
up space for emerging economies to play an increasingly active
role in the reform of global economic and political governance, to
the extent that a “regime change” was regarded as a distinct

possibility (J N Pieterse, 2011: 22). For some, this was the
beginning of a transition from a unipolar US hegemony to one of
“emancipatory multipolarity” (J N Pieterse, 2011) in which the
countries of the South now have a position at the head table, or
even a broader underlying “global centre shift” or “hegemonic
transition” (Gills, 2011). Often this depicts hegemonic conflict as
centred in tensions between a “declining” US state and a “rising”
Chinese state (Arrighi, 2007; Anderson, 2017). The US-led capi-
talist world order of the post-war era is clearly experiencing
significant shifts in the centres of politico-economic power follow-
ing the rise of the South, but the decline of US hegemony is not
the same as the end of US power and many traditional interna-
tional donors like the US and the European Union continue to
hold significant influence. More “pessimistic” views have also
been expressed that the rise of the South has been overstated and
is firmly located within Western global hegemony, offering only a
limited, “within-system” challenge (Stephen, 2014).
This chapter examines the challenges to global governance
collectively posed by the (re-)emerging Southern donors and
questions the extent to which their rise has produced “new” or
“emancipatory” modalities of “development” or has had trans-
formative impacts on the world order. As Stuenkel (2016) notes,
many readings of the current international order are limited in
that they depict a “post-Western world” from a narrow-minded
Western-centric standpoint where the West is conceived as the
sole actor entitled to shape the norms by which the international
system is disciplined. This is often framed in terms of inter-state
rivalry, through a myopic agenda that typically revolves around
the question of China’s “challenge” to the West as a zero-sum
competition (Hirono and Suzuki, 2014: 458). Some analyses see
only an erosion of global governance’s most liberal principles
or a “wrenching [of] global relations into flux” (Shaw, Cooper
and Chin 2009: 27). Others reject the idea that the imminent
post-unipolar world will be necessarily chaotic and unstable and
argue that non-Western actors do not so much seek to under-
mine Western institutions or to question the foundations of
Western liberal order, as to forge parallel institutions (that
emulate the West) and a parallel global order (Stuenkel, 2016).
Either way a fragmentation of global governance appears inevi-
table and for some may even be creative in that it reflects the
broader forces of change in the global political economy
(Acharya, 2016).
There has also been much discussion of the idea of “socialis-

ing” countries like China and India into the current international
development system by involving them in current structures and
making them “responsible stakeholders” leading to greater norm
convergence, such that they come to value the norms that underpin
the system and eventually seek to uphold and potentially enforce
them (Narlikar, 2013). By binding new or emerging powers into
the current architecture of international development, so the argu-
ment goes, their challenges to pre-existing conceptions and prac-
tices can be managed and contained, suggesting an underlying
agenda to “domesticate” rivals (Abdenur and Da Fonseca, 2013).
Also significant here are the labels used to describe these countries
as “emerging” markets, economies or powers, as “new” or “non-
traditional” development donors or simply the “rising powers”
(Cooper and Flemes, 2013; Gray and Murphy, 2013; Six, 2009).
Many of these labels are characterised by a historical amnesia that
fails to recognise that countries like China, India and Brazil have
been active across the global South for many decades and that
their status as donors or their economic “rise” is not new and has
important historical antecedents. Grouping these actors under a
unitary analytical category also considerably downplays some of
the substantial differences between them and fails to recognise
that their individual discourses have not yet converged on a
common narrative around SSDC. They also often overlook the
significance of and sensitivity around labels like “rising powers”
within these countries. China, for example, has been keen to
counter that the “co-development” it seeks to promote overseas
is friendly and mutually beneficial or “win-win”, although this
often obscures the many parallels with Western approaches
(Driessen, 2015).
One of the most influential terms is the BRICs acronym first
coined in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, then at Goldman Sachs, which
regarded Brazil, Russia, India and China as future motors of global
accumulation, but this rests upon and reworks previous “emerging
markets” discourses going back to the 1980s and represents a
further shattering of prior meta-geographical demarcations (cate-
gories such as “Developed” and “Third World”) (Sidaway, 2007,
2013). The conceptual genealogy of the term “BRICS” can be
traced back to the investment discourses, financial industry narra-
tives, statistical tools and common classificatory regimes (which
differentiate economic performance, risk and return expectations)
used by investment banks like Goldman Sachs (Wansleben, 2013).
The BRICs concept re-narrated a specific cluster of large emerging
economies as safe, long-term financial asset providers and has since

come into widespread use as a symbol of the apparently epochal
shift in global economic power away from the developed G7
economies towards the “developing world”, along with a wider
realignment of world economic and ultimately political power
(Power, 2015). This has also been followed by a plethora of
acronyms created by rival banks, investment firms and investment
funds in search of opportunities and pastures new including the
“Next Eleven” (N-11), the CIVETs and EAGLES (Emerging and
Growth-Leading Economies), the “7% Club”, MIST and MINT.
This chapter uses the term (re-)emerging economies and
argues that rather than singling out influential players like China
(or the individual policies that led to their rapid economic growth)
it is necessary to adopt a relational view of their (re-)emergence
vis-à-vis each other (and the US as the pre-existing global hege-
mon) and sets out to contextualise their growth within the wider
neoliberal capitalist order. China’s new global role, for example,
cannot be reduced solely to an analysis of state policies post-1978,
but rather “has largely grown out of the changing nature of
transnational capitalist production imperatives” (Hart-Landsberg
and Burkett, 2005: 36). In many ways, it is too easy to single out
countries like China as an exception “without addressing the
structural and institutional forces that are driving not only China,
but also other emerging powers, to look with covetous eyes at
Africa’s natural resources and markets” (Luk, 2008: 13). To an
extent it is also necessary to look beyond the BRICS in order to
capture the increasingly significant roles played by other (re-)
emerging actors such as Turkey (Baran, 2008; Apaydin, 2012;
Shinn, 2015) or Israel (Yacobi, 2015). Arab donors such as Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE also have a long-standing history of
development cooperation in the Middle East and North Africa
which gained momentum after the petroleum booms of the 1970s
(Mawdsley, 2013). In 2011, with a stock of investments amount-
ing to US$19 billion, Malaysia was in fact Africa’s most important
Asian investor (Steinecke, 2016), ahead of China and India in
terms of the size of its FDI, although this had dropped back to US
$12 billion by 2017 (UNCTAD, 2017). There is also Japan, one of
the most well-established Asian donors, whose integrated
approach in Asia, using tied concessional loans supplied together
with technical assistance and grant aid with the aim of promoting
FDI from Japanese companies and enhancing trade, has been highly
influential in SSDC (Morikawa, 2005; Raposo, 2014a, 2014b;
Yamada, 2015). The competition for strategic influence in the South
between these (re-)emerging donors (with many fearing China’s rise

in particular) is an important driving force pushing them to further
and widen their international engagements.
The chapter focuses in particular on what the “rise of the
South” has meant for Africa and argues that this needs to be
situated and understood within the context of wider transforma-
tions in the global political economy, since this “rise” is linked to
and collectively shaped by broader transnational capitalist
dynamics (Ayers, 2013: 250). What the role of China and growing
economies such as India tells us about Africa and international
relations is thus:
not limited to Africa as a case-study or passive entity in

which changing configurations of power continue to play out
or as a region wholly bound by structural social and eco-
nomic forces. . . Today, the rise of China suggests a shifting
terrain of international relations in which Africa is at the
core, with the potential opportunity to make aggressive use
of the space created by the presence of China to exert greater
agency in the international system. (Harman and Brown,
2013: 19)
Although Africa has become much less peripheral in this

shifting terrain of international relations, Asia’s centrality also
needs to be acknowledged here, particularly in the context of
OBOR where China’s focus on its nearest neighbours has intensi-
fied. Given the centrality of energy and natural resources in the
global outreach strategies that (re-)emerging economies have devel-
oped in search of new markets, there has been talk of a “new
scramble” for Africa (Carmody, 2011) and suggestions that a new
round of dispossession is underway, entrenching highly uneven
dynamics of accumulation and leading to the production or repro-
duction of (often fortified) enclaves – enclosed areas of capital-
intensive extraction, predominantly in mining and commercial agri-
culture – alongside high-surplus labour environments marked by
displacement, destitution and “disposability” (Ayers, 2013;
McNally, 2011). These “new enclosures” are seen to herald the
intensification of primitive accumulation, deepening Africa’s inte-
gration into global extractive circuits and once again “locking” the
continent into trading in and dependency upon primary commod-
ities (Fulquet and Pelfini, 2015). Each of the (re-)emerging donors
has pursued “resource diplomacy” – a form of economic statecraft
where resource relationships are strategically manipulated by states
to obtain access to and control of resources. Indeed, resources

have been so significant in the relations these (re-)emerging
economies have forged with other countries of the South that
they have been framed as a security issue understood as critical
to sustaining their own rapid growth and economic performance.
In a throwback to the age of modernisation there has also been a
clear preoccupation with the development of infrastructure, par-
ticularly roads, railways, dams and other energy projects. The
chapter considers the twin imperatives of sourcing resources and
opening markets that have been key to the geopolitical and
geoeconomic strategies pursued by (re-)emerging economies in
Africa and is divided into four parts which consider the cases of
Brazil, China, South Korea and India, respectively.
BRAZIL AS A “CONDUIT FOR PAN-SOUTHERN

ACTION”
Historically Brazil’s domestic and foreign policies have been
entangled with development thinking in a variety of ways, includ-
ing through the “insurgent” development theory of the dependen-
tistas (e.g. Milton Santos, Fernando Cardoso and Enzo Faletto)
(Slater, 2008). In a 2004 speech to the UN General Assembly,
Brazilian President Lula da Silva quoted Frantz Fanon (“if you so
desire, take it: the freedom to starve to death”) in reference to the
common legacies bestowed by colonialism upon “those silenced
by inequality, hunger and hopelessness” (Lula da Silva, 2004).
Positioning Brazil firmly as a developing and emerging economy,
Lula’s speech conveyed a sense that Southern countries could and
should make their own decisions and take charge of their own fate
but also noted the asymmetric international structures “impeding”
development. Ideas of Brazil as a leader and builder of Southern
partnerships and coalitions, as a mobiliser and coordinator of pan-
Southern voices, as a “conduit” or “interlocutor” for pan-Southern
interaction, and a “bridge” or “balancer” between global North
and South, have been present in Brazilian foreign policy for many
years (Dauvergne and Farias, 2012). This has enabled Brazil to
“advance its own interests behind a pan-southern value-creating,
integrative fascia” (Burges, 2013: 593) as its long-standing ambi-
tion to be viewed and accepted as a major world power and desire
to gain greater influence within existing institutions have led to the
construction of “a benign, conciliatory, consensus-creating persona
for Brazilian diplomacy” (Burges, 2013: 577). Brazil’s moral
leadership and the use of “opinion-shaping instruments” have,

however, led to significant collective action on some shared
challenges such as global health (Kickbusch, 2011).
Under Lula, Brazil’s foreign policy priorities took a firm Third
Worldist orientation reminiscent of the independent foreign policy
tradition established before the introduction of an authoritarian
government in 1964 (Almeida, 2007) which explicitly and funda-
mentally incorporated cooperation around “development” into
Brazil’s foreign policy (Costa Vaz and Inoue, 2007). Prior Brazi-
lian attempts at driving national development forward through
expanded links with Africa or even Latin America had little in
the way of concrete results (Dávila, 2010) but Lula’s administra-
tion (2003–11) pushed for a more representative global govern-
ance architecture (Kahler, 2013) and spoke of building a “new
trade geography of the South” (Amorim, 2017). Lula’s foreign
policy built on previous attempts in the 1980s to diversify Brazil’s
trade linkages that used the South American trade bloc Mercosur
as a platform for reducing the country’s dependence on North
American and European markets (Dávila, 2010) and was also an
extension of some of the global positioning, reframing and coali-
tion-building strategies used during the Cardoso administration
(1995–2003), when stabilising Mercosur and South America
became critical elements of Brazil’s reinsertion into the interna-
tional community (Ban, 2013).
In quite prosaic terms Brazil has often talked up its Southern
credentials with reference to cultural diversity and having exper-
tise and technologies that fit the needs of “developing countries”,
due to greater proximity (vis-à-vis Northern donors) in terms of
economic and institutional development, culture and language (in
the case of some African countries) and even agro-climatic
conditions (Cabral et al., 2013).
To avoid subordination to the agendas of dominant countries
Brazil has pursued a foreign policy strategy of “global power
diffusion” (Christensen, 2013), forging alliances with large per-
ipheral countries and some of the leading states of the South,
regarded as key allies in building these new economic and poli-
tical geographies (Bernal-Meza, 2010) but also in facilitating
Brazil’s rise and the realisation of its foreign policy aims such as
permanent membership of the UN Security Council (UNSC). In
the past, Brazil has sought to transform the global order by work-
ing against US unilateralism (Burges, 2013), attempting to push
the US (and Canada) out of the management of South American
and wider inter-American affairs. The idea that Brazil should at
the very least be a sub-regional leader has long been part of the
conceptual superstructure of Brazilian foreign policy (Dávila,
2010), with South America consistently regarded as a platform
for Brazil’s geopolitical ambitions in the regional and global
arenas and for its competitive insertion in the global economy
(Christensen, 2012). Brazil’s recent turn to Africa is also not new
and can be traced back to diplomatic attempts in the 1960s and
1970s to establish economic, political and cultural relations with
the continent (de Freitas Barbosa, Narciso and Biancalana, 2009)
when, after siding with Portugal against colonies demanding
independence, Brazil changed its position and began recognising
newly independent African states. The presence of Brazil’s biggest
companies in Africa also dates to the 1970s when the Brazilian
military regime supported the internationalisation of domestic
companies as a means to secure resources and foster development
(Ban, 2013).
The onset of the global economic crisis in 2008 prompted Brazil
to intensify its search for new partnerships in the South. At the centre
of its attempts to do so is the Brazilian Cooperation Agency (Agência
Brasileira de Cooperação, ABC), created in 1987 inside the Ministry
of External Relations (MRE) and responsible for coordinating the
negotiation, implementation and evaluation of Brazilian technical
cooperation projects (both bilateral and multilateral), although it
occupies a relatively low-grade position in the government hierarchy
(Cabral et al., 2013). In 2003 a new working department was created
within the MRE specifically with a view to fostering SSDC with
Africa, leading to several new cooperation framework agreements
between Brazil and African regional organizations like the African
Union (2007) and the Southern Africa Development Community
(SADC) (2010). Shortly after the Lula government took office in
2003 the MRE began to organise the Brazil-Africa Forum on Politics,
Cooperation and Trade, as a symbolic event to herald a new era of
Brazil–Africa relations (Stolte, 2015). There is also the Africa-South
America Summit (ASA), a tri-annual bi-continental diplomatic con-
ference which began in 2006 along with preferential trade agreements
between Mercosur and the Southern African Customs Union (SACU)
agreed in 2009.
Under Lula’s administration presidential visits to Africa
reached record levels and the number of Brazilian embassies
there more than doubled, with the MRE facing significant staffing
challenges as a result (Dávila, 2010). Although not a member of
the NAM, Brazil has participated as an observer and has had
additional interaction with African states via the G77, where it
has played an active role. The Brazilian state has frequently drawn
on these historical intersections to construct a narrative of SSDC
that stresses Brazil’s shared history and solidarity with African
partners (Saraiva, 2012), emphasising the “special” nature of its
relations with the continent, a rhetoric that is heavily based on the
African heritage within Brazilian culture and on Brazil’s historical
debt to Africa for perpetuating slavery. The Brazilian public’s
perceptions of the continent however continue to be shaped by
representations in the media and the education system that mix
idealised “Mama África” narratives of Afro-Brazilian history with
negative stereotypical representations of the continent (Oliva,
2009).
Brazil constructs itself as the purveyor of ideas to push events
forward (e.g. around agricultural or urban development or in
relation to clean energy in the South) rather than as a provider of
significant volumes of tangible resources (Dávila, 2010: 587) and
claims that its cooperation approach is guided by the principle of
“solidarity diplomacy”, bringing together elements of altruism
(supporting those in need) and reciprocity (forging mutually
beneficial partnerships) in a horizontal relationship between
Southern peers (Cabral et al., 2013). According to ABC, what
distinguishes Brazilian cooperation efforts are their non-interfer-
ence and “demand-driven” nature, their acknowledgement of the
value of local experience and the absence of conditions and
associations with commercial interests (ABC, 2011: 3). Brazil
rejects being labelled as a “donor” (a term it associates with the
perceived vertical nature of North–South cooperation) and has
avoided the use of labels such as “failed”, “fragile” and “weak
states”, considering them to be stigmatising (Abdenur and Mar-
condes De Souza Neto, 2014). More generally, Brazil often
emphasises that it can offer its own “tested” solutions to devel-
opment problems whilst its technical and scientific cooperation
initiatives have long deployed a discourse of “mutual learning”,
promoting exchanges of knowledge gained from “successful”
social and economic development experiences (e.g. in health
and agriculture) and playing a “key role in promoting capacity
development in developing countries” (United Nations General
Assembly, 2009: 3). Brazil’s Bolsa Familia (Family Allowance)
cash transfer programme for tackling poverty and its Fome Zero
(Zero Hunger) programme to eradicate hunger and extreme
poverty, both launched by Lula, have been seen as opportunities
for knowledge sharing (particularly with Africa), with the latter
being backed by a cooperation agreement with the FAO.
Indeed, technical cooperation agreements are the most visible

modality of the country’s cooperation portfolio and are increas-
ingly used as “a central instrument” of Brazil’s foreign policy
(Dauvergne and Farias, 2012) and the one most explicitly used as
a tool of diplomatic affairs (Cabral et al., 2013). Brazil rarely
provides direct concessional loans, emphasizing instead scientific–
technical cooperation and technological transfers (Fulquet and
Pelfini, 2015). Typically, this consists of the transfer and adapta-
tion of expertise, skills and technology mainly through training
courses, workshops, consultancies, exchange programmes and,
occasionally, the donation of equipment (Cabral and Shankland,
2013: 6). Africa has been the second-largest recipient of technical
cooperation after Latin America and the Caribbean (COBRADI,
2013) with agriculture the main focus of ABC’s efforts there.
Available ABC funding for cooperation projects in Africa fell
25% between 2012 and 2015, however, due to cuts brought on
by the global recession (Mello, 2015). In Africa ABC has worked
through the Agricultural Research Institute, Embrapa, established
in 1973 to promote technological development and support the
development of the Cerrado, the vast tropical savannah of over
200 million hectares spreading across the central regions of Brazil
whose significant agricultural potential it helped to unlock. Brazi-
lian imaginaries of agricultural development have been important
in its relations with Africa and are dominated by an inflated
optimism about the power of technological modernisation that
sometimes borders on techno-utopianism (Cabral et al., 2013).
Brazil’s use of “biofuels diplomacy”, aimed at expanding the
world market for ethanol products and internationalising Brazilian
biofuels companies, has also allowed it to use its technical
expertise (in clean energy) to successfully position itself as a
development-oriented global power (Dauvergne and Farias, 2012;
Power et al., 2016).
Beyond ABC, Brazilian development cooperation with Africa
involves over 170 institutions among federal government organs
(IPEA and ABC, 2013) as well as other Brazilian private institu-
tions (NGOs, foundations and corporations) acting in a wide array
of areas including education, health, urban and rural development,
agriculture, energy and the environment (Fulquet, 2015: 90).
Responsibilities for other modalities of cooperation, such as debt
relief, concessional lending and emergency relief, are spread
across several institutions including the MRE and the Ministries
of Finance, Development, Industry and Commerce, along with the
International Trade Chamber (CAMEX) and the External Credit
Assessment Committee (Cabral, 2011). There is also the Brazilian

Development Bank (BNDES) created in 1952, the federal govern-
ment’s main financing institution which supports external trade
and internationalization and is a key ally and resource for major
Brazilian corporations such as Vale.
Brazil’s “South–South” agenda creates significant opportu-
nities for its internationalising businesses, regarded as industrial
champions and the main sources of Brazil’s export prowess with
commodities such as soya, steel, cotton and oil, often supported by
preferential credit from the state (Amann and Baer, 2003; Baer,
2008). Brazil’s biggest international companies specialise in areas
of civil construction, energy, mining, engineering and other natural
resource-based activities (e.g. Odebrecht, Andrade Gutierrez, Pet-
robras, Vale) and the Brazilian state has strong interests in these
areas, retaining control over sectors deemed “strategic” for devel-
opment (e.g. banks, oil, electricity and aerospace). The oil giant
Petrobras, for example, is state-owned whilst Vale, one of the
world’s biggest mining companies, is partly controlled through a
state-owned bank (BNDES) and government-related pension funds
(Aldrighi and Postali, 2010) despite the privatisation of Vale in
1997. Brazil’s robust and well-articulated civil society has forged
some strong and productive global links with movements in Africa
that are actively monitoring the behaviour of these domestic actors
from Brazil in Africa. Further, Brazilian non-state actors, from the
MST to the agroecology movement, have also been active in
formulating alternative framings of development and are begin-
ning to mobilise, questioning dominant development cooperation
models within Brazil whilst reaching out to build alliances with
civil society groups in Africa (Cabral et al., 2013).
In the ten years after Lula’s administration came to power in
2003 Brazil signed nine new defence cooperation agreements with
African states and Brazilian military officials have been involved
in a number of training and capacity-building exercises across the
continent (Seabra, 2014). Brazil has also recently been playing a
growing role in peacekeeping initiatives in Africa whilst “peace-
building” is one area where Brazil has sought to exercise global
leadership, championing the UN Peacebuilding Commission and
chairing it in 2015 (Call and Abdenur, 2017). In many ways these
initiatives have been beset with contradictions, however (Harig
and Kenkel, 2017), in that whilst the Brazilian government has
been keen to advance peace and security in Africa it has played an
enabling role for Brazil’s defence industry to considerably expand
and diversify military exports to African states (Muggah, 2017).
Under Dilma Rousseff (2011–16), Brazil’s foreign policy lost

the impetus and centrality it had during the previous eight years
and there is evidence that Brazil is now breaking with its SSDC
focus (Vieira and Menezes, 2016). Since President Temer took
office in August 2016, Brazil’s international engagements have
undoubtedly tilted back towards the sphere of Western interests,
with its foreign policy in closer alignment with the US. Temer’s
administration has prioritised bilateral negotiations in a move
away from Brazil’s investment in multilateralism within the
WTO and has deliberately dismantled many of the policies and
political legacies of President Lula, including key foreign policy
objectives such as building close links with left-leaning regional
players like Venezuela and Bolivia and reform of the UNSC, one
of the most important demands of Brazilian diplomacy for at least
three decades.
CHINA AS EMERGING GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT

HEGEMON
When Mao died in 1976 China was on the verge of ruin and still
coming to terms with the collective trauma of the Great Leap
Forward and the Cultural Revolution, combined with the addi-
tional threat of impending aggression from Communist Vietnam.
Since that time China’s economy has been transformed by the
privatisation and de-nationalisation of Chinese economic enter-
prises, by the opening of its markets to foreign capital and through
the partnerships its state cadres forged with transnational investors
and local entrepreneurs (Nonini, 2008). GDP growth rates in
China averaged at 9.71% between 1978 and 2015 (UNDP and
CDB, 2017: 4) and China’s economic rise has led to some
discussion amongst Western scholars as to whether China is set
to become the next global hegemon with imperialist ambitions
(Agnew, 2012; Luttwak, 2012). It has also produced a revival of
“Sinomania”, reminiscent of the Cold War constructions of “Red
China” as a focus of fear and anxiety and “a totalitarian nightmare
more sinister even than Russia” (Anderson, 2010: 3).
Japan’s ODA to China, which began in 1979, played an
important role in China’s rapid modernisation alongside China’s
domestic policies and its opening up to the global economy. For
much of the post-World War II period, Japan’s aid programme was
utilised to bolster market access for Japanese firms, expand
exports and gain access to key natural resources in developing
countries (Potter, 2002, 2009; Reilly, 2013). By the end of 1978,

