The Neoliberalization of Development: Trade Capacity Building and Security at the US Agency for International Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This paper examines recent changes at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) regarding the connections between trade liberalization, development, and security. USAID has adopted “trade capacity building” as a framework for development, and, in conjunction with new US national security discourses, now operates under the assumption that underdevelopment is a source of state weakness that produces insecurity. I argue that these changes in how USAID understands and undertakes development constitute the neoliberalization of development. In accordance with these shifts, USAID has redefined critical aspects of its development mission, undergone internal restructuring, and altered its relationship with other US state institutions and capital. The actual prospects for achieving security or development are slim, however, as the agency remains wedded to definitions of both that suggest the only acceptable role for the state lies in facilitating further neoliberalization and promoting the stability of capitalist class relations. An overview of USAID's historical development, and a closer examination of the place of food aid and food security in the agency's development work, demonstrate this.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".