‘The planet that rules our destiny’: Alternative development and environmental power in occupied Afghanistan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I explore the role that the United States Agency for International Development and its implementing partners played in the ‘alternative development’ effort to provide Afghan farmers with sustainable and economically viable alternatives to growing poppy. I argue that alternative development programs in occupied Afghanistan sought to wean farmers off of poppies by creating a rural ‘environment’ conducive to the cultivation of legal alternative crops. My argument proceeds in four steps. First, I theorize alternative development as a form of ‘environmental power’. Second, I put this theoretical framework to work in eastern Afghanistan through a close reading of one of the United States Agency for International Development’s flagship alternative development projects: Development Alternative Inc.’s ‘Incentives Driving Economic Alternatives – North, East and West’. As Incentives Driving Economic Alternatives: North, East and West (IDEA-NEW) ran its course, its end-state goal shifted from improving production to promoting market exchange. Third, I suggest that IDEA-NEW’s marketization efforts produced differentiated subjects of rule, exacerbating already existing patterns of uneven development in the process. Finally, although IDEA-NEW is represented as productive, humanitarian and therapeutic, I conclude by reflecting on how it is undergirded by – and also provides a legitimating armature for – techniques of population management that are destructive of life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".