Japan had signed 74 contracts with China to finance large-scale
turnkey projects such as bridges, dams, highways, airports and
port facilities, all financed with repayment in oil and all intended
to attract further private investment. Japan subsequently funded
hydroelectric and thermal power plants, urban water supply, tele-
communications, highways and fertiliser plants, sectors that
formed the backbone of China’s modernisation (Brautigam, 2009:
51). Interestingly, in the early 1990s Japan slowly began to shift
away from this approach of explicitly linking its development
assistance to resource extraction just as China (and several other
(re-)emerging donors) adapted and adopted it (Reilly, 2013), with
China’s historical experience as an “aid” recipient itself clearly
shaping its contemporary foreign assistance modalities.
China’s “going out” strategy, launched at the turn of the
century to promote Chinese investments abroad, has encouraged
a huge surge in outward-bound FDI. In 2000 China launched the
Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), a diplomatic
instrument organised around regular Sino-African ministerial con-
ferences and designed to consolidate its engagement in Africa, to
resist American hegemony and to encourage African countries to
follow Chinese pathways to development whilst containing and
limiting recognition of Taiwanese sovereignty (Taylor, 2004). At
that time China–Africa trade was US$10 billion but by 2014 it had
risen more than 20-fold to US$220 billion, although it has fallen
back since due to lower commodity prices. China also became the
second-largest global source of outward FDI (behind the US) for
the first time in 2016, representing a total of US$183 billion
(UNCTAD, 2017).
China’s (re)turn to the South, which has often been misunder-
stood (Chan, 2016), regularly invokes histories of SSDC – indeed
the principles that guide Chinese foreign assistance today draw on
historical discourses of harmonious intra-Asian relations and
notions of non-interference, mutual benefit and peaceful coexis-
tence agreed upon by Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou Enlai at Afro-
Asian solidarity summits in the 1950s, partly in response to rising
border tensions between the two countries (Strauss, 2009). Chi-
nese state actors and SOEs have also been quite adept at tailoring
their strategies to the histories and geographies of recipient states
to ensure resource, market and investment access, working with
rather than against the grain of African state–society formations in
what Carmody and Taylor (2010) refer to as “flexipower”, or
“flexigemony”. Historically, China–Africa cooperation has often
involved symbolic “friendship” or “prestige” construction projects

such as the building of national sports stadia, government ministries
and a variety of monuments to the glory of China’s state partners in
Africa (Power, Mohan and Tan-Mullins, 2012). China has also
financed and constructed the new African Union HQ in Addis
Ababa (see Figure 7.1) as a significant statement of its commitment
to the continent although in January 2018 AU officials accused
China of hacking its computer systems every night for five years
and downloading confidential data (The Guardian, January 30th,
2018). The allegations were denied by China, but the events seemed
to underline the risk African nations take in allowing Chinese
technology companies such prominent roles in developing their
telecoms systems and infrastructures.
Some US$94.4 billion worth of loans were extended to
African states and SOEs by the Chinese government, banks and
contractors between 2000 and 2015 (CARI, 2017). In much of the
debate about Chinese investment flows to Africa, however, the
size and scale of Chinese lending are often exaggerated and there
has sometimes been a failure to disaggregate the different types of
official financial flows involved or to distinguish between official
foreign assistance and more commercially oriented sources and
types of state financing. Aiming at supporting national exporters in
FIGURE 7.1 Chinese Premier Li Keqiang delivers a speech at the African

Union Conference Centre in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on May
5th, 2014. Xinhua/Alamy.
their competition for overseas sales, Chinese export credits are

subsidised and modestly concessional loans to third countries
(export buyer’s credits) or Chinese firms (export seller’s credits)
(Brautigam, 2010). There are also natural resource-backed lines of
credit (e.g. from the Export-Import Bank or Exim) and so-called
“mixed credits”, a kind of “package financing” involving combi-
nations of both buyer’s and seller’s credits and concessional loans.
Other funds available to Chinese enterprises and entrepreneurs
investing in Africa include the China-Africa Development Fund,
which had invested a total of US$4.5 billion by the end of 2017 in
91 projects across 36 countries (People’s Daily, 2018) by sourcing
private equity from the China Development Bank (CDB) (Xinhua,
2017). Indeed, banks and financial institutions have been at the
heart of enabling the state’s plan to encourage the “go-out” of
Chinese capital with agencies like Exim Bank, the CDB and the
Bank of China playing a key role in the facilitation of Chinese
foreign cooperation and investment flows. Exim describes foreign
assistance as a “vanguard” supporting Chinese exports and invest-
ments while contributing to sectors such as transportation, tele-
communications and energy (Export-Import Bank of China, 2006:
21) and its preferential loans have financed over 90% of China’s
infrastructure projects, although the Ministry of Commerce
(MOFCOM) has begun providing some investment and trade
credit financing. Chinese lending in Africa also has very specific
geographies: Angola received US$21.2 billion in cumulative loans
between 2000 and 2014, roughly a fifth of all Chinese loans,
whilst just five countries accounted for over 50% of all loans
(Angola, Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, DRC) (Hwang, Brautigam and
Eom, 2016).
Chinese lending volumes are often measured against those of
the World Bank but comparing China’s developmental experience
with the Washington Consensus is inherently political (Ferchen,
2013) and Chinese loans (which are far more commercially
oriented than those available from the IFIs) are not being rolled
out as part of a strategic attempt to challenge and altogether
replace the IMF’s public debt norms (Malm, 2016). Perhaps a
more pertinent question to ask here concerns the extent to which
the neoliberal adjustment programmes rolled out by the IFIs in
Africa have paved the way for the recent surge in Chinese
investment on the continent. Although there is a state-led “go
out” policy (initiated in 1999 to encourage Chinese investments
abroad) and whilst some SOEs are managed by the State-owned
Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State
Council (SASAC), rather than being part of a strategic “master

plan” Chinese assistance is arguably primarily driven from below
by various state-owned, private and hybrid companies, linked
predominantly to sub-national governments, seeking business
opportunities by lobbying Chinese state agencies to initiate aid-
funded infrastructure and construction projects for them to under-
take (Hameiri and Jones, 2016) (see Figures 7.2 and 7.3). This is a
much more fluid and disaggregated system than is often acknowl-
edged then, with key players jockeying to maximise their impact
on decision-making (Hameiri and Jones, 2016).
Some of the largest sectors of cooperation being financed are
transportation, energy and mining. There are close to 350 Chinese-
funded and Chinese-built overseas hydropower projects either com-
pleted, under construction or at the Memorandum of Understanding
(MOU) stage, most of them in Southeast Asia (38%) and Africa
(26%) (Urban, Siciliano and Nordensvard, 2018; see Figure 7.4).
Most of these are large dams with a capacity over 50MW at a time
when other nations and organisations, particularly those from the
OECD, have withdrawn from the dam-building industry. Conse-
quently, Chinese policy banks are becoming the largest sources of
energy finance for governments across the world, providing US
$225.8 billion globally in energy financing since 2000 (China
Energy Finance database, 2018), whilst Chinese renewable energy
FIGURE 7.2 Chinese and African workers on the construction site of a

station and railway at Libala, Angola in 2011. Dieter Tele-
mans/Panos.
FIGURE 7.3 A Chinese supervisor working for China GEO-Engineering
Corporation gives instructions to Zambian workers who dig
trenches for water pipes on March 23rd, 2007 in Kabwe,
Zambia. Photo by Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images.
FIGURE 7.4 Chinese workers stand in front of the Merowe dam in Sudan.
The main construction work was undertaken by a Chinese
joint venture company established between China Interna-
tional Water & Electric Corp, and China National Water
Resources and Hydropower Engineering Corporation. Photo
by Luis de las Alas-Pumariño.
companies are playing an increasingly significant role in Africa’s

low-carbon transitions (Shen and Power, 2017). China’s heavy invol-
vement in natural resource extraction in Africa has attracted more
attention and controversy, however, with the country often criticised
for taking advantage of the vulnerable dependency of African econo-
mies on increased foreign investment to spur their growth. China–
Africa engagement cannot be reduced to a mere quest for resources,
however, and has to be understood in the context of its wider
diplomatic strategic pursuits and global foreign policy objectives, its
efforts to sustain its own domestic economic and human develop-
ment, to ensure Taiwan’s reunification and to counter secession
drives by minority areas within China (e.g. Tibet) (Besada, 2013: 83).
There has been much talk about the unique and exceptional
nature of China’s approach to foreign cooperation. Within China
debates about a “China Model” have even spawned a mini
publishing boom (Ferchen, 2013). Here, the focus is often on
China’s “pragmatic”, “ideologically neutral” and “disinterested”
government, depicted as having successfully replaced the poli-
tical and ideological intensity of the Mao years with a simple,
“do-what-works” focus on economic development (see Zhao and
Wu, 2010; Yao, 2010a, 2010b). China has been held up as a
“model” of economic development and poverty alleviation that
other countries from the South can learn from in escaping the
prescriptions of Anglo-American neoliberalism (Stiglitz, 2002)
or as a means of “defying the conditionalities of the Bretton
Woods institutions” (Manji and Marks, 2007: 136). There is no
single, unitary and coherent “Chinese model”, however (Fried-
man, 2009), and such narratives considerably downplay the
global interconnectedness and transnational dynamics shaping
China’s economic development strategies both domestically and
overseas (Power, 2015). As it has grown, China’s economy has
increasingly become intertwined with the fate of many other
economies and its economic development is co-produced by
capital accumulation strategies both on the “inside” (in the
domestic restructuring of SOEs and macroeconomic strategies)
as well as the “outside” (in the global search for new markets
and corresponding foreign demand for financial capital) (Lim,
2010). Calling this a “Chinese” “model” is also problematic
given the extent to which China has looked to and drawn from
East Asian examples of (developmental) state practice (Power
and Mohan, 2010), or has followed the tracks of Japanese and
Korean mercantilism.
China is often depicted in much of the debate around Sino-

African relations as a “unitary rational actor” (Constantin, 2006:
17), as implied by the “China Inc.” euphemism that depicts the
country as a kind of single monolithic corporation. China is
however a hybrid assortment of institutions, practices and disci-
plines of power that have juxtaposed older elements of Maoist
governance (e.g. central planning and an ideology of socialist
paternalism toward “peasants” and “workers”) with elements of
market liberalisation in a kind of “slow-tempo improvisation”
(Nonini, 2008: 156) aimed at developing China’s forces of pro-
duction, preserving the position and legitimacy of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) and consolidating the foundations of
accumulation for China’s “cadre-capitalist” class (So, 2005).
Michel, Beuret and Woods (2009: 108), for example, very sim-
plistically liken Beijing’s role to the Godfather:
Borrow from the Chinese and you are drawn into the bosom
of its – highly profitable – family. Beijing is the Godfather,
engaged in everything from textiles to infrastructure to ura-
nium and oil. His bids are all interlinked and his motivation is
constant.
There is no single Chinese ‘‘state capitalism”, however, but

rather a loosely coordinated, sub-national network of “regional
capitalisms”, and although there are “Chinese ways” of capitalism
these are plural rather than singular and represent a range of
globally networked but distinctively Chinese “sub-models” of
capitalism or regional styles of capitalist development that
together call into question the privileging of the national scale
(Zhang and Peck, 2016). In China “state” and “business” take on
many forms according to the way Chinese provinces and busi-
nesses are organised, reflecting diverse political and business
cultures and forms of “state capitalism”. As Gu et al. (2016)
have argued in relation to China–Africa cooperation in the field
of agriculture, much state–business interaction is also informal,
unplanned, negotiated, decentralised, uncoordinated and run
through highly diversified routes, including business associations,
migrant networks and a complex range of both central and
provincial-level companies and enterprises. China has also been
changing quickly and its sheer geographical and population size
defies simple descriptions (Ferchen, 2013).
The lines that separate inside and outside, domestic and for-
eign, state and non-state and public and private in contemporary
China are blurry and it is difficult to identify where Chinese state

interests end and corporate interests begin (Breslin, 2013c). Under
President Xi Jinping, for example, the CCP has increasingly
moved to create party cells within businesses, long a feature of
SOEs but also now a part of corporate life at private companies
and foreign joint ventures (Hornby, 2017). Sinologists have
emphasised the rise of a “fragmented authoritarianism” (Lie-
berthal, 1992), within an increasingly “deconstructed” state (Good-
man and Segal, 1994), whose internal architecture is “more like
the European Community of the 1970s than the USA today”
(Breslin, 2013b: 70). Such disaggregation of statehood (the divest-
ment of power and control to semi- and fully private actors, and
the devolution of authority and resources to sub-national agencies)
has generated internal differences over external relations, not a
single “national” position (Goodman and Segal, 1994). These
fragmented and decentralised state apparatuses and quasi-market
actors are increasingly pursuing their own independent interests
and agendas overseas (Duchâtel, Gowan and Rapnouil, 2016),
generating conflict-ridden, incoherent policy output, often mista-
kenly interpreted as “grand strategy” (Hameiri and Jones, 2016).
The political economy of China’s foreign cooperation is thus not
determined by “centralized geo-graphing alone” (Gonzalez-Vice-
nte, 2011: 2).
In stark contrast to the Maoist period (Sutter, 2008), the
foreign policy duopoly of the foreign and defence ministries has
evaporated and the conventional perception of Chinese foreign
policy being decided by a centralised leadership in Beijing is
outdated (Lanteigne, 2009) as a variety of actors with an interest
and influence in China’s foreign policy-making, at multiple terri-
torial scales, struggle to exert power and authority (Jessop, 2009).
Although China’s foreign policy-making still remains highly cen-
tralised, processes of information processing, deliberation and
decision making, along with the management of foreign relations,
are no longer controlled by a handful of individual leaders (Zhao,
2008). With the growing role of economic actors involved in
China–Africa relations, agencies like MOFCOM or the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) have found it difficult to assert
themselves and the primacy of national interests (Gill and Reilly,
2007). In terms of foreign policy, the list of key actors now
includes (amongst others) China’s National Reform and Develop-
ment Commission (NDRC), the Ministry of Public Security, the
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and banks like Exim and the
CDB but also a wide variety of Chinese firms from small and
medium-scale enterprises to SOEs. Empowered to independently

control their international economic relations, provinces (many
“twinned” with particular African countries due to historical pair-
ing arrangements) and special administrative regions (SARs) (e.g.
Macau) also represent quasi-autonomous foreign policy actors,
concluding agreements with local and national states in the South.
The interaction between Chinese national and corporate inter-
ests and the partnership between the government and China’s
national oil companies are key to understanding the rapid progress
of China’s energy diplomacy (Zhang, 2015). The China National
Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), for example, is the most signifi-
cant Chinese actor in Sudan and South Sudan and has indirectly
steered China’s foreign policy there:
Without its presence, China’s involvement in crisis diplo-

macy in both countries would be minimal. Instead, in the
face of conflict in the Sudans in recent years, MOFA dis-
carded its stringent adherence to the non-interference princi-
ple by engaging in conflict resolution and urging the warring
sides not to target Chinese oil investments and personnel.
(Patey, 2016: 3)
Chinese SOEs operating in Africa like CNPC are often portrayed

as the “handmaiden” of the Party-state, working to sustain the
existing authoritarian political system and/or acting as a “Trojan
horse” to help China compete globally (Yi-Chong, 2014: 823).
The different commercial interests of competing SOEs can how-
ever result in the pursuit of market-driven relations with host
governments and firms that run counter to the foreign policy
objectives of the Chinese state (Liou, 2009). There are also
approximately 100,000 sub-national SOEs compared to just 117
(albeit often very large) SOEs controlled by the central govern-
ment (Szamosszegi and Kyle, 2011). Further, Chinese national oil
companies went overseas long before the central government
adopted the “go out” policy and many have a long history of
working in Africa, going back to the 1960s. Chinese SOEs are
also highly autonomous, market-driven entities selling commod-
ities on global markets, not simply “delivering” them to China
(Hameiri and Jones, 2016). Large SOEs may dominate in terms of
the amount invested overseas, but it is private (rather than local)
firms that are numerically superior in China’s investments in
Africa, representing 85% or so of all companies operating on the
continent, although the significance of truly independent private
companies is often under-reported (Gu, 2009). Contrary to the

assumption of a strong, directive, collusive state, in the African
context many Chinese enterprises do not have much knowledge or
understanding of the state’s policies relating to “going global” and
investing in Africa (Gu et al., 2016) and follow commercial rather
than policy objectives in deciding to establish themselves overseas
(Gu, 2009).
Questions of military cooperation and security have often
been neglected in the China–Africa literature (Alden et al., 2017).
Although China was initially reluctant to play a security role in
Africa, the protection of Chinese overseas interests has increas-
ingly been declared a foreign policy priority. Since 2004, China
has conducted multiple non-combatant evacuation operations, the
largest of which involved 35,860 Chinese employees from Libya
during the 2011 civil war in a vast, interconnected effort involving
various state actors but also Chinese SOEs such as the CNPC,
China Rail Construction and the shipping magnate COSCO
(Duchâtel, Gowan and Rapnouil, 2016). The PLA has gained
valuable operational experience in these encounters and through
its growing role in attending to humanitarian crises (e.g. around
Ebola). A 2016 Pentagon report to Congress on the Chinese
military characterises Beijing’s objectives in UN deployments as
“improving China’s international image, obtaining operational
experience for the PLA, and providing opportunities for gathering
intelligence” (United States Department of Defense, 2016: 21).
In 2012 the China–Africa Cooperative Partnership for Peace
and Security was formed, bringing defence into the FOCAC process
(Chun, 2017), whilst in June 2018 Beijing held the inaugural China-
Africa Defense and Security Forum attended by representatives of
some 49 African states. Beijing’s closest defence alliances are
arguably with Zimbabwe and Angola (Firsing and Williams, 2013)
but Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda
and Zambia also have high levels of military cooperation with
China (Alessi and Xu, 2015). Of these ten countries, six are either
suppliers of oil, gas and other critical resources or have substantial
Chinese commercial investments (Conteh-Morgan and Weeks,
2016), although China’s strategy for military and defence coopera-
tion is complex and cannot be reduced to a simple story of access to
or protection of natural resources. Beijing’s engagement in conflict
resolution and deepening involvement in regional and international
peacekeeping efforts do mark an important shift towards a more
flexible and pragmatic understanding of its traditional support for
non-interference (see Figure 7.5). This has manifested in greater
Chinese involvement in UN peacekeeping operations and the first

combat troops being deployed in northern Mali (2013) and South
Sudan (2014). China’s involvement in peace talks and peacekeeping
activities in Sudan and South Sudan has been a “laboratory” for
developing China’s diplomatic involvement in other security crises
(Duchâtel, Gowan and Rapnouil, 2016).
Paradoxically, alongside its growing commitment to African
security China is also the foremost exporter of arms to Africa with
Chinese military equipment now being used by more than two-
thirds of African countries (IISS, 2017). China supplied Khartoum
with a large stockpile of weapons that ended up in Darfur and sent
a shipment of arms to Zimbabwe in 2008 during a period of heavy
civil unrest following disputed elections (Spiegel and Le Billon,
2009). The Zimbabwean regime was also supplied with instru-
ments of opposition control such as radio-jamming equipment to
disrupt opposition party broadcasts and riot control equipment to
suppress protests and demonstrations (Conteh-Morgan and Weeks,
2016). Supported by favourable financing, more than 130 Chinese
companies are actively involved in selling their wares in the South
as China has become a major global manufacturer and exporter of
FIGURE 7.5 Chinese military personnel associated with the former

United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (now MONUSCO) work on a road
rehabilitation project to allow greater access to a power
plant in the east of the country. UN Photo/Marie Frechon,
April 2008.
low-tech, affordable firearms and related ammunition along with a

growing range of other equipment used in law enforcement (e.g.
handcuffs, riot control gear, restraint chairs, direct contact electric
stun weapons and spiked batons) (Amnesty International, 2014).
Whether in relation to military cooperation, arms sales, infra-
structure and technology transfer or humanitarian intervention,
there are important questions about African agency in mediating
China–Africa encounters (Mohan and Lampert, 2012; Corkin,
2014). This however risks unwittingly reinforcing “internalist”
explanations of African underdevelopment, implying that African
elites are in the “driving seat”, or are “copilots” in relations with
China and able to fundamentally reshape the nature of their state-
societies when the power of elites has often been confined to
incremental bargaining rather than structural change and can be
highly circumscribed (Carmody and Kragelund, 2016). Further,
“African agency” is not a simple opposition to “Chinese power”,
since the two concepts are inter-constitutive, underlining the value
of assemblage thinking which sees power residing not in actors
but in networks (Carmody and Kragelund, 2016). The varied and
often contradictory impacts that Chinese actors and networks have
on the political economy of African states and, more globally, on
the “extraversion dynamics” (Bayart, 2000) that characterise them,
require further research, however. As Chinese entities develop
transnational interests, they extend their “governance frontier”
beyond China’s territory, promoting state transformation elsewhere
and so understanding how other states experience China’s “rise”
(e.g. in terms of power redistribution, the reconfiguration of their
economies, increases in conflict etc.) requires further attention.
Existing IR approaches arguably overlook these dynamics because
their focus is overwhelmingly systemic (Hameiri and Jones, 2015).
More research is also needed on questions of “race”, racism and
racialisation in China–Africa relations (e.g. the “race”/labour con-
juncture) (Sautman and Hairong, 2016). Anthropological perspec-
tives on micro-level social and economic dynamics (Driessen,
2015; Siu and McGovern, 2017) offer a more processual approach
to China–Africa relations and are essential to understanding the
everyday sociocultural and micro-political exchanges involved but
also in complicating Cold War-derived understandings of both
China and Africa and helping to make sense of the mutual
construction of seemingly unconnected social formations across
continental divides (Siu and McGovern, 2017; see Figure 7.6).
FIGURE 7.6 A Chinese businesswoman talks on her mobile phone outside

a shop at the Chinese market in Luanda, Angola on March
31st, 2007. Photo by Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images.
SOUTH KOREA: EXPORTING A STORY OF

DEVELOPMENTAL “SUCCESS”
South Korea’s economic transformation from a war-destroyed and
largely agricultural country with a per capita income of US$67 in
1953 to membership of the OECD in 1996 is often hailed as a
remarkable “rags to riches” success story, one that is now being
offered as a “model” for other states of the global South (Kali-
nowski and Cho, 2012). Founded on a “development first, democ-
racy later” philosophy, this story is said to have particular appeal
to many authoritarian and hybrid regimes in Africa (Darracq and
Neville, 2014: 18). South Korea’s economic success during the
high-growth developmental decades rested upon political repres-
sion, however, and the historical legacy of the Park Chung-hee
regime (1963–79) has been a thorny ideological issue domestically
(Kim, 2015). As a front state in the Cold War, South Korea
secured considerable amounts of US aid, with Korean companies
gaining access to export markets in North America (Stubbs, 1999,
2005). The dynamic growth and industrial transformation of South
Korea’s economy, especially its construction firms, are attributable
not only to the actions of the Korean developmental state but to
the effects of a Cold War geopolitical economy that made access

to technological and engineering learning opportunities available
to South Korean contractors on unusually favourable terms (Glass-
man and Choi, 2014). As such “it is useless to partition the
economic performance of states like South Korea from geopolitics
and transnational class issues” (Glassman and Choi, 2014: 1177).
Crucial South Korean industrial conglomerates, chaebol, were
extensively involved in offshore procurement contracting for the
US military, from the Vietnam War era forward, effectively
becoming players within the US military–industrial complex
(Glassman and Choi, 2014).
The G20 summit in Seoul in 2010 was regarded as belated
international recognition of the country’s success story. The formula-
tion of the “Seoul Development Consensus” on how to tackle global
poverty and volatile markets through the establishment of financial
stability nets along with the “Seoul action plan” were seen as a huge
success for Korea as an emerging player and “issue leader” in the
field of development cooperation, as was the OECD High Level
Forum on Aid Effectiveness held in Busan in 2011 (Kalinowski and
Cho, 2012). In this sense the South Korean state has sought to make a
distinctive contribution to global thinking on aid and development
(specifically around the aid effectiveness agenda) and further the
nation’s “intellectual leadership” as a “knowledge champion” based
on its widely admired development experience (Kim, 2015). South
Korea has also constructed a “benign” (or at least “neutral”) interna-
tional identity for itself as a “moral nation”, partly as a means to
secure a greater stake in global norm-building processes (Kim, 2015).
As a relative latecomer in the race to secure resources abroad,
South Korea has feared being left behind by more powerful
economic risers such as China (Taylor, 2006; Darracq and Neville,
2014) and has in recent years increasingly used high-level diplo-
macy to establish strategic partnerships with resource-rich coun-
tries and to advance its own claims to be a more prominent global
power. Like Brazil and China, South Korea has also turned to the
South in search of energy security and new markets for its
companies. Faced with saturated domestic markets, South Korean
firms have been supported by state agencies offering generous
credit programmes, investment funds and tax benefits in support of
overseas resource development projects. South Korean oil compa-
nies however face stiff competition from traditional Western giants
including BP, ENI, Chevron and Total, as well as increasingly
prominent state-owned Asian behemoths such as Sinopec and
CNPC (Darracq and Neville, 2014: 13).
In recent years the intensity of debate in South Korea over aid

