“Blood in the Veins”

On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that stopped work on all US-funded aid programs and subjected them to a ninety-day review process that was meant to identify—and theoretically save—initiatives that were making “America safe, stronger, or more prosperous.”1 Eight days later, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, tried to placate nervous industry professionals by promising that “core life-saving” humanitarian interventions would be exempted from the looming cuts. Whatever glimmers of hope that Rubio’s hedging might have offered its intended audience, however, were quickly squashed on February 7, when the US Agency for International Development (USAID) put most of its overseas workforce on administrative leave. Here, USAID was clearly anticipating the catastrophic cuts to programming that were coming down the pipeline. As the agency would later confirm to Congress on March 24, it had identified 898 projects that could be continued moving forward and terminated funding for the remaining 4,443. USAID, as Elon Musk quipped on X, had been fed “into the wood chipper.”2

This rapid dismantling was widely condemned by liberal pundits, who offered three general critiques that are helpfully summarized by Laura Robson for The Baffler. First, “soft power of the kind USAID was designed to project around the globe was crucial to American ‘security’ and to maintaining minimal levels of international goodwill.” Second, USAID’s historically successful programming in infectious disease monitoring and pandemic preparation would grind to an immediate halt, invariably endangering lives at home and abroad. And third, the “shutdown was a brutal punishment of the thousands of mostly American aid workers whose appointments were suddenly terminated.” While Robson agrees that the “Trump administration’s abrupt shuttering of the agency is unquestionably illegal and undemocratic,” she also emphasizes that such critiques are fundamentally misguided in how they fail to reckon with USAID’s “long and disgraceful history of collusion with—and sometimes active participation in—colonial and neocolonial violence,” as well as its “promotion of a political economy of privatization” that has “for decades helped to produce an entire developmentalist sector made up of corporations who run state-funded enterprises for private profit.”3 This more radical line of critique is also picked up by commentators such as Hamza Rao, who emphasizes how USAID programming has historically “served as a convenient alibi for capitalist exploitation, a trick to sweep away any hint that Western powers might have had a hand in the South’s misery.”4

As a geographer who has spent a lot of time thinking about the entanglements between development and empire in post-1945 Afghanistan, much of my own work on the subject provides more ammunition for Robson’s and Rao’s countercritiques of liberal attempts to whip up public sympathy for USAID and its employees.5 I write elsewhere on USAID’s deep involvement in the “dirty work” of US empire. In addition to providing civilian cover for police training, prison building, and targeted assassination activities in war-torn Vietnam, USAID also ran logistics for the mujahideen insurgency during the Soviet-Afghan conflict.6 USAID’s complicity in the turn-of-the-century development of narco-economies in Afghanistan and elsewhere is also by now well-documented.7 Even seemingly benevolent projects, such as value chain support initiatives, have subjected rural communities to various forms of slow violence and organized abandonment, entrenching gendered geographies of uneven development that continue to organize everyday life in Afghanistan.8 The implication here is that USAID’s long and bloody history of intervention in post-1945 Afghanistan exemplifies how development, following Micol Seigel, might be understood as violence work or “work that relies upon violence or the threat thereof.”9 From this perspective, any policy that defunds violence work and disarms violence workers should not be opposed by scholars and activists who are struggling to abolish the US national security state.

And yet, reporting out of Afghanistan in the immediate post-USAID moment suggests that the story is unfortunately much more complex on the ground. As the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN) reports, the cuts to USAID programming in Afghanistan “will directly affect millions of Afghans, both beneficiaries and workers.”10 The most up-to-date calculations peg the “absolute” funding reduction for Afghanistan at $223 million USD, which is the “tenth largest decrease globally.” What these figures conceal, however, is the actual hit to Afghanistan’s economy relative to national income, which is predicted to be the “second greatest in the world,” surpassed only by Liberia. When the Taliban victory in August 2021 cut Afghanistan off from various formal sources of military and civilian aid, its economy contracted by 25 percent. While this latest round of cuts is “not on the same scale,” humanitarian assistance still pays for the national trade imbalance, food, fuel, and medicine. What all of this means is that “in the short term, a humanitarian crisis looks likely,” and if left unchecked, that crisis will fester to produce long-term consequences for millions of Afghan beneficiaries and workers. The effects of these cuts will be exacerbated because the Taliban has historically relied on civilian aid to fill gaps in essential public services while steering domestic revenues toward other sectors, such as security and religious education.

