Global Development

This is a wide-ranging, transnational history of “development” during the Cold War era from the perspective of both powerful donor countries and “Third World” recipient countries. One of the book's most valuable contributions is this reframing, in which the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union are all in one boat, using foreign aid to further their own political and economic agendas, while leaders of recipient, target countries were consuming that aid to further their own political and economic agendas. This is a masterful work, whose main take-away is that neither proponents of foreign aid, who see it as a beneficent way to raise the stock of humanity, nor its detractors, who see it as a hegemonic tool to enforce empire, understand how thoroughly foreign aid and “development” failed to meet intended goals—whether for improvement or for control. The author makes three central arguments: (1) that the Cold War was

Cognitive reframing · Cold war · Development economics · Economics · Foreign policy · Hegemony · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Soviet union · International Development and Aid · Law