policy issues has grown, as has the number of actors involved in
aid policy-making (Kim, 2015). ODA (around 40% of which is
provided in the form of loans) is disbursed by the Korean Inter-
national Cooperation Agency (KOICA), supervised by the Minis-
try of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). A key reference point has been
the Saemaul Undong or New Community Movement instituted by
President Park Chung-hee’s regime (1963–79) which was instru-
mental in transforming South Korea’s fortunes in the 1970s and
regarded rural development and modernisation as key to breaking
the poverty cycle. KOICA now has Saemaul Undong replica
projects in some 21 African countries (KOICA, 2017). South
Korea also operates a “Knowledge Sharing Program” (KSP)
which aims to “export” Korea’s development experience and
expertise to developing countries, with the selection of recipients
closely linked to the list of countries being targeted by its resource
diplomacy efforts and foreign policy objectives (Kim, 2015).
There have been concerns however amongst some civil society
representatives that the KSP is “donor-centred” and involves an
“overdose of patriotism” (Kim, 2015: 78). Since joining the DAC
in January 2010, South Korea’s policy of tying much of its aid has
come under greater scrutiny and it has faced increasing pressure to
conform to DAC standards that favour grants over loans and the
provision of ODA to countries with very low levels of develop-
ment (Darracq and Neville, 2014).
Although Asia has been the primary location of Korean out-
ward FDI, Korea’s ODA to Africa in the total budget rose from
2.7% in 2002 to 23.8% in 2014 and by 2016, of the US$1.54 billion
South Korea spent on direct bilateral aid, just under a third (US
$414 million) went to Africa (OECD, 2017). This was spurred by
the Roh Moo-hyun government (2003–08) which launched a sig-
nificant programme of re-engagement with Africa in the shape of
KIAD (Korea’s Initiative for Africa’s Development), one of the
stated objectives of which is to boost South Korea’s presence in the
international community. Bilateral trade between South Korea and
African countries jumped fourfold between 2000 and 2011, rising
from US$5.7 billion to US$22.2 billion, with exports to Africa
increasing fivefold in the same period (Darracq and Neville, 2014).
Technical expertise (e.g. in agriculture) is shared through the Korea-
Africa Food and Agriculture Cooperation Initiative (KAFACI)
which provides training and education for African agriculturalists.
There is also the Korea-Africa Forum (KAF), a ministerial forum
launched in 2006, and the Korea-Africa Industry Cooperation
Forum (KOAFIC), started in 2008, which has become a platform

for private sector participation in Africa. The Korean state has also
been actively lobbying African counterparts on behalf of South
Korean companies in African markets to secure favourable govern-
ment tenders, backed by a rapidly expanding South Korean diplo-
matic network on the continent. Chinese experiences of providing
development bank loans to finance infrastructure projects reim-
bursed by natural resources have been influential in South Korea,
even though Korea has frequently castigated China’s actions in
Africa, accusing Beijing of natural resource plunder and overlook-
ing issues of development (Darracq and Neville, 2014). South
Korea also has its own Peace Corps-style organisation, World
Friends Korea, with around 700 volunteers active in 30 African
countries, aimed at “helping people around the world while enhan-
cing Korea’s brand value” (World Friends Korea, 2017). Some 168
South Korean NGOs were also engaged in international aid service
and advocacy activities as of early 2012, many of which derive
from religious associations (Kim, 2015: 74).
Seoul’s strategy (past and present) in Africa should also be
viewed “through the prism of inter-Korean relations”, since events
in the Korean peninsula were largely responsible for Seoul’s initial
diplomatic embrace of Africa and “remain a key factor in its
operations in the region” (Darracq and Neville, 2014: 8). Seoul
established its first diplomatic relations in Africa in 1961, beginning
with Benin (then Dahomey) and was concerned at the speed with
which Pyongyang had forged diplomatic relations with newly
independent African states, fearing that this would ultimately lead
to UN recognition of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
(DPRK), at the expense of the South. Further, the DPRK’s entry
into the NAM in 1976 gave Pyongyang an international platform in
lieu of UN recognition before 1991 to engage with African states, to
acquire wider recognition and to promote an “anti-Seoul” campaign
(Darracq and Neville, 2014: 8; see Figure 7.7). Pyongyang today
operates military cooperation “on a large scale” with several Afri-
can countries to evade sanctions imposed for its nuclear and
ballistic missile programmes (UNSC, 2017). This includes Angola
(where it has trained members of the presidential guard in martial
arts) and Uganda, a regional security ally for the US (where it has
been training Ugandan air force pilots and technicians), along with
Benin, the DRC, Egypt, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Libya,
Seychelles and Zimbabwe (ISS, 2016). The UN Security Council
has alleged that North Korea “uses its construction companies that
are active in Africa to build arms-related, military and security
FIGURE 7.7 The African Renaissance Monument in Dakar, Senegal,

completed in 2010 and built by Mansudae Overseas Pro-
jects from North Korea. Zoonar GmbH/Alamy.
facilities” (UNSC, 2017: 27) and indeed North Korean-built arms

factories have appeared in the DRC, Ethiopia, Namibia, Madagas-
car and Uganda. Along with competition from China then, South
Korea’s desire to counter and contain the international influence and
diplomacy of the North has been a key driver of its growing desire
to engage with SSDC, particularly in Africa.
INDIA–AFRICA DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION

Historically, India has played a key role in the making of the
“Third World” and the idea of development. During the Cold War,
Western diplomats were “put off by India’s flexible nonalignment,
which for a time was a pretext for a close relationship with the
Soviet Union” (Cohen, 2001: 66). Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the
leading figures of Third Worldism, had great admiration for the
Soviet Union’s self-transformation into a global power. Under
Nehru (1947–64), India perceived Africa as a single regional bloc
and adopted a uniform policy on the continent of colonial and
imperial opposition and non-alignment (Dubey, 2010a, 2010b).
Nehru’s notion of non-interference, articulated in various Afro-
Asian solidarity and non-alignment fora and one of the five

principles of the Panchsheel Treaty signed by India and China in
1954 (which came to the fore at the Bandung conference), was
influential in African political thought, however (Mazrui, 1980),
and continues to be influential in Indian foreign policy (Narlikar,
2013). Soske (2017) places India, the Indian diaspora and the
Indian Ocean city of Durban at the centre of the development of
an inclusive philosophy of nationalism by the African National
Congress (ANC) in South Africa. Gandhi, who worked as an
expatriate lawyer in South Africa to protect the civil rights of the
Indian community (Desai and Vahed, 2015), was also an inspira-
tion to many in Africa, particularly his doctrine of non-violence
(de Waal and Ibreck, 2013).
Even though India does not explicitly rely on the language of
Third Worldism to justify its engagement with the South today, a
strong moralistic framing of global distributive justice does
permeate its demands for ‘policy space’ and ‘development’”
(Narlikar, 2013: 605). India is however not necessarily perceived
as a “champion” of the South, despite the historically important
role it has played in various “incubators” of South–South initia-
tives, from Bandung and the NAM to the G-20, the UNDP,
UNCTAD and IBSA (the India–Brazil–South Africa Dialogue
Forum). India’s approach has also arguably not been radical
enough concerning the transformation of existing international
economic or political structures, nor has it always articulated a
concrete agenda to promote Southern interests, or the interests of
non-members (Alden and Vieira, 2005). Traditionally, India has
offered assistance to other countries through training and capacity-
building, mainly through the Indian Technical and Economic
Cooperation scheme (ITEC) founded in 1964 (Price, 2011).
Beyond the state, however, it is important to recognise that there
are many non-state and sub-state actors involved in shaping and
defining India–Africa development cooperation. Indian NGOs and
civil society actors have been very active across the continent in a
wide variety of sectors and for many years.
Jim O’Neill (2011: 73) once wrote of the resentment of
Western practices he had encountered amongst Indian elites,
“development among them”. Similarly, Indian officials have often
expressed a preference for practical projects, rather than the “more
theoretical positioning” usually associated with prescriptive devel-
opment policy (Price, 2011: 27). Rather than using the language of
“development assistance” or “aid”, India’s growing presence as an
exporter, donor, investor and financier in the global South is often
couched in the language of SSDC, partly as a way of getting past

domestic sensitivities around giving foreign aid when India itself
has high levels of poverty and inequality (Price, 2011). India is
now one of the most significant (re-)emerging donors, but it was
also the world’s eighth-largest recipient of ODA as recently as
2008 and fourth overall from 1995 to 2009 (IRIN, 2011). Respon-
sibility for the administration of ODA programmes is spread over
several ministries and, as with China, India’s assistance is still
predominantly bilateral. In recent years India has started to play a
more involved role in a wide spectrum of multilateral and regional
institutions and become a large contributor to UN peacekeeping
missions. India is known to be good at “multilateral diplomacy”
(Malone, 2011: 270) and some rationalists have argued that as
India rises, its growing integration in the world economy will lead
to a convergence of its interests with other players, with greater
stakes in the system producing a sense of ownership and will-
ingness to invest in it (Narlikar, 2013).
Indian officials have been at pains to emphasise the long-
standing continuities in India’s commitment to and engagement
with Africa. South Asians share a long, intensive and diverse
history with Arab and Swahili traders in the Indian Ocean region,
but it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that they began to
settle in East Africa (Oonk, 2017). Created in part by colonial
geographies of migration, India now has a very large diaspora and
some very strong cultural connections on the continent (Yengde,
2015; Dubey and Biswas, 2016). India’s post-colonial alliances
with Africa were initially forged during the 1950s and 1960s in
the context of debates about non-alignment and decolonisation
(Dubey, 1990; Beri, 2003). In the early stages of India’s indepen-
dence, at a time of widespread domestic poverty, it extended lines
of credit to various African infrastructural projects worth US$3
billion (Dubey, 2010). The Export-Import Bank of India (set up in
1982 for the purpose of financing, facilitating and promoting
India’s foreign trade) has since extended billions of dollars in
credit lines to African countries.
India’s FDI outflows stood at US$6 million in 1990 but
peaked at US$21.1 billion in 2008 before falling back to US
$5.12 billion in 2016 (UNCTAD, 2017) and in that period Africa
has become increasingly important to India’s economy and foreign
policy. India’s “Focus Africa” programme, launched in 2002 to
significantly enhance Indian trade with the continent, has grown
from 7 to 24 African member states. Total trade between India and
Africa was just under US$1billion in 1991 and increased almost
fivefold between 2005 and 2015, reaching US$52 billion in 2015–

16 (The Hindu, 2017). The volume of India’s aid to Africa also
grew by 57 times between 2001 and 2017 (Vivek, 2017). Addi-
tionally, since 2008 India’s Duty-Free Tariff Preference scheme
has extended preferential market access to 48 LDCs (34 of which
are in Africa) through removing import duties on 98.2% of all
tariff lines. Although Africa has risen in importance in India’s
global aid strategy, the bulk of Indian assistance continues to be
directed at Asian recipients, particularly Bangladesh, Bhutan,
Nepal (which all share borders with both India and China),
Myanmar and the Lao PDR. The bulk of India’s aid to neighbour-
ing countries is in sectors that hold mutual economic-strategic
interest, such as transport, energy and democracy (Bhogal, 2016).
Given Indian policymakers’ uncertainty about what is and is
not successful in terms of domestic policy, there seems little
likelihood of an Indian state-led strategy to export a particular
“model” of development on a large scale to other countries (Price,
2011). Rather than concentrating on state-led development assis-
tance, the Indian government has instead set itself up as an
“enabler” for its private sector, particularly state-owned firms
(e.g. in oil and infrastructure). Indeed, some 75% of India’s aid is
tied to the provision of goods and services from Indian suppliers
(Tharoor, 2016), creating considerable market opportunities for
Indian companies, products and services. Indian companies have
been active in Africa for many years – the multinational conglom-
erate Tata, for example, opened a subsidiary in Zambia in 1977
and now has 11 different country offices in Africa with interests in
automobiles, steel and engineering, chemicals, information tech-
nology, hospitality, food, beverages, energy and mining. There are
also hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized Indian
enterprises active on the continent (Alden and Verma, 2016).
Energy and the extractive industries, particularly oil, coal and
uranium, have been at the forefront of India’s Africa strategy
(Chakrabarty, 2017), with the continent seen as a possible source
of raw materials and energy to fuel India’s industrial growth and
ensure its energy security. India’s oil and coal imports from Africa
and the significance of the Indian Ocean to India’s economic
development and security are regarded as particularly immense
(Vines and Campos, 2010). Renewable energy technologies have
also become increasingly important (Power et al., 2016), as
demonstrated by the International Solar Alliance which India
helped to establish in 2015 and the key role Indian firms are now
playing in the roll-out of solar energy technologies.
There is considerable anxiety in India about China’s growing

influence on the continent and a growing desire to mimic the close
economic and commercial ties forged by Beijing in recent years.
As with many other (re-)emerging donors, India has also staged its
fair share of elaborate regional summits underlining the virtues of
SSDC. In April 2018 India announced plans to open 18 new
embassies in Africa by 2021 (in addition to the 29 embassies it
has already established) in order to further strengthen economic
cooperation and links to the Indian diaspora in Africa (Africa
News, 2018). Like China and Brazil, India also now has several
defence cooperation agreements with African countries such as
Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and
Uganda (along with a growing volume of arms exports to Africa)
(Ranjan, 2016).
CONCLUSIONS: THE “EMANCIPATORY”

POTENTIAL OF (RE-)EMERGING DONORS?
Western modernity is no longer uncritically viewed as the
future of developing countries. (Humphrey, 2007: 16)
Central to the self-representation of the West in Africa has been

the claim that its role is essentially altruistic or beneficent, in ways
that are dominated by an enduring notion of trusteeship (Mawds-
ley, 2008). In recent years, this altruism and beneficence has often
been constructed through a contrast with the purportedly opportu-
nistic, exploitative and deleterious role of the emerging powers,
particularly China (Ayers, 2013), so often portrayed as the “villai-
nous other”. The rise of a non-Western power is thus depicted as
somehow an “unknown”, an unprecedented and potentially dan-
gerous development. The solutions prescribed by Western donors
(e.g. trilateral development cooperation) are based upon an impli-
cit assumption that these donors need to be “socialised” into
multilateral fora and the “liberal” way of “doing development”
(Gallagher, 2011). There are multiple echoes of Cold War dis-
courses of the “Third World” here: the “Sinomania”, for example,
surrounding China’s rise or the idea of defenceless and powerless
fledgling “Third World” nations being “sucked” into the orbit of
these “dangerous” others who must be brought into a liberal
political and economic order through the universalisation of a
more “liberal way of development”. There are also the ways in
which these donors themselves draw on Cold War discourses of
SSDC or recall Cold War histories of cooperation along with the

revival of triangulation, where during the Cold War, developing
countries pursued relations with multiple states and played would-
be suitors off against each other. The dynamics of development
diplomacy have shifted, however, from the age of Cold War
polarity where groups of countries stuck together in blocs and
“rejected” other blocs towards “a world of numerous overlapping,
often issue-specific and quite probably fluid alliances and group-
ings” (Breslin, 2013a: 628).
The rise of (re-)emerging donors like China, Brazil, India and
South Korea has opened up opportunities for other countries of the
South to increase their influence in the world, not just through the
assistance they offer in a quest to increase their spheres of
influence and the “followership” they seek in the South (Vickers,
2013) but also in the way that they have attempted to make the
global order more inclusive, equitable and multilateral. Brazil and
India, for example, have become much more central to WTO
negotiations through the G20 (see Figure 7.8) whilst the World
Bank and DAC have been pressed into reform, potentially recali-
brating influence towards emerging powers (Verschaeve and
FIGURE 7.8 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Chinese President Xi

Jinping and US President Barack Obama stand together at
the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China on September 3rd,
2016. Photo by Wanghanan/Shutterstock.
Orbie, 2015). Although it has introduced new actors and added

new discursive frames (alongside its multiple Third Worldist
resonances), SSDC must be understood in its historical, political
and economic context, and in relation to the particular, diverse and
often contradictory interests of states and capital. Forms of SSDC
are rooted in specific state–society configurations (Gray and Gills,
2016) and within different varieties of capitalism.
What many (re-)emerging donors have in common, however,
is the way they conceive of their development assistance as a form
of “soft power”, making heavy use of discourses of SSDC to
advance their desire for a stronger bargaining position within the
global political and economic order (Gray and Murphy, 2013), to
boost their trade and to create markets and opportunities for their
companies. As Abdenur (2014: 92) has noted, “[f]rom a geopoli-
tical point of view, the BRICS helps China to counter US hege-
mony without direct confrontation” by boosting China’s
multilateralism and enhancing its reach, reinforcing calls for
change (e.g. in relation to the UNSC or IFIs) without coming
across as overly aggressive. More generally, SSDC is an important
part of how these states actively manage their international reputa-
tion through diplomacy and improve their image in diplomatic
forums like FOCAC. International power projection is, however,
relational and requires close attention to the geopolitical position
of states within the global state system, as well as to the response
that development cooperation projects elicit from “receiving”
states and the increasing capacity of donor states to directly and
indirectly alter geopolitical and developmental spaces outside their
borders, contrary to the many proclamations they make around
“non-interference”.
The (re-)emerging donors have formulated new aid modalities
which pose a challenge to traditional, established modes of devel-
opment cooperation (Six, 2009) and models of donor–recipient
relations, introducing competitive pressures and weakening the
bargaining position of Western donors by offering alternatives to
aid-receiving countries (Woods, 2008). In several cases, there is a
strong preference for working bilaterally whilst responsibility for
the delivery of assistance is spread over several ministries. China
has also actively used forms of “hybrid” financing tools, blurring
the lines between aid, trade and FDI but India, Brazil, South
Korea and others are also now increasingly making use of similar
approaches. Paradoxically, these new donors represent models of
economic success, yet they have been until very recently, or are
still, recipients of international aid, which again belies the notion
of a unified epistemic donor community. While some parts of

China boast development indicators comparable with those of
Sweden and Singapore, in the recent past there have been others
for which the analogy of Sudan or Honduras is more appropriate
(cf. Heileg, 2006). Even though officially just over 43 million
people still live on less than 2,300 Yuan (US$350) per year, the
poverty line set by the government (Chow, 2018), China remains
“an archipelago of capitalist urban formations within a sea of rural
underdevelopment” (Zhang and Peck, 2016: 64). Similarly, pro-
found socio-economic realities in Brazil and India echo the eco-
nomic chasm of the wider North–South divide and consequently
there remain very real domestic political sensitivities around
giving overseas aid.
The (re-)emerging donors have broadened the range of sources
of development finance available and have been instrumental in
establishing regional development banks such as BancoSur or the
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) which have begun to
erode the primacy of the IMF and World Bank as lenders in Asia
and Latin America. There is also the BRICS’ desire to establish a
parallel mechanism to the World Bank in the shape of the “New
Development Bank” that lends to infrastructure projects both within
the BRICS and across the global South. Consequently, there have
been suggestions of an emerging hegemony led by China or the
BRICS generally, by means of regional banks and investment funds
or through transnational infrastructural corridors such as China’s
“One Belt, One Road”. Indeed, infrastructure has been at the heart
of various forms of SSDC and this is having a range of social,
political and economic impacts across the South. This chapter has
also made the case for a relational view of the (re-)emergence of
these donors (and the different assemblages of SSDC that they
construct) vis-à-vis both each other and existing global actors that
continue to hold significant influence in Africa such as the EU
and US.
Whilst frequently heralded as “new”, “alternative” and “path-
breaking”, SSDC builds upon pre-existing forms of international
development and neoliberal policy frameworks and adds new
variants of statecraft to facilitate capital accumulation and new
forms of market socialisation (Amanor, 2013). Indeed, the (re-)
emerging economies’ reassertion of the role of the state in devel-
opment is “one of the most consequential events of the global
economy” (Ban and Blyth, 2013: 250). Despite the global trend
towards privatisation, many of these states continue to protect and
nurture their own industries and seek to make them competitive
within a global economy. They have, for example, reserved

mining and energy sectors for SOEs and maintain significant
regulatory control of these industries through interventionist
policy tools. The statist nature of their capitalisms is also reflected
in “fuzzier” distinctions between public and private sectors of the
economy. These are not the unitary states of much IR theorising
and globalisation has fundamentally changed them, reshaping their
interrelations with other states in the process (Hameiri and Jones,
2016). That these states are becoming increasingly fragmented,
decentralised and internationalised is noted by some IPE and
global governance scholars but has often been neglected in IR
(Hameiri and Jones, 2016). Partly as a result of the enduring
Eurocentrism in IR the rise of non-Western powers has thus
remained “undertheorized, resulting in an impoverished vision of
a world order where Western hegemony is no longer guaranteed”
(Hirono and Suzuki, 2014: 445). It is also necessary, however, to
go beyond the privileging of nation-states as the fundamental units
of analysis in many IR/IPE debates since such accounts of geopo-
litical competition as distributive conflicts often neglect the wide
range of other actors involved in SSDC.
The focus on energy and natural resources (and the extracti-
vist economies and enclavic developments that they give rise to) is
also seen by many as likely to only further entrench the uneven
dynamics of accumulation, extraversion and dependent relations
that have historically characterised the African continent. Some
have also questioned the transformative and supposedly “emanci-
patory” potential of these donors due to their neglect of civil
society relations in SSDC (Banks and Hulme, 2014) or key
issues like social justice and poverty eradication (Palat, 2008).
Whilst it is often claimed that these donors offer an escape from
the conditionalities favoured by established Western counterparts,
in practice projects are often tied to the use of labour and input
procurements. Thus, it has been argued that the BRICS countries
pose only a “within-system” challenge because of the extent to
which they rely on neoliberal modes of capitalist development, but
also because of their dependence on and level of engagement with
existing institutional structures (Stephen, 2014).
In a curious case of the empire taking back the theory of
dependency, in March 2018 Rex Tillerson (then US Secretary of
State) accused China of “encouraging dependency” in its approach
to Africa, arguing that its use of “opaque contracts, predatory loan
practices and corrupt deals that mire nations in debt and undercut
their sovereignty” stood in direct contrast to that of the US which
“incentivises good governance” (Tillerson cited in VOA, 2018).

