The second chapter moves from the learning crisis to IDFI programming in education. Based on the three main donors involved with primary education (World Bank, DFID, and USAID), it examines the process of designing projects in developing countries and the interventions that were financed. Early emphasis was on developing school infrastructure. Initial research, especially the school effectiveness studies, informed donor decisions on the content of their financing of education reform. There is an evolution in IDFI approach with a singular focus on developing infrastructure to a collective construction of a basket of investments for quality education based on best practice. There are commonalities across agencies in the interventions that are financed. Each of the areas contained in this basket are discussed in detail in light of the learning crisis – instructional materials, teacher training, and community mobilization. The chapter concludes by identifying the gaps in programming that have led to the learning crisis. In the final evaluation, the interorganizational reflection and systems learning that would have helped to comprehend and attend to the learning crisis did not happen.

Beginning in the immediate post-WWII moment and carrying on to the present, international law’s Human Rights and Development missions mirror the US Evangelical ethos that emerged and gained traction at a similar pace. Making no causal claims, this Chapter focuses less on the UDHR’s expressions of monotheistic beliefs and more on the actors and ethos that informed those expressions. Specifically, it explores how legal communicative strategies and ideas used by human rights and development champions parallel those deployed at the same time by dominant US Evangelical leaders. The communicative strategies, inter alia, recall the desperate straits of the ‘unsaved’ other, present information as good news (gospel) and as truth, appeal to Messianic notions of history, and offer salvationist promises to transform afflicted lives. And the parallels form some of the many rationalizing forces that can be viewed as an expression of quasi-religious faith in American approaches to social and economic governance, and a call for those approaches to be internationalized. Like the Kingdom of God, this faith must be true for everyone to be true for anyone, and truth knows no borders. In other words, it is international law as evangelism.

In this chapter, I examine the evolution of US democracy aid in Egypt through the eyes of the diplomats, practitioners, and bureaucrats engaged with such efforts in Egypt. I focus on the practical construction of democracy aid on the ground and the struggles undertaken by different actors to implement aid programs in an authoritarian state. I examine how ideas, interests, and institutions engaged in such aid evolved since 1990s to shape a kind of reform more attuned to the commercial and economic interests of the US and Egyptian governments rather than those of citizens in the country. In the first section, I focus on the nature of authoritarianism in Egypt, tracing its origins since the Nasser era to describe how power has since been exercised and maintained. In the second section, I examine how US democracy aid evolved in Egypt, focusing on the debates and discussions at the inception of USAID’s programs.

To understand how democracy aid works in the Middle East, it is crucial to examine such aid at its origins in Washington, DC. In this chapter, I introduce the actors, institutions, and interests connected to the administration of US democracy aid over the last three decades. The voices and practices of those working on democracy aid seldom feature in most research on such aid. Engaging them illuminates the obstacles and challenges encountered by those working on democracy aid in different capacities within the US government. I trace the evolution of democracy aid from its inception to examine how ideas about democracy emerged, evolved, and were negotiated over time and cast light on the constellation of actors and structures militating against some forms of democracy over others. This chapter incorporates novel new data on the professional histories of nearly 2,000 professionals engaged in democracy promotion to map the influence of individuals in shaping ideas about democracy aid.

In the final chapter, I consider how the 2011 Arab uprisings challenged the strategies adopted by the United States and regimes in Egypt and Morocco. I examine shifting aid strategies from the United States and the response from former regime elites and emergent political actors. Drawing from interviews with diplomats and activists involved in transitional support and unreleased data, I consider how the ideas, institutions, and interests that supported a particular form of democracy aid for twenty-five years adjusted with the promise of political change. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the challenges these changes now pose for activists and emerging political actors in the region as well as policymakers in the United States and those embedded within the democracy bureaucracy in Washington, DC. The chapter’s final section revisits the questions raised at the outset of the book and discusses possible mechanisms for enhancing the effectiveness of democracy aid programs.

This chapter examines the political economy of democracy aid in Morocco in two sections. In the first, I focus on the context in which political and economic reforms began in Morocco and describe the foundation of authoritarian power in the country. The second section discusses the context in which US democracy aid began in the country. US democracy assistance in Morocco was executed later than similar efforts in Egypt and at significantly different funding levels. I discuss reasons for this variation as well as how that strategy was formulated over time. This section traces the United States’ increasing support in its democracy strategy for economic reforms over political aid for democracy that would mirror the regime’s own priorities and how its conception of democracy in the country changed to support the commercial and security interests of the regime and the United States.

The chapter demonstrates the primacy of ‘the procedural’ in overarching US and European policy documents, as well as in discourses of ‘democracy promoters’. It argues that the underlying structural power dynamics of Jordanian authoritarianism are fundamentally ignored, as the Jordanian regime is in important ways portrayed as a mere result of a lack of capacity among Jordanians at large and at times even as an agent of democratisation. Based on an in-depth analysis of a USAID-commissioned assessment of its Democracy and Governance portfolio in Jordan, and of a political party training event funded by USAID and implemented by the IRI, the chapter discusses different modes of institutional reproduction, as well as the self-perpetuating tendencies of ‘democracy promotion’ in the face of seeming practical failure. Ultimately, the chapter contends that external attempts at ‘democracy promotion’ only strengthen authoritarian stability in the country. Such interventions are thus shown to directly accept, depend on and reinforce the Jordanian regime’s questionable reform narrative, which problematises the imagined ‘Jordanian non-democratic other’ instead of authoritarian structures of power.

The chapter discusses the convergence of neoliberalism with efforts at ‘democracy promotion’ and illustrates the precise meaning that ideals of democracy come to hold in Jordan’s only port city, Aqaba, which has come to epitomise neoliberal reform in the country. Processes of neoliberal restructuring in Aqaba have been directly supported by USAID under the assumption that they also help to enable processes of democratisation. The chapter argues that efforts at neoliberal ‘democracy promotion’ are part and parcel of a wider imperial agenda of control and domination. It illustrates this by providing an in-depth discussion of the founding of the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority (ASEZA) in 2001, the subsequent privatisation of Aqaba’s land, property and state-owned enterprises, the latter’s controversial sociopolitical effects, as well as concomitant attempts at neoliberal ‘democracy promotion’ and the further marketisation of sociopolitical life. Instead of enabling future processes of democratisation, it demonstrates that such interventions only further deprive procedural democracy of its already strongly diluted emancipatory potential, as socio-economic inequalities are radically exacerbated. The chapter is largely based on the study of various confidential and non-public documents authored and/or used by the USAID Aqaba support programmes.

President John F. Kennedy was elected on a program of change. Despite his electoral rhetoric, in office, he was cautious and fiscally conservative. He felt especially vulnerable on economic issues with a nagging balance of payments deficit that threatened the role of the dollar in the international monetary system. He chose Republicans for the two agencies that had the greatest bearing on the balance of payments: C. Douglas Dillon as Secretary of the Treasury and McNamara as Secretary of Defense. At the same time, Kennedy’s interest in the developing world was different from his predecessors’ and led him to experiment with new ways of projecting US power internationally, including through building up local capabilities to fight “wars of national liberation.” His national security bureaucracy changed accordingly with the creation of a Special Group on Counterinsurgency, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Peace Corps and with a renewed focus on the US Army’s Special Forces.