Aid & Humanitarianism

Historically
The foundational argument: ‘Development’ was born colonial

• Truman's 1949 inaugural address,

  • where he introduced the concept of "underdevelopment" for the first time, framing two-thirds of the world as economically backward and in need of Western technical assistance.

  • This is the birth certificate of the modern development apparatus, and it it was issued at the precise moment formal colonialism was ending.

  • Aid replaced formal colonialism. Aid became control in a new jacket, framing the Global North as a saviour of ‘underdeveloped, impoverished countries’ (which was underdevelopment caused by Global North’s own extractivism, exploitation and genocide).

• Wolfgang Sachs- The Development Dictionary (1992)

  • Sachs argues that "development" is a Western discourse that operates as a mechanism for the cultural and economic production of the "Third World"
    defining what counts as progress, poverty, and expertise in ways that always position the West as the standard.

• Arturo Escobar- Encountering Development (1995)

  • Escobar builds on Sachs, and lays out how development created an entire apparatus (institutions, knowledge systems, professionals) that reproduces colonial power under a humanitarian vocabulary.

• Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (1997/2014)

  • Rist traces development as a secular religion: a belief system descended from the Christian missionary civilising mission, which itself was one of colonialism's justifying ideologies.
    He shows that "each time the promises of development fail to materialise, the response is always more development", a self-reinforcing logic that structurally cannot acknowledge its own failures.

Continuity of coloniality in Development/Aid 

The structural argument: aid as control

• Kwame Nkrumah- Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965)

  • Nkrumah argued that newly independent states had achieved formal sovereignty but remained economically controlled by former colonial powers, and that aid was one of the primary mechanisms of this control
    By influencing agenda-setting, where funding goes, but also other economic mechanisms.

  • He showed how aid (bilateral grants, loans, technical assistance) came with conditions that served donor interests: purchasing requirements that kept money circulating in donor economies, policy conditionalities that prevented recipient governments from pursuing economic strategies that would reduce dependency

• Ramachandran (2025)- From Empire to Aid: Analysing Persistence of Colonial Legacies in Foreign Aid to Africa

  • This paper uses OECD data to show that colonial powers consistently provide more bilateral aid to former colonies than to comparable non-colonies and that the types of aid (health, education, social protection) mirror colonial-era patterns of "civilising" investment.
    The colonial relationship doesn't end, but instead it gets laundered through aid bureaucracy.

  • Example: Tied aid → by 1970, almost half of British Commonwealth aid was tied, meaning recipient countries could only spend it on British goods and services.

The epistemological argument: knowledge as colonial infrastructure

• Walter Mignolo- Local Histories/Global Designs (2000)

  • Development doesn't just transfer money, it also transfers epistemologies from GN to GS
    It defines what counts as knowledge, whose expertise is credible, what problems are worth solving, and how solutions should be measured.

• Frantz Fanon- The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

  • Describes the psychological and cultural dimensions of epistemological dominance
    He highlights how colonial power operates not only through institutions but through the minds of the colonised, including through the creation of a local elite that has internalised Northern frameworks. The "national bourgeoisie" chapter is directly applicable to the aid sector's elite capture problem. Rasanathan et al., 2026 actually operationalises this: → nearly 80% of health research publications still originate from high-income countries, despite the data and specimens often coming from LMICs.

The debt and reparations argument

• Jason Hickel, The Divide (2017)

  • Hickel analyses the net financial flows between North and South. The Global South sends vastly more money to the North ( through debt service, capital flight, tax evasion by multinationals, and unequal trade) than it receives in aid.
    For every 1% into the Global South, the Global North makes $14.

  • The Danish strategy document actually includes a figure (Figure 6) showing that illegal capital flight from Africa in 2020 was DKK 575 billion against DKK 311 billion in development assistance inflows. So instead of ‘Aid’ (which is used now as a tool of investment), to repay our colonial debts, we should seriously investigate alternatives measures such as debt relief/reparations.

Buzzwordification & Elite Capture:

• Themrise Khan - Decolonisation is a comfortable buzzword for the aid sector

  • Her argument that even decolonisation framing is a Northern imposition is exactly what you need for your buzzwordification section.

• Olúfémi Táíwò- Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously

  • Intellectual and moral critique of today's decolonization movement. Decolonization has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West's direct political and economic control, it has become a catch- all idea, often for performing 'morality' or 'authenticity'; it suffocates African thought and denies African agency.

• Olúfémi Táíwò-Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)

  • Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and become the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.