Under such conditions, the grueling work of reproducing some semblance of everyday life has been downloaded onto the shoulders of local nongovernmental organizations. One man working in “one of Afghanistan’s poorest and most isolated provinces said that all three of his NGO’s mother and child health centres had closed, along with their mental health centre, because of the stop to USAID funding.” As he put it to AAN, “There is no other institution providing the services we were providing, not in the areas we covered. . . . Our life will go from 100 to zero because we relied on our salaries.” Another aid worker told AAN that they had “people who’d worked for us for 15 years” who were “now having to stay at home” with “no other source of income” and “no other jobs out there” to apply for.11 The implication here, then, is that a broader public conversation around the Trump administration’s abolishment of USAID cannot simply revolve around naive liberal eulogies for the agency and barbed radical reminders of its long and bloody implication in the “dirty work” of empire. As Vinay Gidwani powerfully reminded us more than twenty years ago, development is “always anchored to a moral geography of place-making” and “its evaluation is, therefore, inseparable from the freedoms it either enables or curtails.”12 What, then, are the concrete material stakes of this post-USAID moment for a radical politics of decolonization and anti-imperialism?

In the concluding chapter of The Quiet Violence of Empire, I argue that the USAID complex “needs to be the target of an explicitly internationalist or multiscalar politics of abolitionist organizing and struggle that encompasses both the domestic carceral state and the imperial national security state.”13 In the intervening years, these ideas have traveled to cognate fields such as development studies, where scholars such as Priya Raghavan are “explor[ing] the productive possibilities inaugurated by taking an expressly abolitionist approach to development.”14 Bringing together different strands of criticism—the Black radical tradition, postdevelopment frameworks, and so on—Raghavan argues that development scholars and practitioners need a new “set of intellectual and political tools” that can help them become more “active agents in dynamically dismantling” institutions like USAID. For Raghavan, abolition and abolitionist struggle offer one blueprint for moving forward in a post-USAID world.15

Where Raghavan and I depart, however, is in our respective commitments and disinvestments from the postdevelopment project. For Raghavan, development is always the kind of capital D development practiced by USAID and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development. Rightfully suspicious of the ways in which decolonial frameworks in UK academia have prioritized scholarly debates over canons and curricula rather than meaningful political change supported by their research, Raghavan suggests that calls to decolonize development can only lead to “reformist reforms” of the broader system. What Raghavan’s otherwise essential essay curiously downplays, however, are the very real historical connections between the everyday work of development and the everyday work of decolonial and abolitionist struggle in both the “developed” and “decolonizing” worlds. If we take abolitionists like Ruth Wilson Gilmore seriously, then, abolition is a politics not of absence but of presence, concerned above all with “building and supporting life-affirming infrastructures of social transformation.” For me, then, the key question becomes: What role might small-d development play in “building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can”?16

It is beyond the scope of this short intervention to rehearse my arguments in detail. What I do want to emphasize is that grounding an abolitionist approach to international development in the “construction of alternative institutions that can provide collective security in the face of environmental and social dangers” seems like an increasingly necessary project in a moment where the Trump administration has essentially hijacked our project.17 Here, it is important to stress that defunding and dismantling USAID was never a pet project of the Trump administration but rather has historically been a key national security goal of the far-right wing of the Republican Party. Indeed, USAID’s twenty-first-century reinvention of itself into a “wholesaler”—as opposed to a “retailer”—of development aid was triggered by the agency’s previous clash with conservative “deficit hawks” like Senator Jesse Helms, who only agreed to let up their legislative assault after securing a guarantee that the majority of all future development dollars would be spent in ways that would primarily benefit American interests: a new condition of existence that only further accelerated USAID’s embrace of private contractors. What is perhaps novel about the Trump administration’s recent dismantling of USAID, then, is its seeming disinterest in promoting the private sector as an alternative conduit of developing assistance. This, in turn, is further evidence of how the Trump administration no longer feels the need to conceal the ever-intensifying violence of the US empire-state—both at home and abroad—in the cloak of development.