Similarly, a report to the US State Department in May 2018
warned of China’s “debtbook diplomacy” where it extends huge
sums in loans to countries that cannot afford to repay and then
strategically leverages the debt (Parker and Chefitz, 2018). China
has also regularly been depicted as a “strategic competitor” to the
US and a “revisionist power” in recent US National Security and
Defence Strategies and there have been growing tensions between
the US and China in Africa, often focused on the close proximity of
both countries’ military bases in Djibouti (see Figures 7.9 and 7.10).
The BRICS group is sometimes seen as an inner cabinet, a star
chamber, a kind of “Security Council” of the G20 (Chan, 2016) but,
as with IBSA, differences between its members remain substantial. It
does not share a common geopolitical outlook and this is clearly
evident in tensions between the anti-US (China and Russia) and more
Western-friendly (India and Brazil) alignments of its members, as
well as in deep Sino-Russian bilateral security disputes (Wilson,
2015). China’s (re)turn to the South, as a form of “planetary post-
colonialism” (Sidaway, Woon and Jacobs, 2014), is also arguably in a
league of its own compared to the other BRICS and its economy,
exports and official foreign-exchange reserves are considerably bigger
(Rothkopf, 2009). The BRICS often claim to be deepening a South–
FIGURE 7.9 A Chinese warship docks in the port of Djibouti in the Gulf of
Aden on February 6th, 2016. Photo by Vladimir Melnik/
Shutterstock.
FIGURE 7.10 Chinese People’s Liberation Army personnel attend the

opening ceremony of China’s new military base in Djibouti
on August 1st, 2017. STR/AFP/Getty Images.
South dialogue on development yet key SSDC fora such as IBSA

involve only informal consultations and small-scale technical part-
nership agreements or discussions and so the depth of this “dialogue”
remains very shallow. Resources (and a common interest in resource
diplomacy) have been a key platform for cooperation among BRICS
and forms of resource cooperation, including energy security mea-
sures, commodity price stabilisation and development-focused finan-
cial agreements, have been called for in every BRICS Summit
Declaration since they began in 2009 (Wilson, 2015). The summit
culture of groupings like the BRICS or IBSA also mimics that of the
G8 and UN and struggles to get beyond “the platitudinous and empty
promises that all the established and rising powers seem to make in
various forums” (Narlikar, 2013: 601). Few observers believe, then:
that well-choreographed encounters, handpicked initiatives, or

lofty plans signify that diverse and potentially antagonistic
states are either willing or able to translate their combined
economic prowess into collective geopolitical clout. (Brütsch
and Papa, 2013: 300–301)
The (re-)emerging donors are increasingly being drawn into

transnational structures of production, denationalising their
economies and it is important therefore to contextualise their

growth within the wider neoliberal capitalist order and to explore
the internal relations, dynamics and processes of the capitalist
global political economy in order to properly locate this intensifi-
cation of geopolitical competition and the specific dynamics of
accumulation that their growing presence is creating in the South.
Again, this requires attention to the ways in which geopolitical
interests intersect with geoeconomic strategies (e.g. in relation to
the different forms of resource diplomacy that are being
deployed). Attention to South–South value chains and production
networks is also very valuable here (Horner, 2016; Horner and
Nadvi, 2018). A variety of sub-state and non-state actors from (re-
)emerging economies have become key foreign policy actors in
their own right and play an important role in driving SSDC. The
varieties of capitalism that have emerged within these economies
are designed “to take advantage of the neo-liberal global economic
system by deeply integrating with it while keeping state control
intact” (McNally, 2013: 35). Their adoption of a “neoliberal”
strategy of development has been selective and subject to transla-
tion, filtered through specific institutional, cultural and production
contexts and through actors who do not simply “cut-and-paste”
new economic policies developed in foreign “labs” (Ban, 2013).
The extent to which “new” or “alternative” paradigms for devel-
opment cooperation can really be created within this neoliberal
framework is questionable since so often the “development” being
promoted here acts primarily to facilitate capital accumulation.
Chapter 8
Conclusions:
Development and
(Counter-)Insurgency
THE EXCESS OF DEVELOPMENT
If development can be seen as a formula for sharing the world
with others, in its present configuration many seem destined to die
before their time, while others are able to live beyond their means.
(Duffield, 2010a: 57)
I don’t think we said in the Dictionary (nor today) that

developers are dead; they continue their destructive enterprise.
What is dead is its promise. (Esteva and Escobar, 2017: 2570)
[T]he winds of war are blowing in our world and an outdated

model of development continues to produce human, societal
and environmental decline. (Pope Francis, Christmas Message,
December 2017)
A S a “formula for sharing the world with others” (Duffield, 2010a:

57), it has been claimed that development has “evaporated” (Esteva,
1992: 22) and now lies in ruins on the intellectual landscape as an
“outdated monument to an immodest era” (Sachs, 1999: 1–2) or “a
mined, unexplorable land” (Esteva, 1992: 22). The shadows cast by
development are said to obscure our vision (Sachs, 1992, 1999),
emphasising the need to fracture its gaze so as to render possible the
dissemination of other knowledges. In part, the problem is that, as
Gudynas (2011: 441) observes, “development” is a “zombie cate-
gory”, not really alive anymore but not quite dead either. Yet there is
also the paradox that development “can be declared defunct and yet
in the next step promoted as the only way forward [which] is deeply
Development and (Counter-)Insurgency 297
embedded in modern culture” (Gudynas, 2011: 441). As Sachs

(2017: 2575) notes, the immodest era of expansive modernity that
characterised development at its zenith in the 1960s is now over and
this can be seen in the formulation of the recently agreed Sustain-
able Development Goals (SDGs) which refocus development away
from “progress” to “survival” and make do without the ambitious
plans for sky-high growth that were once promised, now seeking
instead only to “secure a minimum for a dignified life universally”.
In some quarters the SDGs have been heralded as promoting a
broader, more holistic and universal conception that promises to
“leave no-one behind” and that understands that “all countries and
regions of the world are interlocked in a mutual process of devel-
opment” (Gills, 2017: 156). In focusing on poverty and inequality in
every country, rather than just on extreme poverty in developing
nations, some argue that international development is “no longer
framed as an aid-financed gift to the poor” (Hulme, 2015) but rather
as an activity that all countries can participate in defining. Just as it
is declared defunct then the SDGs promote development as the best
way forward.
Many words in the development lexicon evoke futures possible,
others carry traces of worlds past but in many ways “development”
has become a sort of performative word: saying by doing (Rist, 2010:
20). A certain degree of simulative potential has always been
inherent in the declarations of the UN (Sachs, 2017: 2575) whereby
quantitative data serve to enable comparison in time and space,
constructing deficits along the time axis between groups and nations
(akin to those in Rostow’s stages of development) in a “deficit-
creation dynamic” that has given the idea of development a purpose
to exist for the last 70 years. The Human Development Index (HDI),
like the archetypal measure of development, GDP, is one such deficit
index, categorising countries according to a hierarchy. More gener-
ally, development practitioners often use an Orwellian “doublethink”
that obscures, disguises, distorts or even reverses the meanings
attached to development in order to portray failures of development
policy as successes (Brooks, 2017).
The SDGs, with the scales and indices of its 17 core goals and
169 sub-goals, clearly follow in the tradition of this “deficit
creation dynamic” with sustainability becoming (much like devel-
opment itself) a kind of shibboleth – devoid of meaning but full of
moral righteousness. Ironically development requires endless con-
sumption and much of what is important to individuals – clean air,
safe streets, steady jobs etc. – typically lies outside its field of
vision as recognised in key measures like GDP (along with the
298 Development and (Counter-)Insurgency
wider distribution of wealth within this “growth”) (Pilling, 2018).

Development experiences non-Western peoples as somehow
incomplete or lacking in the essentials for a proper existence
(Mehta, 1999) whether it be a lack of education, an absence of
capacity or the inability to use environmental resources sustainably,
absences that mean life cannot be lived properly and that call forth
development interventions and institutions as a response to this
inadequacy through a “will to improve” (Li, 2007). Historically,
development has promoted solutions in the form of externally
provided support and the moral or educative trusteeship of experts
(Mitchell, 2002), aiming to bring incomplete or underdeveloped life
to its full potential (Duffield, 2008, 2010a). In this way, develop-
ment must enrol its subjects as always “becoming”, in order to
continuously legitimise the superiority of its ideology. The ways in
which development practitioners narrate and represent these deficits
and disparities also constitute key space-producing practices that
have important geopolitical implications (Strüver, 2007).
Despite the universalising impulse of the SDGs, development
agencies still render global South and global North as if they
imply a rigid dichotomy between geographic areas and historically
established power structures (Wolvers et al., 2015). This book has
argued that it is necessary to critically engage with Southern
theory and to locate the South at the intersection of entangled
political geographies (Sparke, 2007) but also to consider its
historical role alongside other influential metageographies like
“the tropics” and the “Third World”. As Comaroff and Comaroff
(2012: 47) suggest, “the south cannot be defined, a priori, in
substantive terms. The label bespeaks a relation, not a thing in or
for itself” (emphasis in original). The global South is not a stable
ontological category symbolising subalterneity (Roy, 2014a) and
has been deployed here in this more relational sense as a “concept
metaphor” that interrupts and disturbs some of the many conceits
of neoliberal globalisation that assume a single hegemonic form of
capitalism flattening difference wherever it travels. Such an
approach brings into view the different reinventions of develop-
ment that are taking place but also the multiplicity and hetero-
geneity of capitalism’s futures, acknowledging the different
models and varieties of capital accumulation that are emerging
within the South (along with the many different forms of resis-
tance and contestation this has engendered).
Development has, since the earliest days of decolonisation,
promised to slay the dragon of backwardness and underdevelopment
but the regularly promised annulment of global poverty that this has
rested upon has proven elusive. More familiar has been a recurrent
and indignant rediscovery of the persistence of poverty and the idea
that it is a recruiting ground for the strategic threats menacing the
liberal order, which serves a variety of (geo)political functions and
helps to validate a liberal way of development (Duffield, 2001). In
this sense, conceptualising development as governmentality and
examining the way in which development creates governable objects
and spaces is particularly valuable today given the “biopolitical turn
within aid policy” (Duffield, 2010a: 55) where development and
underdevelopment are increasingly conceived biopolitically, in
terms of how life is to be supported and maintained, within what
limits and level of need people are required and expected to live or
around what minimal provisions are needed for survival (in the case
of the SDGs). Rather than building physical things or redistributing
material resources, development has become more concerned with
changing how people think or act (Duffield, 2001: 312), regulating
conduct in the name of advancing stability and security.
The book has also argued that development can productively be
conceptualised as a heterogenous assemblage or dispositif, or as a
complex ensemble of institutions, discourses, resource flows, pro-
grammes, projects and practices. The different combinations of
elements within this assemblage have particular geopolitical and
geoeconomic effects that require and reward further critical scru-
tiny. Some of the early post-development scholarship conceived of
the development dispositif or apparatus as a “machine-like” kind of
entity (Ferguson, 1999) that reproduces itself by virtue of the
unintended, unplanned, yet systematic side effects it brings about
through the institutions, agencies and ideologies that structure
development thinking and practice. The common assumption in
many critiques of development is that its projects or processes are
instigated from outside, whether through the introduction of new
values, new production and consumption structures, or new ways of
relating to nature, the social and the body, but how those desires are
internalised and articulated is a key issue here that needs to be
addressed in moving post-development scholarship forward.
Sachs, in the preface to the new edition of his Development
Dictionary, acknowledges that while development “was an inven-
tion of the West” it was “not just an imposition on the rest” and he
now recognises that the global South has become “the staunchest
defender of development” as well as the extent to which the idea
of development has “been charged with hopes for redress and self-
affirmation” (Sachs, 2010: viii). To an extent, therefore, the idea
and promise of development retains for many of the world’s
population “the potency it has acquired since the Enlightenment and

industrial revolution” (Andreasson, 2017: 2644) and it is likely that
the “ideational influence and normative power of development by
means of economic growth and modernisation will remain an
attractive proposal” (2644). Clearly then “we cannot not desire
development” (Wainwright, 2008: 1, emphasis in original). Rather
than seeing post-development and psychoanalysis as incompatible
and diametrically opposed, however, as Kapoor (2017) does, it has
been argued here that these two approaches can very productively
be combined. Following Deleuze, the development apparatus can
and should also be understood as a “desiring machine” (De Vries,
2007: 25), as a social body constituted by assembling heteroge-
neous desires (Deleuze and Guattari, 2002 [1980]). Indeed, as De
Vries (2007) suggests, this also helps to understand why develop-
ment so often fails or falls short since it relies on the production of
desires which ultimately it cannot fulfil. There is, in other words, a
certain “excess” in the concept of development that is central to its
very functioning.
POST-DEVELOPMENT, STATE POWER AND

INSURGENCY
The long agony of development as a myth is clearly end-
ing. . .. In my view, development is no longer a myth, a taboo,
a promise or a threat. It is an obsession, an addiction, a
pathological mania that some people suffer, in their minds,
their emotions or their behaviour . . . and also a tool of
domination and control. . .. (Esteva and Escobar, 2017: 2567)
The era of expansive modernity is over. The more this insight

sinks in globally, the more the talk of development and thus
also of Post-development will fade. . .. Consequently, it is
about time that someone declared the end of the Post-devel-
opment era, some 25 years after we declared the end of the
Development era. (Sachs, 2017: 2584)
Many of its critics fail to differentiate between the heteroge-

neous positions subsumed under the heading of “post-develop-
ment” and have arguably not fully grasped their political
implications (Ziai, 2004: 1058). Recalling Polanyi’s notion of
capitalism’s “double movement”, whereby market forces
unleash social havoc that in turn generates demands for social
justice, Hart (2001: 650) claims that post-development critiques can

be understood as “expressions of the opposing forces contained
within capitalism” (see also Kiely, 1999). For Hart, post-develop-
ment’s so-called radicalism is integral to the development of capital-
ism. A similar notion that post-development has somehow
“surrendered” to capitalism is also articulated by Kapoor (2017).
Although widely critiqued and condemned, with even some of its
original proponents now saying that it is “about time someone
declared the end”, post-development approaches are particularly
useful in understanding the nexus between geopolitics and develop-
ment. First and foremost, post-development scholarship has provided
insightful and productive reflections on the very meaning of “devel-
opment” and the origins of the concept, including the historical
context of colonialism and in tracing the discursive construction of a
“Third World” during the Cold War. Post-development also usefully
insists upon a re-politicisation of development and poverty and for
these issues not to be reduced to “technical problems” (Ferguson,
1990; Nustad, 2007), along with its recognition that development
studies are interwoven with relations of power and Eurocentrism
(Ziai, 2017). Post-development is also highly relevant in making
sense of the hegemony of neoliberalism but also of the complex
spatialities that characterise contemporary geographies of devel-
opment and the reconfigurations of postcolonial sovereignty that
they involve. Further, post-development envisions the possibility
of a political community that can be explored beyond the state
system (Nakano, 2007) and thus can be useful in reimagining the
state and in understanding the creation of spaces for autonomy
(Escobar, 2012). In this sense, post-development comes closest to
fracturing the development gaze and to enabling other ways of
imagining futures:
For an initiative to be considered post-development it should

contribute to the dismantling of the physical and discursive
hegemony of development so that new locally grounded futures
may be imagined and pursued. This includes freeing bodies,
minds and community processes from the pursuit of develop-
ment and opening up new socio-political spaces in which local
imaginaries can be enacted and empowered. Crucially, in the
context of foreign aid, locally based communities should have
control over the actions and initiatives of external actors operat-
ing in their locality. (McGregor, 2007: 161)
This emphasis on the local and on communities having local

control over development actions and initiatives has been seized
upon by some critics who refer to it as “wobbly romanticism”
(“only the rich get lonely, only the poor live hospitably and
harmoniously”) and “implausible politics” (“we can all live like
the Mahatma, or would want to”) (Corbridge, 1998: 139). As
Sachs (2017: 2574) has recently acknowledged in reflecting on
the early post-development scholarship, “we were opposed to
the idea of Development, in chronopolitical, geopolitical and
civilizational terms” and occasionally that opposition was
sketched in quite bold contrast through references to a single
or homogeneous “development project” even though there
neither was nor is such a monolithic or singular construction,
even at the zenith of modernisation in the 1960s and early
1970s (Simon, 2007).
Some commentators have suggested that as long as post-devel-
opment fails to offer a constructive political programme for dealing
with poverty, it will be stuck in ineffective agnosticism (Ziai, 2017:
2719) and thus remain dispensable in Development Studies (Pie-
terse, 1998). Post-development has however exerted considerable
influence on Development Studies (and other disciplines) and a
number of its central features (the intensive reflection on the study,
meaning and origins of development and its imbrication with
relations of power and Eurocentrism) have often been accepted
and implicitly endorsed, leading to a curious mixture of rejection
and integration as its radical anti-establishment position is explicitly
disavowed in some critiques, but then implicitly some of its tenets
are endorsed without giving credit where it is due (Ziai, 2017).
Post-development does however require a more sophisticated
employment of Foucault’s analysis and must understand power in
less absolute and unitary terms (Nilsen, 2016: 273), allowing more
room for the agency of actors at all levels of insertion in the
development dispositif. Although power is constantly exercised
through discourses of development and the North has long
attempted to make and mould the South in its own Eurocentric
image, development is also constantly challenged and consequently
reshaped. This requires a greater focus on the internal dynamics of
development’s “regimes of truth” and the political communities and
knowledges that they generate but also closer attention to the
heterogeneity of development and its actors and a clearer sense of
how policy ideas, models and frameworks travel, or how they are
received, reworked or rejected as they move across networks and
assemblages at various spatial scales.
During decolonisation, development was reconfigured as an

inter-state relation of governance and moved from colonial bureau-
cracy into a series of institutions of external expertise arranged “to
help and support the newly discovered underdeveloped state” (Duf-
field, 2008: 148). Where “an obsession, an addiction, a pathological
mania” (Esteva and Escobar, 2017: 2567) did quickly emerge was
around the idea of creating “steady” states in the periphery, safe for
the expansion of capitalism. Cold War modernisation mythologies
implied that in order to “catch up” or to capture the secret of the
success of wealthier states, countries of the Third World should
internalise some of their features (Arrighi, 1991), but development-
alism was plunged into crisis by the fact that many states lacked the
means of fulfilling the expectations, accommodating the demands or
satisfying the desires that the lodestar of development had created
(Chatterjee, 2004). This book has argued that the state is best
approached not as a fixed and static entity and not a thing, a
system or subject but as an assemblage of powers and techniques,
an ensemble of discourses, rules and practices, as something to be
discovered, as contingent and evolving, always emergent and
becoming. States emerge as an imagined collective actor partly
through the narration of statehood and the idea of development is
key to that process. States seeking to control and consolidate both
frontier spaces and populations domestically or to “civilise the
margins” in the name of vanquishing rural “backwardness” have
long deployed the idea of development, but territoriality is also
produced from below in “counter-mappings” to those of the state
and it is these competing claims to territory and place that can
reveal a great deal about how geopolitics intersects with develop-
ment. Territory has taken on particular significance across Latin
America in the last three decades via a range of social movements
that have mobilised and “re-invented” it as knowledge and practice
(Porto-Gonçalves, 2012; Halvorsen, 2018; Zibechi, 2012).
Infrastructures can also provide a useful point of entry here,
since they help to bring states into being, to show their strength
and power and to narrate and perform their presence and role.
Across the South, infrastructures have been enrolled in processes
of nation-building, modernisation and development and in geopo-
litical imaginaries of territory, nationhood and sovereignty and
they are also often named as a key object of struggle by social
movements. State power is in part the capacity of infrastructures
to order, arrange and make legible and they are thus key to
“seeing like a state” (Scott, 1999). Given the partiality and
fragmentation of infrastructures and access to them in the South,
examining the uneven extension of biopolitics through the govern-

mental logics of development can be very instructive in terms of
what it reveals about wider state–society relations (Bakker, 2013).
It is also productive to examine the resource–state nexus (Bridge,
2014), particularly given the rise of (re-)emerging economies like
China, India and Brazil where state-led developmentalisms (in
which resources and extractive industries figure prominently)
have returned to centre stage.
The idea of exporting development models and success stories
has a long history, beginning with the “Sinatra doctrine” of
modernisation thinking (Frank, 1997) and coming to the fore in
debates about the East Asian “developmental state” (itself the
product of intersections between development and security in the
Cold War). Development practitioners know all too well, however,
that formal models are slippery in application, finding “fraught
accommodation with the political economy of place, history,
production and territorial government” (Craig and Porter, 2006:
120). Within every development agenda there lie “invisible
assumptions” about people and places, assumptions which can be
found to “lie at the root of the litany of unintended outcomes in
developmental work” (E Pieterse, 2011: 2). Creating desires that
cannot always be fulfilled, the excess of development sows the
seeds of its own destruction. The reformist drive of colonial
developmentalism, for example, intended to avoid anti-colonial
resistance, generated the very conditions for its own demise as
state-controlled development projects created expectations on
which colonial authorities could not deliver (Cooper and Stoler,
1989). Indeed, subaltern political possibilities are “always present
and inherent in the historical material processes of development”
(Paudel, 2016: 1047) and the political geographies they create
provide valuable insights into the nexus between geopolitics and
development. Development is in many ways a dramatic and
complex struggle over the shape of futures (Pieterse, 2001: 1)
and so a focus on the different spaces of insurgency that develop-
ment creates is instructive, particularly as the geographies of
developmental empowerment and subaltern rebellion have often
become entangled and overlap (Paudel, 2016).
Attention to the geographies and histories of social move-
ments can also contribute to ongoing efforts to decolonise the
political geographic imaginaries of critical development studies
(Silvey and Rankin, 2010). There has been much talk about
decolonising Political Geography and IR knowledges, but decolo-
nisation is not a metaphor (Tuck and Yang, 2012) and is about
much more than vocabularies and imaginaries: it is also necessary

to decolonise structures, institutions and praxis (Esson et al.,
2017). Indeed, the same could be said of development – it is not
only development as a discourse or idea that requires decolonisa-
tion but also the very structures, institutions and practices that
maintain it. The approach that has come closest to appreciating
this most fully is post-development, although it has often ignored
or overlooked important questions of how race and racism have
variously been folded into projects of development. The “border
thinking” (Mignolo, 2000) of scholars working on the concepts of
Buen Vivir and decoloniality has a stronger and perhaps more
promising concern for the intersectionality of race and indigeneity
along with a valuable anti-racist standpoint, raising the possibility
of non-Eurocentric modes of thinking and of countering modernist
narratives (Escobar, 2007b: 180).
Dominant theories of social movement studies are typically
modelled on the experiences of the global North yet the social
movements they reference typically tend to concentrate on matters
involving society rather than the state, while those in the South
“tend to take a stand against the state, challenging the existing
system of control inside and outside of each nation state” (Shige-
tomi, 2009: 6). In part, social movements arise because of the
disconnect and disjuncture between citizens and the state and are
“trying to narrow the distance between themselves and the ever
more institutionally remote national state” (Davis, 1999: 609). In
this sense, as Simone (2016: 85) has noted, it is important to focus
on the meanings ascribed to notions of development that emanate
from the repositories of the marginalised “without debilitating
judgement” being placed upon them. Questions of place are key
here in understanding this “anti-geopolitics”, or “geopolitics from
below” (Routledge, 2017) and its role in reshaping development,
since “if we are to understand the social movements in the South –
the conditions in which they have emerged, their strategies and their
reach – we must look at the particular socio-political, institutional
and economic contexts in which they are rooted” (Polet, 2007: 1). It
is also productive in mapping the contested geographies and geo-
politics of development to examine the tensions and contradictions
in development between hegemonic (state) “discourses of control”
and oppositional “discourses of entitlement” (as articulated by
social movements) (Nilsen, 2016: 272).
There are now thousands of alternatives to and beyond devel-
opment, a position of “One No and Many Yeses”, to reference the
Zapatistas’ notion of creating a world in which many worlds can
be embraced (Esteva and Escobar, 2017). Social movements have

skilfully linked localised struggles to the dynamics of global
power structures and mobilised to achieve progressive changes
across spatial scales but are also playing a key role in democratising
development and promoting more participatory and deliberative
forms of political decision-making, although popular struggles
have often quickly been diminished and co-opted by states. Non-
state-centred terrains have historically been important spaces of
resistance and destabilisation of the development project (cf. Esco-
bar, 2008) but social movements do not always seek an outright
rejection of development in its entirety, often seeking instead to
negotiate and change its meaning and direction (Nilsen, 2016).
Resistance and insurgency are also not simply assertions of other-
ness that reject development outright but are tangled up with desires
for equality, dignity and redress and are practices of meaning- and
claims-making hinging on oppositional appropriations.
RE-CENTRING AFRICA AND DEVELOPMENT IN

POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY AND IR
Global development can in its most general sense be understood
as an improvement in the quality of international relations.
(Hettne, 2010: 50)
As Hettne (2010) correctly observes, development is in many

ways about seeking to improve the quality of international rela-
tions. Subaltern geographies of development have, however, often
been neglected in both IR and Political Geography given their
established focus on the core of the world system, as have the
multiple forms of subaltern geopolitics associated with social
movements in the South, but this book has called for a greater
engagement with the complex and rich experiences and scholar-
ship of different places and for engaging with other geopolitical
traditions, knowledges and ways of thinking about the political.
What is also required is a greater degree of engagement with the
various historical entanglements between tropicality, orientalism
and geopolitics, with the Cold War “area studies complex”, with
the histories, spaces and sites of diplomacy around modernisation
(or SSDC) and with the military origins of development thinking.
The book has also argued for the need to better understand the
spaces, networks and circuits for international and transnational
scholarly work through which knowledges of development and
geopolitics flow and has sought to “provincialise” and “post-

colonialise” Political Geography through a focus on Africa, partly
as a way of challenging the view of the continent as essentially
inadequate, a place of systemic failure in terms of its ability to
engage with and partake in the modern world (Andreasson, 2017).
The decolonial approaches pursued by scholars like Arturo Esco-
bar and Walter Mignolo attempt to go further by switching away
from this post-colonial provincialising of Western claims and
instead seeking to rethink the world from Africa, from Latin
America, from indigenous places and from the marginalised aca-
demia of the global South (Grosfoguel, 2010; Radcliffe, 2017).
In many ways, “development has always existed in relation to
a state of exception” (Duffield, 2007a: viii) and usually it is
insecure, collapsed, weak and fragile states (particularly in
Africa) that provide the “other” against which model, steady
states in the periphery are imagined and constructed. As Duffield
(2001, 2007a) shows, the anxieties caused by the disavowal of the
object produce all sorts of images of the Third World as a
phantasmic obscene space of excess and abjection, representing
everything that the West is not. Through their predominant focus
on Western states, IR and Political Geography have also perhaps
unwittingly played a role in the normalisation of particular states
as the benchmark for analysis and in the creation of certain
assumptions and teleological arguments in which states in the
South can be depicted as “deviant”, “weak” or “failing”, with no
“real” sovereignty. The legacies of their imperial and orientalist
histories have meant that both IR and Political Geography have
been slow in showing how many of the fundamental assumptions
that fortify discourses of statehood, state failure and good govern-
ance have an orientalist makeup and colonial trajectories. From
the different colonial governmentalities and developmentalisms
and the resistances they engendered to the post-colonial challenges
of taking over and transforming colonial bureaucracies, colonial
constructions and spatialisations of the state have had significant
and enduring consequences. They are an example of what Ann
Stoler (2016) terms imperial “durations”: the hardened, still-pre-
sent traces, constraints and confinements of empire that continue
to impact in the contemporary moment.
In many ways Africa has had something of an “ambivalent,
tension-filled relationship” to the discipline of IR (Abrahamsen,
2017: 125) and scholars of Africa routinely accuse the discipline
of sins of omission and misapprehension given the preoccupation
with great power politics and the states seen as making the most
difference. On both sides, however, there are now growing efforts

at dialogue and mutual learning, with ambitions to “bring Africa
in from the margins”, to demonstrate the “lessons” IR can learn
from Africa and to include more Southern voices. Yet, as Abra-
hamsen (2017: 130–131) argues, Africa does not enter the disci-
pline of IR as a neutral object of study but is instead already
overdetermined and embedded in diverse struggles. The function
of then adding a series of African cases or illustrations to IR (of
“add Africa and stir”) does not fundamentally change or challenge
theories and deeper assumptions of what constitutes “the interna-
tional”. In this sense:
An African IR would be just another provincial IR, a substitute

or evil twin of a Western IR, and would do little to facilitate the
development of theoretical concepts and frameworks that allow
us to theorize the international or the global – wherever it may
be located. (Abrahamsen, 2017: 127)
In many ways post-development “has had little to say about

