USAID to USAIR
It’s time to breathe new life into global work by shifting from International Development to International Reparations
As we watch the unfolding genocide in Gaza, the of freezing of critical, life-saving humanitarian assistance through UNRWA when it is needed the most, and policy makers like Samantha Power remain stubbornly silent on the horrors unfolding, it’s a helpful reminder for us all: we create the political and societal systems we’re living in. This holds true for international development — our current approaches, methods and agencies that deliver foreign assistance from wealthier nations to less wealthy nations is in reality, a relatively recent system that we have created.
And as we have created it, we are free to update or change it completely to better meet our needs today. If only we have the audacity and daring to do so.
And now — as we watch the international order deteriorate before our eyes — is the time to do just this. In fact, we are seeing this happen already — as many humanitarian assistance organizations reject the mythology of neutrality and publicly call for a ceasefire, calling out their own funders.
International development happens in various forms around the world. To better explore how we can do this work differently, we’re going to use US foreign assistance as a case study. This is informed by the fact that we (the authors) are Americans and have a greater responsibility to explore our own systems than pass comments on others. And, for the sake of time and space — we can’t cover every system in the space of this one article.
Brief history of current US foreign assistance
Understanding history allows us to contextualize what’s happening today, and deepens our systems-level analysis. That’s why it’s important for us to understand the history of international development as it has been constructed in the United States.
In 1961, in the midst of the cold war between the US and the USSR and in the middle of the massive Decolonization (with a capital D) project where most of the world was fighting for freedom from colonial oppression, the Kennedy Administration created the US Agency of International Development. This is not an agency that was created for altruistic reasons. The Foreign Assistance Act starts with this phrase: “AN ACT To promote the foreign policy, security, and general welfare of the United States…” clearly centering the needs and general welfare of the US. USAID and the broader U.S. development project were political projects designed to increase American influence around the globe — with a specific goal of countering an enemy and fitting within a broader defense-led agenda of containment.
There is much more to this history — how foreign assistance was set up, how it’s been framed and messaged domestically and globally, how the US worked to undermine freedom movements around the world, etc. And how all of this intersected with racism and colonialism. That’s for another article.
The question we want to grapple with today is — what comes next?
The world we live in has changed since 1961 when USAID was established. that ranges from everything to the fall of the USSR to the campaign around the Sustainable Development Goals and to the reality of climate change.
Should this not mean that our overarching paradigm of foreign assistance also adapt and change to meet the needs of this world that we live in today? As opposed to continuing to uplift the needs of the Kennedy Administration from 1961?
Political leaders in the United States in 1961 conceived international development around containing the USSR and counterbalancing freedom movements.
As international development leaders of today, how do we want to conceive of international development today?
We have tried to put our trust in “better” leaders. After all, Samantha Power being named as the head of USAID and also given a seat on the National Security Council (NSC) was supposed to mark a new era for us all. A scholar of genocide who made her career noting that policy makers remaining silent in the face of genocide made those policy makers complicit in those horrors. And yet — today, Samantha Power is overseeing a genocide herself.
And importantly, how do we grapple with providing development assistance in situations where the exact same government and exact same tax dollars have created the the conditions requiring aid in the first place?
The future of international development
To answer this question fully, we rely on our training as global development professionals:
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We need to start with listening deeply to frontline communities, to those most impacted by the challenges that global development is attempting to solve. We need to understand and explore the root causes of those challenges, including extraction, destruction, and erasure of local knowledge and wisdom that colonialism and racialized capitalism have caused. We need to explore and unlearn the ways global development can reinforce and perpetuate neo-colonialism and exacerbate the challenges.
We need to explore theories of change, understanding how the work we resource will work to create the change we want, and to articulate clearly how we hold ourselves accountable to these outcomes. Of course, development agencies do this periodically already. What we propose is different in one crucial way: instead of starting with what is possible under the current system, we start with the question of what should we do, not what can we do. Start with the question of what would be morally correct, not just merely feasible.
As with so many other systems, we’ve tried reform. There has been almost an endless set of pledges and policies that have sought to “shift the power” and prioritize “localization”. What we have seen over and over again is the failure to achieve even marginal changes.
If marginal changes don’t work, if trusting better leadership only leads to disappointment, what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to be bolder? To be visionary?
As practitioners, we offer our own assessment of what the future of international development should be: reparatory.
Reparations as a new foundation for international development
We propose that instead of using international development to counter other forces and shore up our own power, we should use international development to address historic harms and create a global arena for healing. We argue that a healing-centric development is humankind’s best opportunity to achieve our collective goals.
A reparations-driven development agenda can and should include: climate reparations that hold the largest polluters accountable for the undeniable harm that we’ve caused the planet; war reparations that start with publicly acknowledging the harm that Global North communities have done; colonial reparations that start with some basic acts that have already gained popular consensus: return of stolen artifacts, cessation of payments from formerly colonized countries to their former colonizers for the audacity to demand freedom.
A global reparations framework can and should also include specific reparations — in the United States this must include reparations for chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide. In this way, our bold new international agenda will better connect the local to the global, recognizing that our needs as humans aren’t defined by the political boundaries where we live and that citizens of rich countries don’t need different things than citizens of countries whose natural wealth has been exploited and stolen over centuries of oppression.
The details of what this can look like is something we should collectively discuss and explore, building a global movement that redefines not just international development but international cooperation more broadly.
As a first step, we argue that it’s time for USAID to become USAIR — the United States Agency for International Reparations.
Join us in this critical conversation.
Through these conversations, we’d love to explore what a reparations framework actually looks like. We have all the same questions that everyone does — what does this look like? What will it mean for programs?
These are all questions we believe we can work through as we strive for bolder things; reparations are the logical next step.
And we believe that in this moment of deep moral crisis that has shaken so many of us to our cores, that this question that dramatically dreams of a different world that centers healing and repair is in fact, the only possible way forward. That having lost the moral high-ground, the only thing we can do is seek to repair the harm.
Join us for this critical conversation.
About the Authors
Farah Mahesri is the co-author for the 2018 State of Diversity in Global Social Impact report, an experienced international development expert with more than 15 years of experience in global development and DE&I expert with nearly 10 years of working on DEI-type initiatives using liberatory frameworks to unlock transformative potential and impact. She is a skilled facilitator, expert in training design, and has experience conducting organizational development work both as internal staff for an organization and as an external consultant. You can see more about her work at www.fnmadvising.com.
Maha El-Sheikh brings 20 years of experience as an international humanitarian and development professional, including 15 years in the Middle East. Her work currently focuses on the social injustices underlying our global humanitarian crises. She facilitates and trains development practitioners in addressing systemic oppression within aid and development organizations, by reimagining organizational culture through compassion-centered, counter-oppressive, healing-centered, liberatory frameworks. She is co-director and core faculty at Courage of Care Coalition, where she partners with relational facilitators and leaders in the economic, racial and climate justice movements.
