Jody Mason
In her incisive discussion of Elon Musk’s recent gutting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Jill Campbell-Miller correctly assesses the move as motivated by MAGA-movement isolationism. She further notes that Musk’s actions are complicated by the fact that, for many decades, the aid paradigm has also been subject to substantive critique from those who, unlike Musk, care about global poverty. Ultimately, Campbell-Miller concludes: “since the Second World War, it has never been the case that a US administration has so fully refused to state a commitment to the global order it helped create, or refused to participate in a dialogue about compassion and care for the world’s poorest.”
Weighing her own response to the attack on USAID, Campbell-Miller finds herself “in the strange position of missing” the “hypocrisy” of American foreign policy. I sympathize with this. But, for historians of development, is lament the most useful response? An activist mobilization is necessary on many fronts in the current moment. As part of this work, we historians of development would do well to return to the critical Indigenous thought on the development paradigm to inform our efforts.
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