Africa” (Matthews, 2004: 374) and all too often Africa is seen as
only acted upon, but if combined with assemblage thinking it is
possible to study Africa simultaneously as a place in the world and
of the world, i.e. in a manner that appreciates its specificity and its
globality (Abrahamsen, 2017) and that recognises the interdepen-
dence of both the unique local social relations and the global spatio-
historical context in which African places are situated (Massey,
1993). As opposed to regarding them as ontologically given, this
perspective understands politics and society in any location as
assembled from “a multiplicity of actors, actants, knowledges,
norms, values, and technologies, some local, some global, some
public, and some private” (Abrahamsen, 2017: 133). The “interna-
tional”, as IR’s object of study, is thus potentially found in any
location and can be traced in its specificity from the ground up in
assemblages that “inhabit national settings but are stretched across
sovereign boundaries” (Abrahamsen, 2017: 133). By studying
Africa from the ground up, as it is being constantly assembled by
a multiplicity of local and global forces, the continent’s politics and
societies can be captured as both unique and global or as a
“window on the contemporary world and its articulation in particu-
lar settings” (Abrahamsen, 2017: 127). What is also helpful in
studying Africa from the “ground up” is a more “grounded”
approach to the place-specific “micro-geopolitics” (Dwyer, 2014)
and local histories and actors that shape how development is
received, experienced and encountered in particular landscapes and

by different populations, along with greater attention to its “every-
day geographies” (Rigg, 2007).
MODERNISATION AND COLD WAR

GEOPOLITICS
Much of the institutional architecture of development was formed
in the Cold War period and was consequently closely shaped by
foreign policy priorities and objectives. The Cold War was fought
not just with military hardware but with competing models of the
modern and different ideas of the correct pathways to develop-
ment, with loans and grants and with technicians and planners. For
Walt Rostow, underdevelopment was a danger to “infant” nations
and foreign aid was nothing less than a “weapon” in the US
strategic arsenal that should be used as a foreign policy tool to
advance US national security objectives. Conversely, foreign aid
programmes from the socialist, Second World became a way of
fomenting revolution and resistance to US imperialism in the
Third World. Consequently, the idea of modernisation was shot
through with geopolitical discourses, practices and imaginaries.
My intention here has been to illustrate that modernisation was a
global, transnational project, shaped by a variety of places, pro-
jects and individuals, not just following from the West to the Rest
or a US export. At the height of the Cold War battle for supremacy
and ideological influence, a variety of competing models of moder-
nisation were on offer but it was not always a straightforward
choice between them – recipients often selectively appropriated
elements of the approaches taken by different donors, sometimes
combining elements of state planning, cooperatives and state farms,
with US models of rural development. In this way it is important to
recognise that Third World peoples and political leaders were able
to negotiate the multiple modernities and political geographies of
the Cold War in various ways.
The foreign aid programmes set up in pursuit of modernisa-
tion had a variety of geopolitical impacts on recipient states,
becoming an important part of domestic security arrangements
and a tool that recipient governments used to stabilise social and
political relations at home (Hyndman, 2009) but also enabling
various regimes to consolidate their grip on power through, for
example, the modernisation of domestic military and police forces.
Cold War foreign aid was in many ways all about conversion –
transforming recipient states into a model of the modern fashioned

in the donor’s own image, persuading them of the pitfalls of
communism or capitalism and transforming their economies,
infrastructures and state institutions in the process. The pursuit of
modernisation through foreign aid was also all about convergence
as it was believed that industrialisation and the transfer of tech-
nology and modern values would pull all recipient nations towards
a common point (modern, industrial societies), thus creating
steady statehood and political order in the periphery.
Across the Third World, roads, railways, airports, schools,
hospitals, factories, textile mills, state farms and river basin
development projects were constructed that were heavily deter-
mined by geopolitical considerations. From Afghanistan to
Angola, what began to emerge were a number of Cold War
“tournaments of modernisation” (Cullather, 2002: 530) where
different models of modern development were enacted and show-
cased by donors. Aid quickly became a tool to reward allies and
prevent threats emerging and in the pursuit of wider geopolitical
aims of dominating, pacifying, protecting, strengthening or trans-
forming recipient countries. In many ways, the result was a
massive and widespread militarisation of the Third World. What
followed was a bloody arc of US-backed military coups that
stretches from Iran in 1953 (via Guatemala, Congo and Indonesia)
to Chile in 1973, as the US sought to constrain transgressions of
the narrow limits of capitalist nation-building (see Silver and
Slater, 1999). Along with the US, China, the USSR and Cuba
also intervened in a range of Third World conflicts but also often
lacked sufficient understanding of the recipient contexts or of the
complex nature of the struggles they had entered.
The Cold War around modernisation and development was also
fought through popular geopolitics and propaganda wars for hearts
and minds where donors sought to narrate the “progress” their
assistance was enabling through popular geopolitical texts including
films, radio programmes, comics and posters and which created
significant affective communities, as in the idea of “Red Africa”
created in Soviet propaganda (Nash, 2016). In particular, US attempts
to modernise the Third World were all about defining America and
Americans and in this sense foreign aid also provides a valuable
“window into the national political soul” (Taffet, 2007: 4) and reveals
a great deal about the values and world view of donors. US theory
and practice on modernisation were also framed as much by events
domestically as internationally. The establishment of domestic wel-
fare states in the 1930s and 1940s in particular paved the way for the
foreign aid regime (along with the Marshall Plan) and the willingness
to consider governmental programmes of assistance to people over-
seas. Modernisation theorists and practitioners became obsessed with
that which had worked elsewhere (Andreasson, 2010) and transfer-
ring these “lessons” and models to the periphery, to the point that
what would work in recipient countries almost became of secondary
importance. In drawing out such “lessons” and exemplars, Cold War
donors often drew upon domestic experiences of modernisation and
development (such as the Tennessee Valley Authority or Virgin
Lands campaign). Projections of the spheres of influence that each
power was building in the Third World were however never as
unified, constant or unilateral as mapmakers suggested and the reality
was a far more complex and dynamic patchwork of shifting alle-
giances. Interest peaked and troughed at different historical moments
and was always subject to a wide range of national, regional and
global geopolitical dynamics. Projects were to an extent supply-led
but were also very much demand-driven, but frequently struggled
with issues of implementation and were often resisted and reworked
by recipients and intended beneficiaries whilst their reception “on the
ground” was far more complex than anticipated by those who dreamt
them up.
DEVELOPMENT AND PACIFICATION

It is important to remember that the idea of development took shape
in the context of a military power struggle among emerging states in
a turbulent and industrialising Europe (Cowen and Shenton, 1996)
and from its very beginnings development intended “to compensate
for the negative propensities of capitalism through the reconstruc-
tion of social order” (111). With its in-built sense of design,
“development” has thus always represented forms of mobilisation
associated with order and security (Duffield, 2002). With its pro-
mise of redemption through making full and wholesome what
would otherwise remain incomplete, development has a long his-
tory then as a strategic response to various threats, a role that is still
not widely appreciated since as a practical technology of security,
development exists in the here and now and its benefits are always
cast as a future yet to be realised (Duffield, 2008). Recalling the
competing development projects put forward by colonial states and
anti-colonial movements in the death throes of empire, Cullather
(2009: 509) argues that:
At the theoretical level, development was a generic, universal

vaccine against communism in postcolonial settings, but at the
level of implementation it looks more like a kind of combat,
an exchange of economic and administrative thrusts and
counterstrokes aimed at specific political goals.
This notion of development as a “kind of combat”, involving

“thrusts and counterstrokes” aimed at fulfilling political objectives,
goes to the very core of the geopolitics–development nexus.
The sense that development could be used as a kind of antidote
or “vaccine” to counter the “contagion” of insurgency and disorder
in the Third World was very much a product of the age of
decolonisation and the Cold War. During this time development
became ever more closely associated with pacification, with the
government and management of restless rural populations and with
the restoration of political order and stability (Attewell, 2017),
typically attempted (e.g. by agencies like USAID) through a series
of villagisation, resettlement and infrastructure projects. Such
schemes illustrate the presence of an emerging governmental
rationality where development increasingly came to be fashioned
as a set of biopolitical compensatory and ameliorative technologies
of security (Duffield, 2006b), seeking to accomplish stable rule by
creating certain sorts of governable subjects and objects (Watts,
2003). The word pacification originates from the Latin pacificare
meaning “to make peace” but as a locus of disciplinary (bio)power
the primary concern of development has often been about violently
fixing potentially insurgent populations within an extended archi-
pelago of highly securitised spaces (Duffield, 2007a, 2008, 2010a).
The Third World has long been constructed as a space of
insurgency but was also an important source of insurgent theory
and alternative geopolitical imaginations. In particular, questions
of “race” (and other axes of difference) played a key role in the
mobilisation of those who sought to rework the meanings of
development (Prashad, 2007). The theme of poverty reduction
also came to be closely linked to widespread anxieties about
racialised violence in American cities and the wars of insurgency
in the global South (Roy and Crane, 2015). The Third World was
never a place, however, but was an ideological project, conceived
in various locations and refracted through distinctly different
routes and through various socio-cultural contexts. An exaggerated
aura of permanent insecurity and chaos was ascribed to the “Third
World” (and more recently the global South), stoking a “geopo-
litics of fear” that this chaos and insecurity will “leak” out into
Western homelands or that its peoples will “invade” or “infect”

donor countries in the North if adequate aid transfers are not
provided. In constructing and producing the threat of a crisis,
various enforcement measures to eliminate them, to “liberate”
others and to guide them to the trappings of liberal democracy
and capitalist development, are sanctioned and enabled. This has
been a key feature of the “security–development nexus” which
itself can be understood as a dispositif or “constellation of institu-
tions, practices, and beliefs that create conditions of possibility
within a particular field” (Slater, 2008: 248). Here, development
has found a reinvigorated and renewed purpose in the context of
post-Cold War violence and insurgency, increasingly being trans-
formed into conflict resolution and a technology of counter-insur-
gency (Duffield, 2007a, 2008). The idea of development as a form
of containment has been rehabilitated and instead of anti-colonial
resistance or communist contagion, the focus is on containing
terrorist insurgencies and the mobility of underdeveloped life
given the global outlawing of spontaneous or undocumented
migration which has seen a shift in the focus of security from
states to the people and movements based within them. The
“shotgun marriage” between development and security (Luckham,
2009) has further blurred the contours of the shapeless, amorphous
and amoeba-like entity of development but crucially it also con-
stitutes a field of development and security actors, aid agencies
and professional networks that call forth the conditions of need
and insecurity they seek to provide solutions for and then inter-
vene upon.
Rather than upholding a threatened state or rebuilding a fail-
ing one, recent interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have sought
to break and then remake the state and thus comprise a different
model of militarised power, that of “reconstruction as war”
(Kirsch and Flint, 2011), which constitutes a fertile arena for
pursuing a critical analysis of geopolitics but also the intertwining
of the geopolitical and geoeconomic in contemporary develop-
ment. Military setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan have also reig-
nited a long-dormant interest in development-based counter-
insurgency (Duffield, 2010a) as the US has sought to stem the
spiralling violence and this has involved a rediscovery of colonial
wars of counter-insurgency such as those of Malaya and Algeria.
The transfer of counter-insurgency techniques and knowledges
between these very different spatial and temporal contexts
deserves much further critical attention, however. Palestine, for
example, has historically served as an important stage for the
consolidation of British imperial policing and pacification strate-

gies (and later as a testing ground for Israeli experiments in
asymmetric warfare and demographic engineering) whilst the
counter-insurgency techniques honed by the British Army in
Africa were subsequently used in countries like Northern Ireland
and Cyprus (Hughes, 2013). US imperial violence in Vietnam,
where “population-centred” approaches foregrounded development
as key to counter-insurgency and pacification, has also been a key
reference point. This “armed social work” again involves exten-
sive efforts to reconfigure biopolitical landscapes, only this time it
is supposedly more humane, culturally sensitive counter-insur-
gency. Indeed, US imperial endeavours slip between exemplary
or performative forms of violence meant to intimidate and more
“humane” and developmental warfare intended to persuade (Kha-
lili, 2012: 4). In particular what stands out here is the increasing
role of military actors in development, which characterises the
“humanitarian present” (Weizman, 2011) where various techno-
cratic collusions occur among those working to aid the vulnerable
and those who mete out state violence in the name of security.
This militarisation of development sees humanitarian language
increasingly recruited to justify military operations but also a
growing role for military actors in the design and delivery of
foreign assistance, where, for example, reconstruction is
embedded within combat brigades, becoming explicit tactics for
countering an insurgency.
In recent years the US has increasingly focused attention and
its foreign aid programmes on Africa’s “ungoverned spaces” and
“failed states”. Consequently, Africa’s fragility has become highly
securitised – its problems seen as threatening to US national
security, and its insecurities placed in the context of the War on
Terror. The US has always adopted a militarised foreign policy
towards Africa (Majavu, 2014) and in constructing the continent
as a “swamp of terror” contemporary US engagement in Africa
has become increasingly obsessed with security issues, particularly
counterterrorism, counter-piracy and efforts to resolve internal
conflicts. In particular, the idea of “stability operations” builds on
and exceeds counter-insurgency thinking but also further nor-
malises military engagement in the fields of development and
governance. US civil affairs forces now increasingly pursue an
“indirect” and “population-centred” approach using humanitarian
assistance (from medical care to infrastructure projects) as a form
of “security cooperation” through a panoply of aid projects, aimed
at winning the hearts and minds of Africans and so reducing the
lure of extremist ideologies associated with groups such as Boko

Haram and Al-Shabaab whilst improving US visibility, access and
influence with foreign military and civilian counterparts.
The US military publicly insists its efforts in Africa are small
scale, no more than a “light footprint”, but there is no doubt that
the various elements that make up the US military assemblage in
Africa have expanded considerably with an increasing network of
surveillance and drone bases tracking and targeting jihadist groups
taking root in “weak” states. Such strategies have important
consequences for African states as some of the continent’s poli-
tical and military elites have sought to bind themselves to AFRI-
COM’s counterterrorism assemblage as a means of better securing
their own authority (Moore and Walker, 2016). There are however
no clear battlefields and officially recognised combat zones in this
age of “everywhere war”, only multidimensional and fluid “battle-
spaces” (Graham, 2009), and shadowy campaigns against non-
state actors in “borderlands”, whilst the nature of insurgencies
(and the relations they have with the impoverished populations
amongst whom they are embedded) is also changing.
In this context USAID has become a part of the national-
security structure along with its ever more ambitious ventures into
the domestic security environments of recipient countries, becom-
ing a kind of “quasi-security” agency concerned with crafting
particular kinds of states and promoting political order and stabi-
lity in the interests of US national security. The DoD is also
increasingly preoccupied with addressing the roots of instability
and extremism in “weak” and “failing” states and preventing their
collapse into conflict by building counterterrorism capabilities,
which operate alongside USAID’s historical efforts to enhance
the capabilities of civilian police and paramilitary forces in the
name of long-term “institution building”. Foreign aid is however
not a story featuring only nation states as the actors or one-way
coherent flows of money and may be more effectively conceptua-
lised in terms of a set of complex networks, networked elements
or assemblages, constituted by flows of capital, knowledge, influ-
ence, practices, material objects and people (Roberts, 2014). Key
network or assemblage elements in US foreign assistance include
multiple government agencies, contractors, industry organisations
and lobbyists, as well as the actual contracts, sub-contracts, grants
and procurements. Thinking of foreign aid in terms of the “secur-
ity–economy nexus” provides a better understanding of the var-
ious ways in which US geopolitical interests intersect with
geoeconomic strategies, or of how geopolitical forms are
“recalibrated by market logics” (Smith and Cowen, 2009: 24).

These long-standing geopolitical priorities related to the promo-
tion of security, democracy and liberal peace have increasingly
overlapped and intersected with the neoliberal agenda around aid
effectiveness (Duffield, 2008), but also with wider projects of
neoliberalisation that involve making countries “safe” for the
passage of US capitalism. In this sense, USAID (as with many
other Western agencies involved in aid disbursement) is increas-
ingly embroiled in the machinations of the global neoliberal roll-
out (Essex, 2013).
SSDC AND THE CHANGING DYNAMICS OF

DEVELOPMENT DIPLOMACY
In addition to Africa’s growing prominence in international rela-
tions, the continent has also been vociferously courted by a variety
of (re-)emerging economies. In many ways, the self-representation
of the West in Africa continues to be dominated by an enduring
notion of trusteeship, but Western development interventions are
today increasingly constructed as altruistic and beneficent in con-
trast to the supposedly opportunistic, exploitative and deleterious
role of the (re-)emerging powers, particularly China (Ayers, 2013),
so often portrayed as the “villainous other” in ways reminiscent of
Cold War Sinomania. Here, the rise of a non-Western power like
China is depicted as somehow an “unknown”, an unprecedented
and therefore potentially dangerous development. This has been
further fuelled by an escalating trade war between the US and
China, with the Trump administration seeking to justify the
imposition of import tariffs on Chinese goods on the grounds of
national security. There has also been an assumption that these
donors need to be “socialised” into multilateral fora and the
“liberal” way of “doing development” (Gallagher, 2011) and that
as they rise, growing integration in the world economy will lead to
a convergence of interests with other players since greater stakes
in the system will produce a sense of ownership and a stronger
willingness to invest in it.
In part these represent attempts to contain the challenge of the
“rising powers” but there are also multiple echoes of the Cold War
here. This includes various depictions of China’s rise as threaten-
ing and alarming and the idea of a defenceless and powerless
“Third World” being “sucked” into the orbit of “dangerous” others
who must be brought into a liberal political and economic order
through the universalisation of a more “liberal way of develop-

ment”. There has also been a revival of Cold War discourses of
South–South cooperation, constructing visions of horizontal, less
hierarchical and more equal interaction and development coopera-
tion that are mutually beneficial or “win-win”. The “triangulation”
of foreign aid during the Cold War, where recipient countries
pursued relations with multiple states and played would-be suitors
off against each other, has also made something of a return in
many African states. The dynamics of development diplomacy
have shifted since the age of Cold War polarity, however, and
rather than fixed bloc-type alliances, there has been a rise of
multiple, overlapping and fluid alliances, issue-specific groupings
and constellations of power (Breslin, 2017).
Soon after the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 some obser-
vers proclaimed the end of late development and suggested it
would lead to a reassertion of the West’s political and economic
dominance over the South, yet the origins of the contemporary
global financial crisis lie in the West itself and this has clearly
undermined the credibility of Western models and institutions
(such as the IFIs) to prescribe the pathway to successful economic
growth (Gray and Murphy, 2013). The old order of global devel-
opment, predicated upon a vertical donor–recipient relationship, is
clearly in decay, with key actors like the DAC facing a crisis of
legitimacy. The consequent fragmentation of global governance
appears inevitable and for some observers may even be creative
(Acharya, 2016), opening up space for emerging economies to
play an increasingly active role in the reform of global economic
and political governance.
Many of the claims made in the name of SSDC and the
narratives of solidarity that they rely on are reminiscent of Third
Worldist coalitions and diplomatic traditions of the past with their
references to harmonious intra-Asian relations and notions of non-
interference, mutual benefit and peaceful coexistence. Indeed,
SSDC must be understood in its historical context, and as rooted
in specific state–society configurations and different varieties of
capitalism. The elaborate summits staged by India or Japan
intended to mimic those of China, to boost international presence
and to woo African partners by underlining commitment to the
virtues of SSDC, often reference Bandung and other Third Worl-
dist summits and such sites and spaces of diplomacy deserve
further critical scrutiny. Much of the debate about these donors is
characterised by a historical amnesia however and there remain
very substantial differences between them whilst their individual
discourses are yet to converge around common narratives. Fre-

quently heralded as “new”, different and “path-breaking”, SSDC
builds upon pre-existing forms of international development and
neoliberal policy frameworks and adds new variants of statecraft
to facilitate capital accumulation and market socialisation. The
extent to which “new” or alternative paradigms for development
cooperation can really be created within this neoliberal framework
is questionable. Many of these donors have also neglected civil
society or key issues like social justice and poverty eradication,
which also provides grounds upon which to question their suppo-
sedly “transformative” or “emancipatory” potential.
The rise of the South has increasingly been heralded as reshap-
ing the global economic landscape and credited with creating “new”
international economic geographies, or in the words of former
Brazilian President Lula, a “new trade geography of the South”.
Certainly, (re-)emerging economies have introduced competitive
pressures into the existing world of development assistance, weak-
ening the bargaining position of Western donors by widening the
options available to aid-receiving countries, although this has varied
both spatially and temporally but also in part due to commodity
cycles (Carmody, 2011). They have also broadened the range of
sources of development finance on offer (through regional develop-
ment banks that are beginning to erode the primacy of the IFIs as
lenders in Asia and Latin America) and challenged the traditional
configuration and discourse of “donor–recipient” relations. These
“new” aid modalities have blurred and loosened the definition of
what constitutes “aid” and are often characterised by a diffusion of
responsibility for ODA programmes across several state agencies.
Indeed, one of the characteristic features of SSDC is the huge range
of actors involved: Brazilian development cooperation with Africa,
for example, involves over 170 institutions including federal gov-
ernment organs and private institutions (NGOs, foundations and
corporations). It is also necessary however to go beyond the
privileging of nation-states as the fundamental units of analysis
here in order to recognise the growing number of transnational
connections being forged through SSDC by a range of non-state
actors (e.g. civil society groups).
In some ways there is a sense that these donors are providing
something more practical and less prescriptive in contrast with
Western aid and it also appears that ODA from OECD countries is
of declining importance and attraction, although this changing
picture is subject to significant regional variation. It is often claimed
(re-)emerging donors offer an escape from the conditionalities
favoured by established Western counterparts, although in practice

projects are often tied to the use of labour and input procurements.
Further, the summit culture of groupings like the BRICS or IBSA
mimics that of the G8 in a variety of ways but specifically in
struggling to get beyond the platitudinous and the empty rhetoric
and promises. To an extent then the rising significance of these
actors is located within Western global hegemony in offering only a
limited, “within-system” challenge given their level of engagement
with and dependence upon existing institutional structures (Stephen,
2014) and the continuing predilection for neoliberal modes of
capitalist development. It is also misleading to suggest that these
actors have essentially completely superseded existing actors and
hegemons – the decline of US hegemony is not the same as the end
of US power and many traditional international donors like the US
and the EU continue to hold significant influence in the framing and
practice of global development in regions like Africa.
Many of the (re-)emerging economies portray themselves as
both “developing country” and “champion of developing nations”
and deploy a discourse of “mutual learning”, promoting exchanges
of knowledge gained from “successful” social and economic
development experiences and “tested” solutions but also seeking
to “export” them. Paradoxically, despite their much-heralded eco-
nomic success, some of these donors have been until recently, or
are still, recipients of international aid themselves and several
experience strong domestic sensitivities around the giving of aid
internationally in the context of high levels of poverty and
inequality at home. Several of these (re-)emerging donors claim
that their own colonial history, cultural diversity, expertise or
technologies provides a better “fit” for the needs of developing
countries, due to greater proximity (vis-à-vis Northern donors), the
absence of conditions and associations with commercial interests,
their “demand-driven” nature and the way they acknowledge the
value of local experience. Brazil and India depict themselves as
the purveyors of ideas to push events forward rather than provi-
ders of significant volumes of tangible resources, emphasising
instead scientific–technical cooperation and technological transfers
of expertise and acting as an enabler for the private sector rather
than concentrating on state-led development assistance.
Approaches to SSDC have also been closely shaped by the
domestic experiences and imaginaries of development and moder-
nisation in these (re-)emerging economies. The transformation of
Brazil’s cerrado, for example, has provided a model and inspira-
tion for Brazilian agricultural cooperation in Africa (Cabral et al.,
2013) and China’s historical experience as an “aid” recipient itself