On some level, this is hardly surprising, for development—at least in the sense understood by Raghavan and Robson—has always been, at its core, a key liberal justification of empire and colonialism. It is by now widely accepted that the Second World War launched an “epochal sea change” in the racial projects of empire.18 As I argue in The Quiet Violence of Empire, the United States’ enduring investments in and commitments to upholding the transnational infrastructures of white supremacy at home and abroad were increasingly seen as undermining its ambitions to become the leader of the so-called free—or noncommunist—world. This is not to suggest that the US empire-state no longer trafficked in lethal forms of white supremacist violence. Rather, “it is simply to emphasize that such overt forms of race war gradually came to coexist uneasily with an operational framework of foreign intervention that ‘conceived of racism as prejudice and promised to release liberal freedoms from racial restrictions by extending equal opportunity, possessive individualism, and cultural citizenship’ to historically marginalized populations.”19 As I go on to show in the rest of the book, the US Cold War leadership came to rely on development in general—and USAID in particular—to sell this ruse to the decolonizing world. Given this history, then, what the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID signals is a revanchist return to the overtly genocidal mode of empire-building and settler militarism that characterized the United States’ colonizations of Turtle Island, Hawai‘i, and the Philippines. No longer hamstrung by the need to make US empire appear as a force for good across the decolonizing world, the Trump administration has felt emboldened to revisit the “more primal terms of American race war”—and, by extension, longer-standing fantasies of achieving “national social and economic regeneration through (frontier) violence”—as the touchstones for its strategy of geopolitical economic brinksmanship in the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere.20

In a world where mass disappearances, organized de/development, extrajudicial killing, and militarized genocide have become increasingly normalized as acceptable strategies for reproducing the established racial capitalist order of things, it seems to me that that the Trump administration has, somewhat paradoxically, opened up a space where abolitionists might reclaim small-d development away from militaries, markets, and empires and instead orient it toward the ongoing project of building liberatory futures of social transformation. As I emphasize in The Quiet Violence of Empire, this is not a new idea but rather has been articulated in different ways and times by different radical thinkers and activists. What threads through all these different formulations is the conviction that “transnational infrastructures of mutual aid and collective security might serve as the basis for a theory and praxis of revolutionary development committed to ensuring that the ‘last shall be first.’ ”21 Frantz Fanon, for instance, saw postcolonial development projects as a continuation or extension of anticolonial struggles against oppression. “After national liberation,” he writes, “[the people] are called upon to fight against poverty, illiteracy and underdevelopment.”22 Fanon, of course, was aware of how such postcolonial projects could be co-opted by “an emerging class of colonized intellectuals, political functionaries, and petty-bourgeois actors for explicitly reformist or even counterrevolutionary ends.”23 For decolonization to succeed, then, it had to develop and cultivate a new kind of internationalist subject: eager to “walk in the company” of their comrades across the decolonizing world, “night and day, for all time.”24

By turning to development as a means of fashioning a “new human subject for the world after 1945,” Fanon was exposing the need for an alternative USAID and its predecessor institutions, which had been similarly targeting the “interior worlds of individual people” across the decolonizing world with self-help, rural uplift, and community participation programs since the late 1940s. This “convergence” in the “ambitions of empire, revolution, and international solidarity,” moreover, was never confined to overseas spheres of foreign intervention.25 As Stuart Schrader and Elizabeth Hinton show, the US empire-state simultaneously deployed technologies of pacification and counterinsurgency such as “participation,” “model villages,” and “community development” in domestic and overseas theaters of poverty management.26 Such a transnational approach to the problem of poverty was also mirrored by radical organizations such as the Black Panther Party, whose leaders also came to appreciate the importance of holding the foreign and domestic spheres “in the same frame of analysis.” Domestically, the party, guided by its “Ten Point Platform and Program,” built a nationwide infrastructure of “survival pending revolution” that “in various places, provided free medical care, free clothing and groceries, ran free breakfast and lunch programs for children, food banks, community gardens, drug rehab centers, ambulance services, and housing cooperatives.”27 These local attempts at resolving “most of the material contradictions people face” coalesced, over time, into a more “intercommunalist” approach to revolutionary liberation that was meant to transcend borders, nations, and oceans. As Huey P. Newton put it in 1974: “There are only differences in degree between what is happening to the blacks here and what is happening to all of the people in the world, including Africans. Their needs are the same and their energy is the same. And the contradictions they suffer will only be resolved when the people establish a revolutionary intercommunalism where they share all the wealth that they produce and live in one world.”28 We carry forward these inheritances into the present moment. Whether we are talking about the transnational solidarity work necessary to supply e-sims, food, and other forms of humanitarian assistance to besieged communities in Gaza or the organic emergence of immigrant defense networks across US sanctuary cities such as New York and Los Angeles, such forms of mutual aid can help us imagine what it might mean to internationalize the Black Panther Party’s visions of surviving—and perhaps even thriving—pending revolutionary intercommunalism.

