Selling Stabilization: Anxious Practices of Militarized Development Contracting

This article examines how post-9/11 US military trainings have conscripted development as a weapon of war. The post-9/11 years saw the increasing dominance of for-profit international development contractors (IDCs), who, by 2010, were winning more valuable contracts from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) than non-profit organizations, UN agencies, and the World Bank. This article describes financial, administrative and bureaucratic shifts in the integration of development and defence that have fed into the increasing dominance of IDCs. In the mid-2000s, USAID developed an instructional framework to translate development for military audiences. The framework speaks to the rejection in this period of the language of hearts and minds' and the adoption of a technical language of stabilization' amenable to private contracting. Drawing on ethnographic observations of private civilian contractors teaching the USAID framework on military bases, I examine the contradictions of stabilization' as a concept sold in private militarized development markets, and as a lived practice of military learning that often conflicts with other dimensions of soldiering.