has clearly shaped its contemporary foreign assistance modalities,
for example in the provision of development bank loans to finance
infrastructure projects reimbursed by natural resources (an
approach shaped by its relations with Japan and now widely used
by others). Many (re-)emerging donors have been creative with
the semantics of development, being careful to avoid stigmatising
labels such as “failed”, “fragile” and “weak states” and keen to
depict themselves as leaders and builders of partnerships and
coalitions across the South, or as interlocutors and mediators
acting as a “bridge” or “balancer” between North and South.
It is important, however, to examine how both the framing and
delivery of this assistance are shaped by geopolitical agendas,
discourses and imaginations. SSDC is a key component of how
the (re-)emerging powers seek to project an image of themselves
and their power and this requires close attention to the geopolitical
position of states within the global state system. The projection of
an international identity as a “moral nation” and development
“success” (e.g. South Korea) is also a means to secure a greater
stake in the global norm-building process. In constructing a
“benign” (or at least “neutral”), conciliatory, consensus-creating
political persona for diplomatic purposes and in claiming to pursue
global leadership, these countries are in part seeking global follo-
wership (Vickers, 2013; Breslin, 2017) and are using the diplomacy
of development to advance this. Many (re-)emerging donors expli-
citly conceive of their development assistance as a form of “soft
power” and so their use of SSDC discourse can in part be under-
stood as rhetoric with which they have sought to negotiate a
stronger bargaining position and to create new markets for their
companies, which again requires attention to ways in which geopo-
litical interests intersect with geoeconomic strategies. Further, their
international development cooperation efforts are also very much
shaped by domestic geopolitics. South Korea’s desire to counter and
contain the international influence and diplomacy of the DPRK has
been a key driver of its growing desire to engage with SSDC,
particularly in Africa. Similarly, China’s relations with Taiwan and
its desire to counter the international recognition of Taiwanese
sovereignty, along with the Sino-Soviet split, were historically very
significant in China’s embrace of Africa.
There is a degree of symbiosis in the relations forged between
(re-)emerging donors and the partners they seek to work with across
the South. Changes in the global economic order and the international
state system over the last 20 years have created new opportunities and
pressures for countries (like Malaysia, South Korea and Turkey, for
example) to become more involved in the global politics of develop-
ment and their emergence is at least to some extent a result of these
transformed economic and political relations. The rise of countries
like China, India and Brazil then has opened up opportunities for
other countries of the South to increase their influence in the world,
both through the assistance being offered by these donors but also in
the way that they have been seeking to make the global order more
inclusive, equitable and multilateral. The book has argued that it is
necessary therefore to adopt a relational view of their (re-)emergence
vis-à-vis each other (and existing global hegemons) and to contextua-
lise their growth within the wider neoliberal capitalist order. Fear of
being left behind by other more powerful economic risers such as
China has certainly been a key driver of SSDC initiatives in, for
example, India, Japan and South Korea. In order to properly locate
this intensification of geopolitical competition and the specific
dynamics of accumulation that their presence is creating in Africa
and other parts of the South, it is necessary to situate this in the
context of the internal relations, dynamics and processes of the
capitalist global political economy.
The (re-)emerging donors have increasingly become part of
transnational production networks and value chains and have
denationalised their economies and societies but their adoption of
a “neoliberal” strategy of development was not simply a “cut-and-
paste” of economic policies developed in foreign “labs”; rather, it
was selective and subject to translation, filtered through specific
institutional and production contexts, cultures and actors. The
specific varieties of capitalism that have emerged within these
economies are often characterised by deep integration with the
neoliberal global economic system while keeping state control
intact. Indeed, a reassertion of the role of the state in development
is a key feature of many of these (re-)emerging economies, where
public/private distinctions in the economy are often “fuzzy” and as
states continue to protect and nurture their own industries, to make
them competitive within a global economy and actively seek to
create market opportunities for them. State agencies from (re-)
emerging economies have offered generous credit programmes,
investment funds and tax benefits, backed by rapidly expanding
diplomatic, trade and business networks, in support of their
national corporations seeking to invest overseas and often faced
with increasingly saturated domestic markets.
(Re-)emerging economies have also increasingly begun to
develop an internationalist profile and to assert themselves as
humanitarian, peacekeeping, peacebuilding and “policekeeping”

actors on the world stage. Most now operate forms of military training
and capacity-building exercises and are also starting to play a growing
role in peacekeeping initiatives in Africa. Alongside their claims to be
advancing peace and security, however, it is important to remember
that the domestic defence industries from these countries play a huge
role in arms transfers to Africa and in the creation of instability.
Questions of military cooperation and security are often neglected in
China–Africa studies (Alden et al., 2017) but China is now a major
global manufacturer of low-tech, affordable firearms and related
ammunition along with a growing range of other equipment used in
law enforcement, exporting them to more than two-thirds of African
countries (IISS, 2017). Further, military forces from China and India,
for example, have gained significant field experience, expertise and
intelligence through their engagement in African theatres of conflict.
China’s involvement with peacekeeping and peace talks in places like
Sudan and South Sudan has, for example, served as an important test
site or “laboratory” for China’s diplomatic involvement in security
crises (Duchâtel, Gowan and Rapnouil, 2016). Beijing’s engagement
in conflict resolution and deepening involvement in regional and
international peacekeeping efforts mark a shift towards a more
flexible and pragmatic understanding of its traditional support for
non-interference, manifest in greater Chinese involvement in UN
peacekeeping and the first combat troops being deployed in Africa
along with China’s increasing involvement in counter-insurgency.
Partly as a result of the enduring Eurocentrism in IR, the rise of
non-Western powers has remained under-theorised and there has
been a privileging of nation-states as the fundamental units of
analysis in many IR/IPE debates, which depicts geopolitical com-
petition as a series of distributive conflicts between rival states. The
(re-)emerging economies are not the unitary states of much IR
theorising and have fundamentally changed, however, reshaping
their interrelations with other states in the process. Several (re-)
emerging donors have witnessed a general shift towards “regulatory
statehood” whereby central executives have withdrawn from “com-
mand and control” activities to merely set broad targets for diverse
national, sub-national and private bodies (Dubash and Morgan,
2013). Indeed, the transformation of statehood under globalisation
is a crucial dynamic shaping the (re-)emergence and conduct of
these donors (Hameiri and Jones, 2016) as their states become
increasingly fragmented, decentralised and internationalised.
China’s (re)turn to the South in particular has often been mis-
understood in this sense (Chan, 2016). China is not a unitary rational
actor, nor is there a single Chinese “state capitalism”, but many. The
disaggregation of statehood has generated a multiplicity of different
actors involved in foreign policy along with internal differences over
external relations. Far from there being a single “national” position or
“grand strategy”, fragmented and decentralised state apparatuses and
quasi-market actors pursue their own independent interests and
agendas, generating conflict-ridden, incoherent policy output.
China–Africa interaction is often informal, unplanned, negotiated,
decentralised, uncoordinated and run through highly diversified
routes (business associations, migrant networks and diasporas) and a
complex range of both central and provincial-level actors from small
and medium-scale enterprises to SOEs (Gu et al., 2016).
Contrary to the image of an all-powerful monolithic state
centrally and coherently coordinating all of China’s foreign assis-
tance from Beijing, its strings all pulled by the CCP as “God-
father”, the reality is far more complex in terms of the diversity of
actors involved with assistance, often driven primarily from below
by various state-owned, private and hybrid companies, linked
predominantly to sub-national governments, seeking business
opportunities by lobbying Chinese state agencies to initiate aid-
funded infrastructure and construction projects for them to under-
take overseas (Hameiri and Jones, 2016).
THE SHIFTING SPATIALITIES OF

CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENT
As Chinese entities (e.g. SOEs and state agencies) develop trans-
national interests, they extend their “governance frontier” beyond
China’s territory, effecting state transformation elsewhere
(Hameiri and Jones, 2016) and this question of how other states
experience China’s “rise” requires much further research, as does
the increasing capacity of China and other (re-)emerging powers
to directly and indirectly alter geopolitical and developmental
spaces outside their borders, contrary to the many proclamations
around “non-interference”. Of particular value in doing this are
anthropological perspectives on the micro-level social and eco-
nomic dynamics around SSDC which offer a more processual
perspective (Siu and McGovern, 2017) and help to make sense of
the everyday sociocultural and micro-political exchanges and
interactions as they are lived and experienced in a variety of
places and contexts. China’s engagement has often been depicted
as simply a “scramble” for natural resources but whilst
foregrounding the significance of the extractive dimensions of its

“cooperation” this downplays the wider geopolitical context of its
diplomatic strategic pursuits and global foreign policy objectives,
its effort to solidify its position as a global power, to sustain its
economic and human development, to ensure Taiwan’s reunifica-
tion or to counter internal secession. There has also frequently
been a failure to disaggregate the different types of official
financial flows involved in China–Africa cooperation whilst the
size and scale of Chinese lending (which also has quite specific
geographies) have often been exaggerated. Although China is by
far and away the most powerful of the (re-)emerging economies in
terms of the scale and scope of its SSDC efforts, it is of course not
the only show in town and the heavy focus on China–Africa
cooperation has to an extent obscured the growing significance
on the continent of other (re-)emerging donors like Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait and the UAE, Turkey, Israel or Malaysia. Further, despite
the attention focused on the competition between these donors in
Africa, China and many other (re-)emerging economies typically
focus much of their development cooperation efforts on neigh-
bouring countries within their own immediate regional contexts.
Many commentators have argued that China–Africa interac-
tions have encouraged only dependency in terms of the heavy
focus on resource extraction and that its model of “debtbook
diplomacy” will only further entrench the uneven dynamics of
accumulation and dependent relations that have historically char-
acterised the continent. The resource geographies created in these
forms of development cooperation clearly require further
research, as do the ways in which resources have become a
central focus of diplomacy around SSDC. For some observers,
if African countries are to avoid a repetition of colonial-era value
extraction they require judicious negotiating strategies, improved
deliberative capacities and coalitions with local, continental and
global civil society and business networks in order to ameliorate
their weaker bargaining power and reshape the terms of their
engagement with international partners, particularly the (re-)
emerging economies (Vickers, 2013). The growing emphasis on
the importance of African agency in mediating China–Africa
encounters is useful here but the power of recipient states is
often confined to incremental bargaining rather than structural
change and can be highly circumscribed as African elites have
struggled to change the terms of the extraverted and commodity-
oriented trading relationship (Carmody and Kragelund, 2016).
Again, this underlines the value of assemblage thinking which
sees power residing not in actors but in networks, enabling an

understanding of Africa and China (and their agency) as inter-
constitutive (Carmody and Kragelund, 2016).
In spatial terms, the predominance of extractive industries and
natural resources in China–Africa relations has been characterised
by the production or reproduction of (often fortified) enclaves –
enclosed areas of capital-intensive extraction (e.g. in mining and
commercial agriculture) that typically have limited linkages to local
communities, firms and institutions while remaining largely self-
contained and detached from the national economy. These sub-
national and transnational “spaces of post-development” (Sidaway,
2008a) involve subtly reworked articulations between territory,
development and sovereignty and are marked by a variety of
fractures and boundary practices involving articulations of citizens
and subjects and places and spaces of accumulation, exclusion and
inclusion. What such spaces illustrate is that contemporary devel-
opment policy and practice has become strikingly polycentric
across multiple scales (local-to-global) and multiple sectors
(official, non-official and public–private combinations), simulta-
neously unfolding both beyond and across states. A focus on the
complex and shifting spatialities of development is thus increas-
ingly warranted although this “cannot be assumed a priori” and
“needs to be discovered” (Novak, 2016: 503). In Africa, a good
place to start would be some of the many SEZs that have emerged
in recent years or are planned for the future, inspired by models
from China (and others), along with some of the many transbound-
ary infrastructure-related projects funded by (re-)emerging donors.
In this sense it is productive to examine the “borders–develop-
ment nexus” and to deepen the dialogue between the fields of Border
Studies and Development Studies given the recent proliferation of
FTAs, SEZs, “growth corridors” and other re-bordering strategies
characteristic of contemporary development, whereby territorial jur-
isdictions are redefined in regional, cross-border and/or sub-national
terms (Novak, 2016). The recent “renaissance” of Border Studies has
seen a move away from linear and container-like conceptualisations
of state-centred cartographies, privileging instead the study of
b/ordering processes (across national, transnational, regional and
global scales and across both state- and non-state-centred scales of
discourse and practice), and this provides a useful focus on the
dispersed and fluid ways in which the dichotomies defined by borders
unfold in situated and place-specific contexts (Novak, 2016: 494). By
creating territorial governance units among, across and within states,
these “political technologies” (Elden, 2013) are increasingly seen as
important in fostering FDI, regional cooperation and trade-led

growth (Novak, 2016).
One key example is China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR)
development strategy which aims to build transregional connectivity
based on multilateral geoeconomic exchange (Jessop and Sum,
2018). As Blanchard and Flint (2017) note, OBOR has been var-
iously narrated as: (1) a geoeconomic or commercial project to
facilitate a cross-continental flow of capital, commodities, labour
and resources through infrastructure construction or a “spatial fix”
to China’s industrial overcapacity problem; (2) as China’s strategic
move for fulfilling its geopolitical ambition and as a geopolitical-
economic strategy not only to counter US imperialist efforts to isolate
China but also to promote SSDC and; (3) as a platform to recover the
Third World spirit that developed in Maoist China leading to a new
Bandung era (Paik, 2016). On their own none of these explanations is
particularly satisfactory, however, and it is critical to explore how
flows of capital, commodities, labour power and resources impact
upon class relations and political formations both within China but
also in other concerned countries by paying attention to the role of
multiple actors at multiple levels in constructing the components of
OBOR, along with the ways in which geopolitics and geoeconomics
interconnect in its design, implementation and outcomes. There are
of course many definitions of today’s “Silk Road” in terms of
communities, cultures, communications, ecologies, geographies,
hubs, technologies, coexistence etc. and the idea contains a history
closely entangled with European imperialism, often skirted around in
the contemporary reworking of the concept into OBOR narratives
(Sidaway and Woon, 2017). OBOR also recalls the heady days of
modernisation with its heavy focus on transport and energy infra-
structures (particularly roads, bridges, gas pipelines, ports, railways
and power plants) and as a transnational, neoliberal development
strategy OBOR has to be understood in the context of China’s rise,
geopolitical positioning and geoeconomic strategies. The use of such
political technologies and (re)b/ordering strategies, the multiple
echoes of Third Worldism and SSDC that they involve and the
reincarnation of development as an economic and foreign policy
strategy to counter the geopolitical ambitions of others, provide
promising points of entry for understanding the contemporary nexus
between geopolitics and development.
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Index
Entries in italic denote figures.
1290-d project 150 24, 314; Chinese involvement in

35, 142, 144–8, 165, 172, 204–5,
AAPSO (Afro-Asian People’s 252–3, 268–79, 272, 292–3,
Solidarity Organisation) 81, 323–5; Chinese workers in 271,
131, 144 272; colonial development in
AAS (Association for Asian 27–9, 28; Foucault and 73;
Studies) 58 geography of modernisation in
Abahlali baseMjondolo 202, 208 49; Indian involvement in
ABC (Agência Brasileira de 284–8; insurgency and counter-
Cooperação) 263–5 insurgency in 187, 238–47,
ACOTA (Africa Contingency 250–1; in IR and political
Operations Training and geography 65, 67–72, 77–8,
Assistance) 244 256; Korean involvement in
Addis Ababa, African Union HQ 282–4; as metageography 41–2;
in 269 natural resources of 68, 186;
Afghanistan: Cold War competition peacekeeping in 322; re-
in 121, 126, 160, 164; and centring 34–8, 306–9; and rise
Comecon 130; counter- of the South 260, 288, 318–21;
insurgency in 230–1, 236–7, securitisation of 222; social
313; military provision of aid in movements in 201–2; Soviet
215, 217–19, 248; nature of Union’s campaign in 131, 137,
state in 206–7; pro-Soviet 139–40, 166, 310; as swamp of
regime in 134, 160; Soviet aid terror 212, 237–8, 249, 314–15;
to 96–7, 98, 140–1; US aid to as ungovernable 177
115, 158–9; US military Africa Center for Strategic
intervention in 123 Studies 240
AfP (Alliance for Progress) 109–10, African states: cooperation with
113, 157–8, 161–2 (re-)emerging economies 35,
Africa: Brazil’s involvement in 38; as deviant, weak, fragile or
262–6, 318; British presence in failing 44, 71, 179–80, 207,
Index 391
239, 307; theorisation of 175, anti-geopolitics 50, 78, 187, 207, 305
178–9; and US military Antipode (journal) 50
assemblage 315 anti-politics, development as 7, 14,
African Studies 67–8, 73, 77 175, 181, 196
African Union 263, 269 anti-racism 77, 94, 96, 143, 305
African-Americans 102–3 anti-systemic movements 197
Africanists, Soviet 131 apparatus 2–3, 16–17, 199; see also
AFRICOM (US Africa Command) dispositif
238–40, 243, 247, 251, 315 AQAP (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Afro-Asian solidarity 81, 87, 91–2, Peninsula) 191, 238, 240, 243
141, 144, 268; see also AAPSO; AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic
solidarity Maghreb) 191, 240, 243
Afro-Brazilians 264 Arab spring 208
Afronauts 183 Arab states, as donors 259
agency: African 68–9, 279, 324; and Arab-Israeli conflict 219
assemblage thinking 178; elite- Arbenz, Jacobo 151
centric view of 20 Area Studies 38, 44, 49; birth of
Agnew, John 18 54–6; critical reworkings of 75;
agricultural development, Brazilian and development studies 74;
imaginaries of 265; see also and US state 56–9, 107; waves
rural development of interest in 59
agroecology movement 266 Area Studies complex 58, 81, 306
agrovilles 150, 156 Argentina, social movements in 208
AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Armenia, US military aid to 218
Investment Bank) 291 Army Field Manual FM 3-24 231
Algeria: Chinese involvement in 277; ASA (Africa-South America
Cuban aid to 97; French Summit) 263
counter-insurgency in 150, Ashley, Richard 18
231, 313 Asia, Chinese involvement in 260
AMISOM (African Union Mission to Asian financial crisis of 1997-98
Somalia) 241 256, 317
anarchical governance 72, 177, 210 assemblage thinking: and China-
ANC (African National Africa relations 324–5; and
Congress) 285 critical geography 75–7; and
Anglosphere 24 development 3–4, 16–18; and
Angola: Chinese involvement in 148, geopolitics 21; and
252, 270, 277, 280; and governmentality 178; and
Comecon 130; and GDR 137, neoliberalism 5; and race 87–8
138; post-colonial images of 31, Aswan Dam 135, 147
32; pro-Soviet regime in 134; asylum seekers 213
Soviet-China propaganda battle asymmetric warfare 233, 314
in 126; Soviet-Cuban austerity protests 202
intervention in 98, 124–8, authoritarianism, fragmented 275
138–9, 140, 164–5; autonomy: creating spaces for 301; de
villagization in 29 facto zones of 190; Latin
anti-capitalism 90, 165 American literature on 63
anti-colonialism: counter-insurgency Azerbaijan: in USSR 141; US
against 149–50; Cuba military aid to 218
supporting 126; development as
response to 27; as geopolitics backwardness: of Africa 37; in
from below 187; international development narrative 250, 298,
conferences of 90–1; US 303; of frontier spaces 193, 205;
heritage of 113 of Russia 93–4; of the tropics 47
392 Index
Bahrain, Arab Spring in 209 British Empire: “2.0” 24; see also UK
Ban Ki-Moon 289 Buen Vivir/Vivir Bien 14, 200–1, 305
BancoSur 291 Bulgaria 136
Bandung Conference 87–92, 88, 285; Burdick, Eugene 112
and Sino-Soviet split 143–4; Burkina Faso 242–3
and SSDC 255 Burma see Myanmar
Bandung Era 89, 117, 326 Burundi 204
Bangladesh 194, 287 Bush, George W. 224
barbarity 189 Business Task Forces 218
Baudrillard, Jean 42
Belgium 27, 114 Cambodia 46, 57; pro-Soviet regime
Bell, David 152 in 134; US intervention in 160
Beltway region 228, 248 Cameroon: Boko Haram in 191;
Betancourt, Romulo 111 Chinese support for 142, 253;
Bhilai steel mill 97 Cuban aid to 98; US troops in
Bhutan 287 239, 243, 251
binary oppositions 21, 36, 117 CAMEX (International Trade
biofuels diplomacy 265 Chamber) 265
biopolitics: in Afghanistan 236; and Camp Lemonnier 244, 251
aid policy 299; of counter- capacity-building 213, 222, 252, 266,
insurgency 249; development as 285, 322
101–3, 166, 181, 222–4, 304, Cape Town 202
312; infrastructure and 184–5; capitalism: Chinese form of 274, 323;
racialised nature of 6 and development 8; as
bio-power 12, 166 heterogenous 298, 321;
Biya, Paul 243 managing fallout of 26; and
Black, Eugene 104 post-development 300–1; and
BNDES (Brazilian Development poverty 8
Bank) 266 Cardoso, Fernando 261
Boko Haram 191, 239–43, 241, 245, Carnegie Corporation 58, 106
253, 315 Castro, Fidel 97–8, 126, 127, 153,
Bolivia 174, 200, 267 155, 157
Bolsa Familia 264 CCP (Chinese Communist Party)
border control 172, 224 141, 143, 252, 274–5, 323
Border Studies 325 CDB (China Development Bank)
border thinking 305 270, 275
borderland spaces 188–9, 212, 221, Central African Republic 191, 221
242, 247, 315 Central America 154
borders-development nexus 174, CEPAL (Economic Commission for
205–6, 325 Latin America) 173–4
Brazil: AfP in 158; aid to Africa 256; CERP (Commander’s Emergency
critical geographers of 50; Response Program) 217
favelas of 177, 178, 190; and the Cerrado 265, 319
hybrid financing tools 290; Césaire, Aimé 47
hybrid policy regime of 173–4; Ceylon see Sri Lanka
international role of 258, 261–7, Chad 191, 242, 245
289, 319; social movements in chaebol 281
199, 200, 208; uneven Chile: AfP in 158; coup in 310
development of 258 China; aid to Third World
Brazil-Africa Forum on Politics, countries 141–8, 172, 320; in
Cooperation and Trade 263 Angolan civil war 126; and
Brezhnev, Leonid 138 Comecon 130; counter-
BRICS 258–9, 290–4, 319 insurgency in 193–4; as
Index 393
(re-)emerging economy 252–4, CLs (contingency locations) 242, 251