By way of a conclusion, it is worth noting that the recent experiences of Afghan refugees in the United States offer a stark example of how the above struggles are necessarily connected. According to AAN, approximately 200,000 Afghans have “sought safety in the US after the fall of the Islamic Republic in August 2021.”29 Most of these refugees arrived in the United States through three avenues: humanitarian parole, a special immigrant visa, and the United States Refugee Admissions Program. By the time that the Trump administration passed Executive Order 14163, which paused all forms of refugee processing, very few—if any—had achieved settled status. As Jelena Bjelica writes, Trump’s “anti-immigrant policies have come as a rude awakening” to Afghans, many of whom had previously seen the United States as their “most steadfast ally throughout the Republic.”30 It did not take long for the deportations of Afghans on humanitarian parole, temporary protected status, or special immigrant visas to begin. On June 17, 2025, a video showing unidentified Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detaining Sayed Naser—a “civilian interpreter for the US military in Afghanistan from 2015 to 2018”—during a mandatory immigration hearing went viral on multiple social media platforms. As Naser is dragged off, he laments: “For more than three years, I worked for the US military back in my home country. I came here to make a better life. I didn’t know this was going to happen like this for me.”31 Perhaps Naser, as a former intimate of US empire, imagined himself and his fellow Afghan refugees receiving the “gift of freedom” just like the South Vietnamese translators, generals, police officers, counterinsurgents, and fixers who had once carved a place for themselves and their families in California, Texas, and Virginia in the bloody aftermath of another failed imperial war.32 But as Thuy Linh Tu reminds in a poignant essay that tries to hold the fall of Saigon and the fall of Kabul in the same frame of analysis, the “way to freedom” is always “somewhere ahead,” in “another place, at a future time.” To quote Tu at length:

Many have said that Kabul is a replay of Saigon. For years, while Vietnam was under a US embargo, people hungered in the way that many Afghans now hunger. Left with a decimated landscape and devastated economy, families like mine set off on a raft of hope, following our own arrow forward. I imagine some in Afghanistan are contemplating the same.

But Kabul is not really a replay of Saigon—it’s a continuation. And now the United States has become a shrinking kingdom, with far less generous immigration policies, fewer opportunities, and little sense of responsibility for the damage it has caused. Freedom, for the more recently displaced, is all that much farther ahead.33

For all the Afghan refugees whose lives had already been put on hold by Executive Order 14163, the news of Naser’s arrest is likely to have hammered home the material implications of these fraught imperial contradictions with startling precision and clarity.

But perhaps there is an opening here. While much has been made of Naser’s exceptional record of service for US empire in Afghanistan, ICE’s decision to ramp up courthouse operations means that his experience has, in recent weeks, become an all too common one. Consider Mohsen Mahdawi’s arrest during an “appointment he had previously scheduled to complete his citizenship application.”34 Or Julio David Pérez Rodríguez, who was stopped by undercover ICE agents as he “attended an immigration hearing [in May] in pursuit of refugee status in the US.” Like Naser, Rodríguez was caught on camera wondering, through tears, “what is happening with this country.”35 Scholars of empire, of course, might point out that the United States has always been a “vanishing kingdom” to marginalized and precarious people of color like Rodríguez, Mahdawi, and Naser. But never has it been more obvious how the transnational “fields of development and destruction” caused by US empire-building abroad are connected to the ongoing and intensifying race war on the home front.36 As James Baldwin once presciently seethed, “Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.”37 These shared experiences of organized abandonment, racial violence, and globalized mass incarceration, in turn, highlight the urgent need for more effective ways of “mobilizing these highly localized struggles into a transnational movement of collective resistance and solidarity, geared toward tackling the ‘underlying causes’ of broader social, economic, and political crises.”38 There is no more crucial task facing ethnic studies scholars in this current moment of crisis and emergency, both in the classroom and in the occupied territories upon which we all live, survive, struggle, and endure.