Selling Stabilization: Anxious Practices of Militarized Development Contracting

Abstract

This article examines how post‐9/11 US military trainings have conscripted development as a weapon of war. The post‐9/11 years saw the increasing dominance of for‐profit international development contractors (IDCs), who, by 2010, were winning more valuable contracts from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) than non‐profit organizations, UN agencies, and the World Bank. This article describes financial, administrative and bureaucratic shifts in the integration of development and defence that have fed into the increasing dominance of IDCs. In the mid‐2000s, USAID developed an instructional framework to translate development for military audiences. The framework speaks to the rejection in this period of the language of ‘hearts and minds’ and the adoption of a technical language of ‘stabilization’ amenable to private contracting. Drawing on ethnographic observations of private civilian contractors teaching the USAID framework on military bases, I examine the contradictions of ‘stabilization’ as a concept sold in private militarized development markets, and as a lived practice of military learning that often conflicts with other dimensions of soldiering.

The impacts of marketization on international aid: Transforming relationships among USAID vendors

“…The structure of the Partnership for Supply Chain Management (PFSCM), the seventh ranked vendor in 2016 (Table 1), provides in- The comparative USAID aid distribution data as presented in Table 1 and Figure 3 illustrates a consistent for-profit stakeholder presence. Contracts received by for-profit contractors are larger than those received by non-profit organizations, a finding consistent with Greenburg's (2017) research that analyzed funding models a decade earlier. A review of USAID contractor data in 1991 finds some of the same firms.…”

“…An examination of Department for International Development (DfID) disbursements over a 5-year period between 1998 and 2003 finds that for-profit firms bid on more service oriented, fixed price contracts with clearly specified deliverables in comparison to NGO focus on development, solution-oriented contracts (Schoenberger, 2018). Within the first decade of the new millennium, Greenburg (2017) notes that for-profit firms received bigger contracts than organizations in the nonprofit sector. For-profit contractors include a return on investment in their contracts that contrasts with the NGO's non-profit generating model.…”