256–7, 267–8; hybrid financing CMOs (civil-military operations)
tools 290; and India 285, 287–8; 245, 248
international role of 258–60, CNPC (China National Petroleum
268–71, 273, 277–9, 288, Corporation) 276–7, 281
293–4, 323–4; IR theory in COI (Coordinator of Intelligence) 57
63–4; Korean criticism of 283; Cold War: and Area Studies 49, 56–9;
military of 253, 322 (see also cartography of 163–4; counter-
PLA); propaganda posters 85, insurgency in 231; and
86, 97, 143, 146; rise of 257, development 30–3, 39, 74, 309;
316; and Soviet Union 96, 99, East Asian developmental states
143–4 (see also Sino-Soviet in 170; foreign aid in 125–6,
split); state and corporate actors 128, 152, 160–3, 166, 214,
in foreign policy 273–7, 322–3; 309–11, 317; India in 284; and
uneven development of 290–1; Korea 280; and modernisation
see also SOEs theory 81, 105–8, 109–12, 116,
China Rail Construction 277 119–23, 309; and Nepal 194;
China-Africa cooperation 35, 142, NGOs in 175; supranational
144–8, 165, 172, 204–5, agencies in 103–4; and Third
252–3, 268–79, 272, 292–3, World 80–1, 92–3, 99, 118–21,
323–5 165, 169, 188, 288–9, 301
China-Africa Cooperative Cole, Cory 246
Partnership for Peace and Colombia 117–18, 158, 214; see also
Security 277 Plan Colombia
China-Africa Defense and Security colonial spatialisations 206
Forum 277 colonial wars 29, 139, 313
China-Africa Development Fund 270 colonialism: and development 27–30,
Chomsky, Noam 53 186–7, 304, 311–12; and IR 61;
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) legitimacy of 2; and tropical
58, 104, 107, 112–13, 151, geographies 48–9; see also anti-
153–4, 163, 212 colonialism
CIS (Center for International Studies) coloniality matrix 201
57–8, 106–7, 120, 152 colonisation, as metaphor 11–12
citizenship: colonial construction of Comecon 130
28; in developmental state 105, commodity cycles 318
181; and dual insurgency 190; communism: containment of 56, 101,
insurgent 177, 360; post- 104–5, 107–8, 118, 122–3, 153,
colonial 188; rights of 171; and 194–5; and development 2,
social movements 181, 198; in 153, 162
US 112, 119 Communist International 95, 130
civic action programs 154–6, 232 communist studies 59
civil affairs projects 155, 212, 218, concept metaphor 76, 298
237, 245–8, 314, 395 Confucianism 64
civil society: in Africa 202, 266; in Congo: Soviet presence in 139; US
Brazil 266; in (re-)emerging intervention in 118; see also
economies 292; Indian 285; and DRC; Zaire
SSDC 318; and the state 176; construction firms 266, 272, 280, 283
use of term 7 construction projects, friendship/
civil wars: in Angola 125; in China prestige 269
142, 149; in Cold War era 188; containment 4, 56, 58–9, 105, 163,
delegitimation of 189 219, 221–2, 224, 313
CJTF-HoA (Combined Joint Task continental thinking (Julius
Force - Horn of Africa) 246 Nyerere) 65
394 Index
contracting assemblage 228, 247 Cyprus 150, 314

contragovernmentality 72, 177, 210 Czechoslovakia 136
control, discourses of 207, 305
convergence: and global integration DAC (Development Assistance
286, 316; as industrialization Committee) 256, 282, 289, 317
163; and modernization 33, 116, Dalby, Simon 18
310; of norms 258 Darfur 36, 278
conversion 163, 309–10 de Castro, Josué 50
CORDS (Civil Operations and debtbook diplomacy 293, 324
Revolutionary Development decoloniality 64, 201, 305
Support) 156–7, 236, 250 decolonisation: African agency in 71;
COSCO 277 and development 2, 12–13, 32,
counter-geopolitics 87, 118 119, 223, 304–5; and geography
counterhegemonic knowledges 51, 78 49, 304–5; and insurgency
counter-insurgency: Army Field 230–2
Manual 231; biopolitics of 249; decolonising knowledges 77
Chinese experience of 253; defence contractors 235, 242
development as part of 2, 30, deficit-creation dynamic 297
33, 39, 119–20, 189–92, 212, Deleuze, Gilles 17, 75, 204
220, 230–7, 312; modern democracy promotion 71, 203, 214,
renaissance of 4; in Portuguese 229, 233, 247, 316
Africa 29; Rostow’s role in 108; Deng Xiaoping 87
SORO handbooks for 57; and Department of Homeland
stability operations 245; US Security 218
promotion of 112, 149–55, 166 dependency theory 11, 50, 57, 63, 68,
counter-piracy 238, 314 117, 169, 261, 292
counterterrorism 226, 238, 244–5, Der Derian, James 18
251, 314 Derrida, Jacques 19
CPA (Civil Police Administration) desire, and development 15-16, 84,
151, 153 199, 203, 208, 299–300
Creek Sand 243 desiring machine 15, 199, 300
criminal insurgency 190–1 developing areas, study of 49
crisis diplomacy 276 developing states: Rostow on 109; in
critical geopolitics 2, 18–22; as Three Worlds theory 85; US
decolonization 62; and discourses on 225–7
development 18-22; and development: as assemblage 17–18;
development theory 73–4; and Big D and little d 8–9, 12;
tropical geography 44, 53; cartography of 227; as
Western bias in 64–5, 68 containment 107, 312–13;
CSLs (cooperative security democratising 208, 306; as
locations) 242 dispositif 15–17, 105, 199,
Cuba: challenges to Soviet Union 299–300; end of 256, 296–7;
98–9; in Comecon 130; literacy experience of non-Western
campaign 104; military peoples 222–3, 298; global
intervention in Angola 124, politics of 320–1; governmental
126–7; revolutionary use of rationality of 166–7; historical
tropical imagery 50; support for situation of 22–34; indigenous
Third World revolutions 97–8; conceptions of 201; institutional
USAID in 229 architecture of 103–5, 121, 258,
Cuban Revolution 97, 157 309; language of 45; liberal way
cultural diversity 262, 319 of 223, 288, 316–17; local
Cultural Revolution (China) 49, 142, control over 301–2;
145, 267 metageographies of 38, 40;
Index 395
metaphors used in 42; discourse, and critical geopolitics

militarisation of 217, 314; as 20–1
missionary project 122; and discourse analysis 12
nationalism 187–8; political disorder, instrumentalization of 179
geographies of 50; and post- dispositif 16–17, 221, 299, 313
development 10–12; romance of Djibouti 38, 191, 204, 244, 246, 253,
93; securitisation of 4, 220–2, 293, 294
247–8, 311; shifting spatialities DoD (US Department of Defense):
of 323–6; social movement and aid provision 148, 217–18,
contestations of 197–9, 207–8; 225–6, 248; and counter-
and statecraft 5, 205–6, 303, 321; insurgency 152, 315; research
unconscious fantasies of 14–16; centres of 240
unintended consequences of Dominican Republic 149, 158
195; use of term 6–8; see also Domkhedi village 184
economic development; donor community, diversity of 290–1
underdevelopment donors: 3, 26, 117, 125–6, 136, 147,
development apparatus see 161–2, 164–6, 214–5, 257–60,
development, as dispositif 262, 288–92
development diplomacy 289, Dooley, Tom 112
316–17, 320 dos Santos, Jose Eduardo 127, 137
development discourses 7–8, 74, 102, DPRK (Democratic People’s
171, 173, 207, 250 Republic of Korea) see North
development finance 283, 318, 320; Korea
see also regional development DRC (Democratic Republic of the
banks Congo) 191, 252, 270, 278,
development geography 49–50 283–4; see also Zaire
development ideologies 9 Dresch, Jean 50
Development Loan Fund 152 drone bases 242–3, 251, 315
development models, replicable drone strikes 238, 239, 241
33–4 Dubois, W. E. B. 112
development strategies 9 Dulles, John Foster 89
Development Studies 2, 50, 60, 70, Durban 202
301–2; and Border Studies 325; Duty-Free Tariff Preference 287
critical 14, 208, 304
development theory 9; in Brazil 261; EAGLES (Emerging and Growth-
and Cold War 3, 105; and Leading Economies) 259
critical geopolitics 73–4; and East India Companies 25
metageographies 40; military Eastern Europe 121, 128, 130, 136–7
origins of 306; neoliberal ECA (Economic Cooperation
hegemony in 5 Administration) 148
developmental states: in East Asia 32, ecofeminists 198
170–1, 304; Portuguese colonial Economic Commission for
29–30; and science 28; and US Europe 107
liberalism 105–6 economic development: and
developmentalism 39, 118, 173, 199, autonomy 63; and politics 7,
206, 228, 303, 304, 307 100; romance of 93; in the
development-industrial complex tropics 48
228–9 Economic Geography 74, 185
dialectics 8–9, 11, 17, 22, 74–5, 228 economic risers 39, 281, 321; see also
dictatorships, pro-US 104, 154 emerging economies
Diego Garcia 253 ECOSOC (Economic and Social
Diem, Ngo Dinh 156 Council) 96
Diplomatic History 33, 90 Ecuador 174, 200
396 Index
Edgerton, Glen E. 158 FAF (Foreign Assistance Framework)

Egypt: Arab Spring in 165, 208–209, 214, 227
209; Chinese involvement in failed states: in Africa 37, 67,
277; and North Korea 283; and 179–80, 238, 250–1;
Soviet Union 134–5, 138; US contemporary scripting of 210;
aid to 149, 219 emergence of concept 171; in
Eisenhower, Dwight 88, 108–9, Third World 188
150–1, 229 Faletto, Enzo 261
El Salvador 20 FAO (Food and Agriculture
El Vietnam Heroico 124, 126 Organization) 103–4, 264
electrification 181, 182, 191, 251 Farmer, Bertram Hughes 46
Embrapa 265 FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) 174,
emerging economies 38–9; in Africa 255, 259, 268, 282, 290, 326
186, 316; as donors 255–6, 260, finance: hybrid tools of 290; for
268, 286–91, 294, 317–22, infrastructure projects 283, 320;
324–5; infrastructure package 270; see also IFIs
investment by 205–6; financial stability nets 281Fisher,
internationalist profile of 255–7, Charles 46
321–2; as recipients of aid 319; Five-Year Plans 93–4
and resource diplomacy 261; flexipower and flexigemony 268
and resource extraction 260, FNLA (National Liberation Front of
268, 273, 287, 292, 304, Angola) 126
324-5; role of state in 291–2, FOCAC (Forum on China–Africa
304, 321–2; use of term Cooperation) 268, 277, 290
258–9 focal sites 192
enclaves 75, 183, 185, 190, 260, 325 Focus Africa programme 286
enclosures, new 75, 185, 205, 260 FOLs (Forward Operating
the Enlightenment 24–6, 34, 47, Locations) 242
54, 300 Fome Zero 264
entitlement, discourses of 5, Food for Peace programme 113, 152
207, 305 Ford Foundation 58, 105–6, 117
enunciation, locus of 42, 66, 78 foreign aid: biopolitical turn in 224,
Escobar, Arturo 10–11, 64, 307 299; China 141–8, and foreign
Esteva, Gustavo 10, 13, 209 policy 160–1; Eastern European
Ethiopia: al-Shabaab in 191; Chinese aid 136–7; militarisation of
labourers in 252; Chinese loans 216–17; network analysis of
to 270; and Comecon 130; 215, 315; in Palestine 234; as
North Korea and 284; offensive security issue 211–14, 309;
in Somalia 239; Soviet-Cuban Soviet Union 134–41;
intervention in 128, 134; triangulation of 317; US
US assistance to 121, 149, 148–60; use of term 125; see
218, 224 also ODA
Eurocentrism 47, 60–1, 64, 72–3, 80, Foreign Operations Administration
179, 206, 292, 301–2, 322 152
European Union 257 Fort Benning 152
the everywhere war 240–2, 315 Fort Bragg 108, 153
Exim Bank (Export-Import Bank of Fort Gordon 151
China) 270, 275 Foucault, Michel 9, 12, 16–17, 19;
Export-Import Bank of India 286 and biopolitics 222; and global
External Credit Assessment politics 72–3; and
Committee 265–6 governmentality 168, 177; in
extractive industries 185, 287, 325 Hérodote 53; and post-
extraversion 279, 292 development 302
Index 397
fragile states: discourses of 171, 164; US modernisation policies

179–80, 206, 237, 307; in 120; US troops in 239
intervention to strengthen 220, Ginsburgh, Robert 110
226–7 global economic crisis of 2008 3, 256,
France: and colonial development 27; 263, 317
counter-insurgency global governance 257, 292, 317
programmes of 156; military global power diffusion 262
interventions in Africa 245; Global South: access to services in
tropical geography in 46 182–4; counter-representations
FTAs (Free Trade Areas) 174, from 74–5; IR’s view of 61–2;
205, 325 as metageography 40–1, 43,
futures 31, 90, 182, 196, 297, 75–6, 298; (re-)emerging
301, 304 economies as champions of the
254–5, 262, 319; natural
G20 281, 285, 289, 293 resources of 186; rise of 254–7,
G77 (Group of 77) 89, 144, 263 260, 318–21; social movements
Gaddafi, Muammar 239 in 196, 305; states of 61, 171–2,
Gandhi, Mohandas 285 175–6, 307; wars in 191
gated communities 190 globalisation: and Area Studies 59;
Gates, Bill 171 neoliberal 76, 196, 227–8, 298;
GDR (German Democratic Republic) social movements contesting
125, 136, 137, 138 197; transformation of
Geldof, Bob 36 statehood under 322
geoeconomics 22, 219, 227–8, 249 good governance 293, 307
geographic imaginaries, Gourou, Pierre 47, 53
alternative 196 governance, sub-state territorial units
geographical warfare 53 of 325–6
geographies of resistance 204; see governance frontier 279, 323
also social movements governmentality: Africa as limit to 72;
geography: classification and compromised 185; development
comparison in 41, 54–5, 75; as 2, 9–10, 15, 177–8, 199, 230,
imperial disciplinary roots of 249, 299; neoliberal 200;
47–9; see also human transnational 177
geography; Political Great Leap Forward 96, 267
Geography Greece, communist insurgency in 149
geopolitical imaginations 2, 65, 73–4, green revolution 100, 103
117, 123, 172, 312 growth corridors 174, 205, 325
Geopolitics (journal) 65 Grubber, Mary Jean 116
geopolitics: critical use of term 50 Guatemala 104, 118, 151, 310
(see also critical geopolitics); of guerrilla warfare 97, 108, 145, 187
fear 213, 247, 312; and Guevara, Che 97, 126
geoeconomics 227–8; Guinea 131, 145
materiality of 21; neoliberal Guinea-Bissau 98
250; popular 20, 74, 131, 310; Gunder Frank, André 116–17,
postcolonialisation of 20, 44, 123, 125
64, 307; use of term 18; see also
anti-geopolitics Haiti 231
geopolitics from below 78, 187, 305 Haley, Nikki 219
geopolitics-development nexus 1–3, Harriman, Averell 108
37, 43, 185 HCA (humanitarian and civic
Germany, East see GDR assistance) 245
Ghana: Chinese involvement in 277; HDI (Human Development
Soviet relations with 131, 138, Index) 297
398 Index
HDR (Human Development non-Western 64; of US 187,

Report) 254 309, 314; see also colonialism
hearts and minds, battle for 29, 82, India: aid to Africa 256, 287; and
150, 155, 165–6, 245, 248, Bandung Conference 87;
310, 314 Chipko movement 198;
hegemony, transition in 257 economic planning in 94; as
Helmand 115, 158, 159, 236 (re-)emerging economy 254;
Hérodote (journal) 50, 53, 54, 55 hybrid financing tools 290;
Herter, Christian 237 international role of 258, 284–9,
high-modernist approaches 5 319; military of 322; as part of
history from below 67, 78 the tropics 45; rivalry with
HIV/AIDS 226 China 193; Soviet relations with
Ho Chi Minh 95 96–7, 121, 131, 135; Subaltern
House, Edward M. 27 Studies in 66–7; summits staged
Howard, Emory 115 by 317; uneven development of
HTS (Human Terrain System) 291; US aid to 107, 121, 218
234–6, 250 Indian Ocean 253, 286–7
human geography 60, 236 Indochina 46, 50, 52, 149–50; see
humanitarian assistance 125, 141, also Southeast Asia
160, 217, 245, 314 Indonesia: and Bandung Conference
humanitarian intervention 222, 279 87, 90–1; economic planning in
humanitarian present 233, 94; and Soviet Union 134–5;
250, 314 US support for Suharto coup
humanitarianism: celebrity 36; and 121–2, 154
securitisation 220, 233, 314 industrialisation 26, 93–4, 135, 139,
Hungary 136 163, 168–9, 310
HVP (Helmand Valley Project) infrastructure, fragmentation of
159–60, 162 182–5
hydroelectric development: Chinese- infrastructure projects: in British
funded 271, 272; large-scale Empire 27; Chinese finance for
135, 184 320; foreign aid for 162; as
hyper-realities 42 pacification 312; and resource
diplomacy 261; in Soviet model
IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa 93; and states 172–3, 180–1,
Dialogue Forum) 285, 205, 303–4; US domestic
293–4, 319 102, 159
ICA (International Cooperation Institute of Oriental Studies at
Administration) 152 the Russian Academy of
IFIs (international financial Sciences 56
institutions) 36; alternatives to institution building 229, 315
318; and Arab Spring 209; and insurgency: anti-colonial 230–1;
financial crises 256, 317; and communist 118, 166;
humanitarian intervention 222; contemporary forms of 210;
protests against 196; and SAPs Islamic 177, 219–20, 232, 238–9;
in Africa 270; and transnational as meaning-making 206–7; and
governmentality 178 modernisation 119; spaces of 5,
ILO (International Labour 207, 304, 312; and the state
Organization) 31 186–95, 306; terrorist 2, 313;
imaginative geographies 44–5, 75 see also counter-insurgency
IMF (International Monetary Fund) International Commission of Inquiry
10, 61, 104, 202, 270, 291 into US War Crimes in
imperialism: classification projects of Vietnam 52
44, 55; and development 26–8; international conferences, interwar 90
Index 399
International Department of the KAF (Korea-Africa Forum) 282

Central Committee of the KAFACI (Korea-Africa Food and
CPSU 130 Agriculture Cooperation
International Development Advisory Initiative) 282
Board 148 Keiser, Jane 115
International Relations: Africa in 34, Kennan, George 93
179, 307–8; decolonising 304; Kennedy, John F. 111, 114; and AfP
and development 2–3; 157; and aid to Third World
Eurocentrism in 60–2, 77–8; 152–3, 161; development policy
and geopolitics 18; and human under 33, 107–9, 112–13;
suffering 70; non-Western support for authoritarian
forms of 62–4; and the regimes 121–2
sociocultural 90; and the Kenya: al-Shabaab in 191; Chinese
subaltern 306 loans to 270; civil affairs
International Solar Alliance 287 projects in 246; colonial
intersectionality 305 development in 28–9; economic
intimacy-geopolitics 21 resurgence of 239; Indian
IPE (international political involvement with 288; rural
economy) 292 planning in 230; UK counter-
Iran: and Africa 38; in Cold War 219; insurgency in 150; US aid to
US intervention in 118, 120, 310 218, 229
Iraq: counter-insurgency in 230–1, Khrushchev, Nikita: and Afghanistan
237, 313; military provision of 140; and China 144; and Third
aid in 215, 217–19, 248; and World 56, 95–6, 128, 134, 138,
Soviet Union 130, 134; US 152; Virgin Lands campaign 94
military intervention in 4, Kia Henda, Kiluanji 31
123, 214 Kilcullen, David 166
ISGS (Islamic State in the Greater knowledge creation: flows and
Sahel) 251 networks of 50, 76–7;
ISIS see Islamic State geopolitics of 62; military forms
Islam, political 38, 197 of 57
Islamic extremism 37–8, 212, KOAFIC (Korea-Africa Industry
238–40, 245, 315 Cooperation Forum) 283
Islamic State 38, 240, 251 Kofman, Eleanore 60
Israel: and Africa 324; counter- KOICA (Korean International
insurgency in Palestine 233, Cooperation Agency) 282
314; US support for 118, 211, Komsomol 131, 141
218–19, 249 Kony, Joseph 36
ITEC (Indian Technical and Korea: DPR of see North Korea;
Economic Cooperation) 285 Republic of see South Korea
Korean War 120, 149
Japan: as aid donor 259, 267–8; and KSP (Knowledge Sharing
China 320; as developmental Program) 282
state 170; geopolitical role of Kulp, Earl 230
87; summits staged by 317; in Kuwait 259, 324
Three World theory 84–5; US
occupation of 153; US study of Lacanian/Deleuzean approach 199
59; in World War II 57, 142 Lacoste, Yves 44, 51–3, 52
jihadists see Islamic extremism; land grabs 186, 205
insurgency, Islamic Laos 46, 57; Chinese agribusiness in
Johannesburg 202 186; and Comecon 130; and
Johnson, Lyndon 109, 110, 157 India 287; infrastructure
Jordan 218–19 projects in 192–3; pro-Soviet
400 Index
regime in 134; US invasion Mali: Chinese relations with 52;

of 109 Soviet relations with 131, 138;
Lashkar Gah 159 UN missions in 221; and US
Latin America: adaptation of IR to military 243, 245, 252; as weak
63; and AfP 110–11; Brazil’s state 239
role in 262; Chinese aid for 145; manifest destiny 106, 122
decoloniality in 201; Mao Tse-tung: and Chinese aid
geopolitical traditions of 20; as projects 145; death of 267;
metageography 42; post- economic policy of 96; and
neoliberal developmental states Soviet Union 143–4; see also
in 174; social movements in Three Worlds theory
199–200; Soviet relations with Maoism 99, 194–5, 205, 232, 274–5,
113; territory in 303; US policy 326; and the Third World 142–4
for 120, 151–2, 155, 157, 162 Marcos, Ferdinand 214
LDCs (less-developed countries) marginality 37, 67
162–3, 287 markets, regulatory frameworks
Lederer, William 112 for 173
legibility 5, 29, 177 Marshall Plan 103; Rostow’s role in
legitimacy, crisis of 256, 317 107; Soviet response to 130;
Lenin, Vladimir 94–6, 128, 130 success of 161; and USAID 152
Li Keqiang 269 Marx, Karl 50, 75, 123
liberal democracy 59, 65, 213, 313 Marxism 123; and Africa 68; and
liberal peace 214, 316 post-colonial geographies 75;
liberal warfare 230 and Third World 90
liberal way of development 223, 288, Mauritania 242–5
299, 316-7 McCarthy, Joseph 105
liberalism 60, 106, 113, 220 McCloy, John 104
Liberia 149, 239, 252 McNamara, Robert 104
Libya: Chinese workers in 277; MDGs (Millennium Development
overthrow of Gaddafi 209, 239; Goals) 223
US aid to 149 Mengistu, Haile Mariam 128, 224
Liska, George 161 Mercosur 262–3
literacy campaigns 104 Merowe dam 272
LPRP (Laotian People’s metageographies 3, 38, 40–5, 75, 298
Revolutionary Party) 192 Mexico, and Comecon 130
LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) 36, micro-geopolitics 186, 205–6, 308
191, 240 micro-sovereignties 190
Ludin, Mohammed Kabir 158 Middle East: as metageography 43;
Lula da Silva 261–4, 266–7, 318 and modernisation theory 82
Lumumba, Patrice 95 Mignolo, Walter 64, 307
Lusophone Africa 34 migration: global direction of 221;
undocumented 223–4, 313
Mabogunje, Akin 50, 51 militarism, participatory 250
Madagascar 284, 288 military aid: to Angola 125; from
Make Poverty History 36 Brazil 266; from China 252–3,
makeability of society 4–5 277–9, 322; North Korean
Makuka, Edward 183 283–4; Soviet 134, 139; US
Malawi 116 148–9, 151, 160, 211, 218, 244
Malayan Emergency 150, 156, military orientalism 53
231, 313 military training, for managing
Malayan Journal of Tropical civilians 231
Geography 47 Millennium Challenge Corporation
Malaysia 35, 236, 259, 321, 324 212, 218
Index 401
Millennium Villages Project 223 MPLA (People’s Movement for the

Millikan, Max 106–7, 152 Liberation of Angola) 126,
MIT (Massachusetts Institute of 139, 144
Technology) 106 MRE (Ministry of External Relations,
Mobutu Sese Seko 214 Brazil) 263, 265
model villages 28–9, 156 MSA (Mutual Security Agency)
modernisation: China’s “four 149, 152
modernizations” 145; Cold War MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores
models of 92–3, 119, 135; and Rurais Sem Terra) 199, 208, 266
Third World elites 121; Mubarak, Hosni 165
tournaments of 126, 162, 310 multilateral diplomacy 286, 290
modernisation theory: and multipolarity 257
decolonisation 33–4; and Mutual Security Act 1959 149, 152
dependency theory 117; and Myanmar 87, 96, 192–3, 194, 287
geography 49; and orientalism Myrdal, Gunnar 107, 122
56; and OSS 57; and state
institutions 169–70; and the NAFTA (North American Free Trade
Third World 81–2; US Cold Agreement) 210
War versions of 82, 101, Naghlu hydropower station 98
105–13, 116, 119, 122–3, 157, NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) 81,
309–11; and visions of 92; and Brazil 263; and China
development 8, 304 144; foundation of 89;
modernism, high 34, 172 geopolitical vision of 65
modernity: African critiques of 65; Namibia 139, 283–4
alternatives to 197, 201; Nasser, Gamal 87, 89–91, 134
Chinese intellectuals and the national liberation 118, 189, 363
language of 8; communism and national security: fragile states as
105–7; Escobar’s critique of 10; threat to 237, 314; as purpose of
European making of 26; foreign aid 148, 152, 213–14,
expansive 297, 300; 224–5, 229, 309, 315 (see also
expectations of 182; and foreign security-development nexus); in
aid 128; Kennedy’s vision of Thailand 193; US strategies
120; models of 128; outer 100, 293
boundaries of 193; Soviet nationalist elites 187
version of 93, 95, 101, 105; natural resources: China’s interest in
transition to 107–8; US apostles 283, 320, 323, 325; political
of 112, 116, 122 economy of 185–6; and SSDC
MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 292; see also resource
China) 275–6, 282 geographies
MOFCOM (Ministry of Commerce, NDRC (National Reform and
China) 270, 275 Development Commission) 275
Mongolia 95, 130 Nehru, Jawaharlal 87, 89–91, 94–5,
Morgenthau, Hans 67 268, 284
Mortenson, Greg 250 neo-colonialism 125, 216
Movimiento de Trabajadores neo-developmentalism 174
Desocupados 208 neoliberalism: China Model as
Mozambique: Chinese involvement alternative to 273; and
in 148; and Comecon 130; (re-)emerging economies
Cuban aid to 98; Indian 291–2, 294–5, 318–19, 321;
involvement with 288; late hegemony of 5–6, 301; and
colonial development in 29; security-aid nexus 214–15,
Soviet influence in 139; US aid 249–50, 316; social movements
to 218 contesting 199–200, 209; and
402 Index
the state in development 72–5; diffusion of responsibility for

and white saviour complex 36 318; India and 286; from OECD
neo-primitive accumulation 186, 205; 256; from South Korea 282;
see also primitive accumulation Soviet and Eastern European
neorealism 69 136; and US foreign policy 212,
Nepal 194, 195, 287 226; see also foreign aid
Neto, Agostinho 32, 126, 139 OECD (Organisation for Economic
New Deal 102, 105 Cooperation and Development)
New Villages scheme 29, 236 130, 213, 256, 271, 280–1, 318
Next Eleven 259 Ogaden war 128
NGOs (non-governmental oil: African countries supplying 277;
organisations): African focus of in Brazil 200, 266; China’s
37; and development 25–6, 175, involvement in 145, 274;
189; and foreign aid 125, 149; Comecon subsidies for 130;
Indian 285; in Palestine 234; discovery of new reserves 35;
providing services 184; social India and 287; Middle East/
movements contesting 198; North African sources of 219; as
South Korean 283 payment 268; pipeline
Nicaragua 104, 130, 160, 211 projects 182
NID (Naval Intelligence Division) 46 oil companies 271, 281
NIEO (New International Economic oil-producing countries 219
Order) 147, 255 Omar, Hafez 235
Niger: Boko Haram in 191; US O’Neill, Jim 258, 285
military in 239, 242, 245, 251 Operation Carlota 124
Nigeria: Chinese involvement in Operation Phoenix 236
252–3, 277; fight against Boko OPS (Office of Public Safety) 153–5,
Haram in 191, 241, 242–3; US 229, 377
aid to 218; as weak state 239 OPSAAAL (Organization of
Nigerian Colonial Service 48 Solidarity of the Peoples of
Nixon, Richard 120, 135, 238 Africa, Asia and Latin America)
Nkrumah, Kwame 65, 89, 144 91–2
NLF (National Liberation Front, Orientalism: and Area Studies 56, 58;
Vietnam) see Viet Cong and development 13; tropicalist
non-interference 264, 268, 276–7, critique of 53; tropicality and
284, 290, 317, 322–3 geopolitics 306
non-Western powers 288, 292, OSS (Office of Strategic Services)
316, 322 57–8, 106
Noriega, Manuel 152 Ottoman Empire 82
North Korea 59, 87, 124, 283–4, 320
Northern Ireland 314 pacification: and counter-insurgency
North-South relations 3, 11, 75, 88, 212, 231–3, 312, 314;
113, 183, 257, 264, 291 development as 2; intellectual
NSS (National Security Strategy) 225 42; by prosperity 156–7, 166
Nyerere, Julius 65 Pakistan 87, 218, 250
Palestine: counter-insurgency in 150,
Ó Tuathail, Gearoid 18–19, 73–4 233–4, 313–14; Soviet policy
Obama, Barack 229, 251, 289 on 163
OBOR (One Belt, One Road) 22, Panchsheel Treaty 285
23, 172, 193, 204, 253, 260, Park Chung-hee 280, 282
291, 326 parochialism 2, 60, 62, 76–7
Occupy movement 196 participatory governance 205
ODA (overseas development Patkar, Medha 184
assistance): and Cold War 125; patrimonial logic 173, 179–80
Index 403
Peace Corps 109, 113–14, 115, 116, post-colonial performances 31

