VIOLENT SAVIORS

Of humanitarian enterprises that don’t take humans into account.

Half a century ago, a young Ugandan, expelled from the country for being of Asian origin and a refugee in England, refused to be relocated from London to a distant camp, saying, “We protest at being treated as objects or, at best, as cattle.” This affords development economist Easterly a starting point addressing the question of agency: Do the recipients of aid not deserve some voice in the aid they receive and what they do with it? The violence of his title speaks to assumptions made under the rubric of the “Development Right of Conquest”: I conquer your land, you refuse to develop it to Western industrial standards, and you are displaced so that, if you will not be improved, the land can. Thus the European conquerors of the Americas “could then justify the replacement of the unprogressive people by progressive people in the name of progress.” Easterly, in a spritely text, invokes Adam Smith, a hero throughout, for his insistence that the right of choice in trade is fundamental, and a fundamental check against the illiberal tendencies of those urging conquest, such as the French philosopher Condorcet, who “put Enlightenment intellectuals in charge” of deciding the fates of non-European peoples. A few twists of metaphor, and one might say that slavery was a kind of developmental aid—more anti-Smithian violence, but a point vigorously argued by the Southern elite before the Civil War. As Easterly charts, most development aid is less draconian than all that these days, although there is still plenty of politics: The post–Cold War Washington Consensus, for instance, offered financial aid only if the recipient country “agreed to reforms decreed by [World] Bank and [International Monetary] Fund staff.” Easterly concludes that aid is one thing, but agency and dignity in the face of systemic paternalism are quite another.

A nicely contrarian work of interest to aid organizations and policymakers everywhere.