The Foreign Aid Regime

Abstract

Foreign aid practices constitute a particular regime of government: with its own truth, discourse and knowledge, its own explicit aims and programme; and its own intrinsic logic and strategy. Adopting a historical perspective, this chapter illustrates how the foreign aid regime has emerged after the end of the Second World War as a regime of government of North-South relations, and how it has increasingly expanded to a regime of government of South countries and selected groups of populations within and across them. Although Furia acknowledges that foreign aid practices carry a function in the conservation of economic and geopolitical/strategic power relations, she argues the reason for doing so lies in their peculiar and continuous potential for transformation of the same relations.