160, 212, 218, 283 post-colonial provincializing of
peace interventionism 4, 189 Western claims 307
peace-building 39, 255, 266, 322 post-colonial territorialization 201
peacekeeping: Brazil’s role in 266; post-colonialism: and Afro-Asian
China’s role in 252–3; solidarity 87; and development
(re-)emerging economies and 3, 11, 24; and Edward Said 66;
39, 255, 322; Indian role in 286 and Eurocentrism 61; and
Peoples’ Friendship University of history from below 78;
Moscow 95–6 planetary 293 and sovereignty
People’s War 112, 124, 142 71; and statehood 178–80; and
PEPFAR (President’s Emergency territory 201
Plan for AIDS Relief) 251 post-development 6, 9–11; and Africa
performance: and decolonization 308; conception of power
90–2; and development 297; 11–14; and critical geopolitics
and the state 180–1; and Third 20; enclave spaces of 185;
World solidarity 118 political implications of 300–2;
permanent deferral, structure of 30 and psychoanalysis 14–15, 300;
Petraeus, David 212 and social movements 198, 200,
Philippines: communist insurgency 203, 208; spaces of 325;
in 149; US support for theorisation of post-
dictatorship 104 development 10–16, 300–2
pity, politics of 36 postmodernism 65, 73, 367
PLA (People’s Liberation Army) 275, post-neoliberalism 14, 174,
277, 294 199–200, 208–209
Plan Colombia 230 poststructuralism 20, 73, 176, 199
plutocratic insurgency 189–90 post-Western world 257
PMSCs (private military and security poverty 8, 33; African 36–7; constant
contractors) 242 rediscovery of 221, 248–9,
Point Four programme 13, 25, 30, 298–9; depoliticization of 1;
100, 101, 149 and insecurity 220; Kennedy’s
Poland 136 reaction to 113; Make Poverty
Polanyi, Karl 300 History 36; re-politicisation
political development 59, 100 of 301
Political Geography (journal) 59, poverty porn 37
65–6 poverty reduction: as counter-
Political Geography 18–22, 59–60; insurgency 312; as goal of aid
Africa in 34, 65; Anglo- 214; use of term 8
American version of 59–60; power: and development 206–207;
colonial categories in 78; Foucault on 12
decolonising 304; development Power Africa 251
and geopolitics in 2, 44; global power projection, international 290
division of labour in 62; and primitive accumulation 260; see also
global South 74; non- Western neo-primitive accumulation
forms of 65–6; and the subaltern process geographies 59
306–7 Project Camelot 57
population control 104, 120 Project Troy 106, 120
Portugal: colonial empire of 29–30, PRSPs (Poverty Reduction Strategy
49, 101, 124, 139, 263 (see also Papers) 173
Angola; Guinea-Bissau; PRTs (Provincial Reconstruction
Mozambique); Occupy protests Teams) 217
in 196 psychological warfare 57, 155
post-colonial geographies 66, 75–6 psyops 155, 236
404 Index
public services: access to 182–5; river basin development projects

enclaves of 190; protests against 162, 310
lack of 202–3 Rockefeller, Nelson 148
Pye, Lucian 107, 112 Rockefeller Foundation 58, 103, 106,
117, 122
al-Qaeda 38, 191, 238, 240, 243 Roh Moo-hyun 282
Qatar, and Africa 38 Rohingya 193, 194
Romania 124, 136
race: in Angola 148, 165; in China- Roosevelt, Franklin D. 57, 99
Africa relations 279; and Roosevelt, Theodore 99
development 6, 305, 312; in Rostow, Walt Whitman 57, 106–9,
postcolonial states 188; Soviet 110, 114, 122–3, 161; and
attitudes to 131; and state failure counter-insurgency 153;
179; and Third Worldism 81, development model of 112, 117,
87–9; and tropicality 45–6; US 152, 309
attitudes to 112 Rousseff, Dilma 267
racism 14, 88, 96; see also anti- Roy, Arundhati 184
racism Rural Community Development
RAND corporation 230–1 Programme 156
Rapti region 194–5 rural development 121, 166, 223, 230,
realism 60; non-Western roots of 65; 265, 282, 309; see also
subaltern 63 agricultural development
reconstruction as war 215–16, rural planning 230
248, 313 Russia, and BRICS 293; see also
Red Africa 166, 310 Soviet Union
Red River (Vietnam) 51–3
(re-)emerging economies see Sachs: Jeffrey 223; Wolfgang
emerging economies 10, 43
regional development banks SACU (Southern African Customs
291, 318 Union) 263
remittances 232, 256 SADC (Southern Africa
remote sensing 21 Development Community) 263
repossession, geographies of 75 Saemaul Undong 282
resistance: and apartheid 197; and SAFs (Special Action
colonialism 187; and Forces) 154
governmentality 72, 185; Said, Edward 45, 66
insurgencies 232; and NGOs SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation
175; and place 197; and US Talks) 135
intervention in Vietnam 92 Salt River Project 159
resource diplomacy 260–1, 294–5 Sanmenxia dam 96
resource extraction 35, 186, 268, 273, Santos, Milton 50, 261
324; see also natural resources SAPs (Structural Adjustment
resource geographies 175, 185, 324 Programmes) 173, 202
resource-state nexus 175, 185, Sardar Sarovar dam 184
206, 304 SARs (special administrative
revolutionary insurgencies 232 regions) 276
revolutionary myths (of Third SASAC (State-Owned Assets
World) 118 Supervision and Administration
RIDP (Rapti Integrated Development Commission) 270–1
Project) 195 Saudi Arabia, and Africa 38
rising powers 3, 35, 186, 253, 258, Sauvy, Alfred 84
294, 316; see also (re-)emerging scopic regimes 37, 42
economies Scott, James 172
Index 405
scramble for Africa 68, 185, 323; new socialism: and Bandung movement
25, 35, 260 89–90; revolutionary myths of
SDC (Save Darfur Coalition) 36 118; Soviet model of 93–4, 96;
SDGs (Sustainable Development Third World challenges to
Goals) 297–9 Soviet model 98–9; see also
secularism 25 communism
security: developmentalisation of 4, SOEs (state-owned enterprises)
168–9, 172; focus of 224, 313; 268–70, 273, 275–6, 292, 323
human 171, 220, 223 soft power 224–5, 245, 290, 320
security-development nexus 4, 39, solidarity: against US 118; Brazil-
219, 221–4, 247, 252, 313 African 264; international and
security-economy nexus 224, 228, tricontinental 81, 91, 97;
250, 315 narratives of 133, 255, 317; with
self-help 103, 255 US 114
self-reliance 146, 223–4, 255 solidarity aid 98
Senegal 245, 284 solidarity diplomacy 264
Seoul Development Consensus 281 Somalia: al-Shabaab in 191; US
Seychelles 253, 283 forces in 225, 241; as weak
SEZs (Special Economic Zones) 174, state 239
191, 204–5, 325 SORO (Special Operations Research
al-Shabaab 191, 238–40, 241, 245, Office) 57
251, 253, 315 Soros, George 171
shadow economies, trans-border 232 South Africa: access to services in
Shah, Rajiv 229 184; anti-neoliberal movements
Shapiro, Michael 18 in 202, 203, 208; apartheid
Shariati, Ali 82–3 regime in 120, 197; Chinese
Sidaway, James 66 involvement in 148, 277; and
Sierra Leone, Cuban aid to India 285; Indian involvement
98, 252 with 288; mercenaries from
Sinatra Doctrine 116, 304 242; see also IBSA
Sinomania 267, 288, 316 South Korea: aid to Africa 256,
Sino-Soviet split 85, 126, 130, 282–3; as developmental state
143–4, 320 170–1, 280–1, 283; hybrid
Six-Day War 134 financing tools 290;
SKSSAA (Soviet Afro-Asian international role of 281–2, 320;
Solidarity Committee) 131, 141 IR theory in 63; and North
Slater, David 73–4 Korea 283–4
slave trade 68 South Sudan 191, 204, 276,
small wars 231 278, 322
Smith, Adam 26 South Vietnam: fall of 124, 134, 139;
SOA (School of the Americas) 152 military aid to 165; US
SOCAFRICA (Special Operations intervention in 109, 122; see
Command, Africa) 240 also Vietnam War
social engineering 103, 105, 180 South Yemen see Yemen, People’s
social movements 20; contesting state Democratic Republic of
power 196–203, 206–10, Southeast Asia: adaptation of IR to
305–6; and neoliberalism 63; hydropower projects in 271;
174–5; and territoriality infrastructure projects in 191–2;
205, 303 as metageography 42–3, 56–7
social science: spatial framework of South-South cooperation 172; see
41, 56; and US state policy also SSDC
57–8, 105–6 South-South dialogue 14
social work, armed 166, 232, 314 South-South transfers 141, 161
406 Index
sovereign power 12 neoliberal 215, 227, 249; post-

sovereignty: in Africa 44, 69, 179; colonial 188; translocality of
and development 169; post- 204; see also institution
colonial 71, 206, 301; as building
relational 186; Third World state intervention: and development
versions of 61 27, 170–3 (see also
Soviet Union: aid for Third World developmental state); and
nations 95–9, 128, 131–41, 145, governmentality 184–5;
166; in Angolan civil war security-motivated 168–9
126–7; Area Studies and 55–6; state of exception 206, 307
artwork from 129, 132, 133; and state power: and development 5, 32,
China 96 (see also Sino-Soviet 177; everyday spaces of 180;
split); development and Cold narratives of 176; and
War 30; global institutions neoliberalism 173
founded by 128–31; internal state-centrism 19–20, 69, 174, 325
periphery of 141, 164; Mao on statehood, disaggregation of 275,
85; model of modernisation 322–3
92–4, 143; US containment states: and development 168–75;
of 101, 106 (see also Cold breaking and remaking 173,
War); US propaganda against 215, 313; colonial 27, 48,
157, 163 170–1, 186–7; 175–6;
space of exception 44, 61, 71 effectiveness of 222; ideal
Spanish-American War 99 models of 169, 206; and
spatial structures 41, 75; see also insurgency 186–96; IR’s vision
metageographies of 60–1, 71, 303; post-colonial
spheres of influence 125, 267, 71, 175, 181, 188; producing
289, 311 space 201, 205–6; steady
Sri Lanka 87, 114 (modelling and promoting) 10,
SSDC (South-South development co- 169, 206, 303, 307; theories of
operation) 3, 39; Brazil’s role in 175–80; see also African states;
263–4, 267; China’s role in 268, failed states; fragile states;
323–4, 326; India’s role in 286, Third World, states of;
288; and infrastructure 204, 291 weak states
micro-level of 323; and rise of Stoler, Ann 307
the South 255–6, 258–9, strategic hamlets 150, 156, 192, 236
288–95, 317–21; South Korea’s Strong, Anna Louise 85
role in 280–4 subaltern geographies 64, 306
SSRC (Social Science Research subaltern geopolitics 44, 66–7, 73,
Council) 58, 106 78–9, 306
stability operations 237, 245, subaltern nationalism 147
247, 314 subaltern struggles 174, 194, 204,
The Stages of Growth (Rostow) 107 207–8, 304
Stalin, Joseph 34, 93–4 Subaltern Studies collective 66
state capacity 175, 188, 232 success stories (of development) 59,
State Department: diplomatic role of 264, 280–1, 297, 304, 319
212; and foreign aid 214, 218, Sudan: Chinese involvement in 252,
225–6, 248; on Indonesia 154; 270, 272, 276–8, 322; Gezira
on Laos 109; and Point Four irrigation scheme 29;
programme 100 Middle Eastern states and 38;
state failure see failed states Soviet relations with 138; US
state institutions 171, 176; in Brazil strike on 238; see also South
177; failed or predatory 189; Sudan
foreign aid transforming 163; Suharto 154, 214
Index 407
Sukarno 87, 88, 89–91, 134, 154 model to 92–4; as borderland

summit culture 294, 319 spaces 188–9; Chinese ties with
sustainable development 217, 222–3; 145, 147, 316–17, 326; Cold
see also SDGs War competition in 162–4, 311;
SWAPO (South West African counter-theory from 117–18,
People’s Organisation) 139 123 (see also theorising back);
Sweezy, Paul 57 discursive creation of 10, 301;
Syria 134, 208, 240 Eastern European aid to 136–7;
as geopolitical perspective 30,
Taiwan: contest with mainland China 32–3, 118–19; as ideological
64, 146–7, 161, 268, 273, 320, project 83–92, 312–13; India’s
324; as developmental state role in 284; insurgency in 207;
170–1; model of growth 33; US IR visions of 61, 70; as
aid to 164 metageography 40–1, 43, 50,
Tajikistan 218 77; militarisation of 165, 310;
Tanzania 89, 144–5; al-Shabaab in origins of term 83–4; as other of
191; goldmining in 186; Indian West 307; rise and fall of
involvement with 288; US aid category 3, 75, 80–2; Soviet
to 218 involvement with 56, 95–9, 128,
Taroke Kalacha 236; see also 131–41, 145, 166; states of 165,
Afghanistan 169, 178–9; US role in 99–101,
Tata 287 106–8, 113, 119–20
TAZARA (Tanzania–Zambia Third Worldism: and Ali Shariati 82;
Railway Authority) 147, 162, and contemporary South-South
204–5 cooperation 255, 262, 317; sites
TCA (Technical Cooperation and varieties of 83–4, 87
Administration) 148–9 Three Worlds Theory 85–6, 142, 255
TCT (Three Cups of Tea) 250 tianxia 64
technical assistance 31, 130, 155, Tillerson, Rex 292–3
226, 229, 230, 259; Soviet 113, Titov, Gherman 98
135, 140; UN programme of 96; Touré, Sékou 145
US forms of 100 TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) 22
technological transfers 265, 319 transnational actors 174, 178
technology: European obsession with transnational crime 213, 247
25; and modernisation 33; SEZs transnational economic zones 191–2
as political 174, 325–6 transnational governmentality 10, 177
Temer, Michel 267 transnational production structures
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 294–5, 321
34, 102, 120, 311 Tricontinental Conference 81,
territorialisation 180, 201, 205 91, 92
territoriality 40, 201, 205, 303 tropical geographies 38, 46–7
terrorism, in Afghanistan 250; in tropicality: history of 44–8, 50–1,
Africa 240, 242, 245, 252; aid 76–8; orientalism and
as preventing 212–13, 220, 226; geopolitics 306
in China 194; insurgency the tropics, as metageography 40–1,
framed as 150; public anxiety 44–8, 50–1, 53, 57, 77
about 213; state support for 38; Truman, Harry 13, 25, 30, 99–100,
see also counterterrorism; War 105, 108, 148, 168
on Terror Trump, Donald 38, 211, 218, 238,
Thailand 149, 192–3 251–2, 316
theorising back 117, 123, 169, 185 trusteeship 26, 128, 288, 316;
Third World: agency within Cold War educative 223, 298
of 121–3; appeal of Soviet truth, regimes of 207, 302
408 Index
TSCTP (Trans-Saharan Security Council 213–14, 262,

Counterterrorism Partnership) 267, 283–4, 290
245 United States: agencies disbursing aid
Tunisia 73, 208, 245 218, 226 (see also USAID); aid
Turkey: and Africa 38, 324; in Cold to Third World countries
War 219; as (re-)emerging 148–60, 162, 166; arms exports
economy 259; infrastructure of 249; authoritarian regimes
of 181 supported by 165, 251; bombing
twin insurgency 189 campaigns in Vietnam 51–3;
Cold War development
UAE (United Arab Emirates) 38, practices of 30, 101–3, 106,
259, 324 111–13, 122; competition with
UCI (University College Ibadan) 48 China 22, 292–3, 316;
Uganda: Chinese involvement in 204, contracting assemblage in 228;
277; Indian involvement with counter-insurgency doctrine of
288; insurgencies in 191; North 234; and East Asian
Korea and 284 developmental states 170;
The Ugly American 112 foreign aid and foreign policy
UN Peacebuilding Commission 266 211–13, 219, 226–8, 250,
UNCTAD (United Nations 309–11; forms of violence 233,
Conference on Trade and 310, 314; hegemony of 13, 81,
Development) 285 106, 116, 257, 319; military
underdevelopment: Africa as space of assemblage in Africa 38, 212,
35, 37, 42; biopolitics of 224, 218–20, 237–40, 242–7, 251–2,
299; as dangerous 4, 188–9, 314–15; military provision of
219, 238, 248, 250, 309; in aid 216–17, 245–6; model of
dependency theory 50, 117; in modernisation 92–3; and racial
Truman’s Point Four issues 88; South of 102–3;
programme 31, 100 strategic use of area studies
undergoverned spaces 4, 185, 245 56–9; unilateralism of 262
UNDP (United Nations Development US Export-Import Bank 158, 159,
Programme) 254–5, 267, 285 218–19
UNESCO (UN Educational, US-African Development
Scientific and Cultural Foundation 218
Organisation) 103–4, 120 USAID (US Agency for International
UNFPA (UN Population Fund) 104 Development): in Afghanistan
ungovernability 36, 72, 177, 185, 210 160, 206; aid disbursed by 218;
ungoverned spaces: and foreign aid and counter-insurgency 120,
218, 314; and insurgency 210, 154–5, 166–7, 212, 220, 225,
238, 250–1 230, 312; in Egypt 165; launch
UNICEF (UN Children’s Fund) 104 of 113, 152; and neoliberalism
UNITA (National Union for the Total 5, 215, 219; and Nepal 195;
Independence of Angola) 126, outsourcing at 228–9 (see also
160, 163 contracting assemblage); in
United Kingdom: and colonial Palestine 234, 235; Rostow’s
development 27; counter- role in 109, 161; security role of
insurgency in colonies 150; 212, 214, 217, 224–7, 229,
post-Brexit foreign relations of 247–50, 315–16
24–5; tropical geography in USDA (US Department of
46–7 Agriculture) 103, 217–18
United Nations 81, 91; USIA (United States Information
multidimensional integration Agency) 157, 159–60, 344
stabilisation missions 221–2; USSR see Soviet Union
Index 409
Vale 266 white supremacy 25, 77

value chains, transnational 295, 321 WHO (World Health Organization)
Venezuela 111, 208, 267 103–4
Viet Cong 151, 155–6, 236 will to improve 16, 181, 223, 298
Vietnam: challenges to Soviet Union Williams, Shirley 164
98–9; and China 267; in Wilson, Woodrow 99
Comecon 130; Republic of see Wofford, Harris 112
South Vietnam Wolfowitz, Paul 104
Vietnam War: counter-insurgency in World Bank: BRICS challenge to
112, 149, 155–7, 314; Rostow’s 291; and Chinese lending 270;
role in 109; and Tricontinental disciplinary power of 10;
Conference 92; and tropical reform of 289; refusal of
geography 49–53 African aid projects 147; and
villagization 28–9, 172, 191, 312 US development agenda 103–4;
Virgin Lands programme 94, visions of statehood 61
120, 311 World Systems approaches 68
Wright, Richard 88–9
Walker, Rob 18 WTO (World Trade Organisation)
Waltz, Kenneth 68 267, 289
War on Terror 2–4, 214, 218; in
Africa 38, 238, 251, 314 Xi Jinping 275, 289
wars of decolonisation see colonial
wars Yemen: Arab Spring in 208; People’s
Washington Consensus 173, 270 Democratic Republic of 134;
weak states 36, 61, 179, 239, 264, 320 US military strikes on 238, 239
welfare states 106, 125, 161, 310
the West: global hegemony of 257, Zaire 73, 104, 120, 124, 214; see also
319; reification of 13, 44; self- DRC
representation of 24, 71, 288, Zambia: Chinese involvement in 272,
316; and the tropics 45; view 277; electricity system in 182;
from in Political Geography and Indian firms in 287; Soviet
IR 60–1, 77 influence in 139; US aid to 218
Western humanitarian and peace Zapatistas 199, 209–10, 305–6
interventionism 4 ZAPU (Zimbabwe Africa People’s
WFK (World Friends Korea) 283 Union) 94, 166
white saviour industrial complex Zhou Enlai 90, 144–5, 268
35–6 Zimbabwe 166, 277–8, 283

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Geopolitics and

Geopolitics and Development examines the historical emergence of devel-

Marcus Power is a Professor of Human Geography at Durham Univer-

Typeset in Times New Roman

1 INTRODUCTION: GEOPOLITICS AND THE

2 POST-COLONIALISM, GEOPOLITICS AND

3 MODERNISING THE “THIRD WORLD” 80

4 COLD WAR GEOPOLITICS AND

5 THE STATE AND DEVELOPMENT 168

6 THE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF

7 THE RISE OF THE SOUTH 254

8 CONCLUSIONS: DEVELOPMENT AND

1.1 Map of China’s “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR)

2.2 Yves Lacoste at a congress on Vietnam held in

Romulo Betancourt of Venezuela and others on

4.10 Chinese propaganda poster (1963) entitled “Awakened

The village was submerged as part of the construction

special operations soldier was killed by a mortar attack

7.6 A Chinese businesswoman talks on her mobile phone

AAPSO Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation

FAF Foreign Assistance Framework

OPS Ofﬁce of Public Safety

WHO World Health Organization

A LTHOUGH it has consistently been imagined and represented as a

disorder, insecurity and insurgency. In particular, the book explores

studies and seeks both to re-theorise development as an apparatus or

book examines the growing articulation between security policies

its long-standing obsession with (re)modelling states in the per-

postdevelopment was meant to convey the sense of an era in

A “toxic” word (Rist, 2010: 24) fraught with a Faustian ambiguity,

to individuals, communities, nations and regions but ultimately as a

critique of “development”, since it was equated “almost with life

Although Hart (2010) does recognise the dialectical nature of

of development programmes typically refer themselves to the

mined, unexplorable land” (22) and how it stands as an “outdated

metaphor” that appears common “through the employment of inap-

424). It is thus important to recognise that development repre-

position (Ziai, 2004). For others, post-development thought opens

it is not enough to critically deconstruct discourses, to point

More generally, international development has tended to ignore – or,

replete with disavowed memories (racism, (neo)colonialism,

(the exoticised Third World, structural adjustment as universal

This important question of the unconscious fantasies of devel-

as a crazy, expansive machine, driven by its capacity to incor-

about the promises of development that produce a subject that

Such approaches acknowledge not only that “all sorts of

(Brigg, 2002). Deleuze similarly conceptualises the dispositif as a

suggests a different set of metaphors for the social world (e.g.

CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS AND DEVELOPMENT

The term geopolitics, which has different meanings in different

of plurality, in linguistic terms, that geopolitics is a polysemic

. . ..no more than a general gathering place for various critiques

The focus on the displacement of state-centric readings of

and Power, 2013). Rather than assuming critical geopolitics to be

Critical geopolitics has done an excellent job of documenting

Some scholars have sought to challenge this elite-centric view

regional expertise and ﬁeldwork and argues that critical geopoli-

SITUATING DEVELOPMENT HISTORICALLY

possibilities wiped out. They throw facts at my head, statis-

An archaeology of development demands a full grasp of