USAID – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Empire’s “Mimic Men”

Imperialism by Invitation or Imitation? US efforts in remaking the international system according to an image reflecting the US are not usually in complete vain since the track has already has already been cut. To continue with the analogy, US policy planners and military analysts are concerned about widening and then paving the track so […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Force Multipliers and Cuba

Much of what appears as “novel” thinking in US imperial strategies, masks deeper historical foundations. Numerous authors have already explained how Latin America and the Caribbean, from the early 1800s onward, have served as “laboratories” for incubating and developing strategies of destabilization, intervention, occupation, and counterinsurgency. More recently, counterinsurgency was being sold as a new […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Iatrogenic Imperialism

The following is an extract from Émile St-Pierre’s chapter, “Iatrogenic Imperialism: NGOs and CROs as Agents of Questionable Care,” published in Good Intentions: Norms and Practices of Imperial Humanitarianism (Montreal: Alert Press, 2014), pp. 37-55: Overview: Émile St-Pierre examines the role of NGOs and Contract Research Organizations (CROs) in the formation and propagation of a […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Civil Society, NGOs, and Saving the Needy: Imperial Neoliberalism

The following is an extract from my chapter, “Imperial Abduction Lore and Humanitarian Seduction,” which serves as the introduction to Good Intentions: Norms and Practices of Imperial Humanitarianism (Montreal: Alert Press, 2014), pp. 1-34: Outsourcing Empire, Privatizing State Functions: NGOs First, we need to get a sense of the size and scope of the spread […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Militarizing Africa and African Studies and the U.S. Africanist Response

By David Wiley [First published as: Wiley, David. (2012). “Militarizing Africa and African Studies and the U.S. Africanist Response.” African Studies Review, 24(2) September, pp. 147-161.] There was an ironic and troubling confluence in the 1958-64 years when simultaneously the majority of African nations won their independence, the Soviet Sputnik went up and shocked Americans […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Encircling Empire: Report #21—Search and Distort Missions

Encircling Empire Reports is a selection of essays, blog posts, and news reports covering a given time period, providing links and representative extracts or key passages from each resource, usually focusing on certain countries/continents and/or processes in each report. The focus of the reports ranges from imperialism discussed in broad strokes, to specific facets of […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Getting It Right: Hugo Chávez and the “Arab Spring”

Some opening vignettes might set the right tone for properly appreciating the question of “who was right” about the so-called Arab Spring. (The notion of there having been an “Arab Spring,” a term first coined by U.S. neoconservatives such as Charles Krauthammer back in 2005, is one that has been subject to radically diverse interpretations, […]