Making Aid Work: Rethinking Western assistance in an age of authoritarian resilience

In a political moment when foreign aid is being dismantled in Washington and questioned across Europe, Making Aid Work: Dueling with Dictators and Warlords in the Middle East and North Africa arrives as both diagnosis and proposal.

Guilain Denoeux, Robert Springborg, and Hicham Alaoui bring together decades of field experience and intellectual rigour to rethink how the West engages with a region caught between hardened autocracies and "militianised states."

Published by Lynne Rienner, the book is timely, confident, and unusually grounded. It is not another lament about aid failure, but a considered attempt to rebuild its logic from within.

Denoeux and Springborg, long associated with USAID and other donor programmes, write with professional candour. Alaoui, the Moroccan scholar-prince-turned-critic of autocracy, adds a rare regional voice with credibility among Arab elites.

Together, they offer a manual for survival in a world where the very legitimacy of foreign assistance is under siege.

A moment of reckoning

The book opens with a blunt premise: democracy's wave has receded from the Arab world. What remains are two forms of statehood that define the region today.

The first, "hardened authoritarianism," is exemplified by Egypt and Morocco, where rulers have learned to repress more efficiently. The second, "militianised states," such as Libya, Lebanon, and Yemen, are territories captured or fragmented by armed groups.

The authors situate these trends within the broader collapse of the Western development project. The war in Gaza and Lebanon's devastation in 2023-25, they argue, destroyed what little credibility Western governments still claimed on democracy and human rights.

The return of Donald Trump and the abrupt abolition of USAID in early 2025 marked the end of an era. Yet they insist this crisis can become an opportunity. If aid is to survive, it must abandon its outdated moralism and become more realistic, modest, and politically literate.

The end of the old playbook

A central strength of Making Aid Work lies in its historical excavation of the "democratisation assistance playbook."

From the 1990s through the early 2010s, donors treated Arab regimes as "liberalised autocracies" that could be nudged toward democracy through training programmes, election monitoring, and civic-education projects. Denoeux and Springborg helped write that script, and their account of how it ossified is refreshingly self-critical.

As they trace the story of USAID's Democratic Institutions Support programme, one sees how bureaucratic inertia replaced strategy with ritual. The same vocabulary of governance, capacity building, and empowerment was recycled long after the political environment had changed.

The 2013 coup in Egypt and the subsequent closure of public space across the region rendered these approaches obsolete, yet the aid industry carried on as if the 1990s never ended.

The authors' verdict is unsparing: the machinery of aid became adrift, captured by conflicting mandates and endless rebranding exercises. What began as democratisation turned into an incoherent effort to do everything at once, from countering violent extremism to mitigating climate change, without a clear theory of power or politics.

Egypt and Morocco as mirrors

The book's case studies of Egypt and Morocco are particularly sharp. They show how donor optimism collided with regimes that perfected the art of donor management.

Egypt has emerged as the textbook example of hard authoritarianism, in which the state uses aid to project a façade of reform while entrenching military capitalism. Morocco, often held up as the region's reformist model, appears to be a monarchy that has absorbed aid dollars to modernise its bureaucracy while preserving absolute control.

Denoeux, Springborg, and Alaoui argue that these governments have turned "governance reform" into a public-relations strategy.

By cooperating selectively with donors, they extract resources and legitimacy without conceding political space. For anyone who has followed the cycles of aid to Cairo and Rabat, this analysis rings true. The authors' decision to write about these regimes without diplomatic euphemism is one of the book's major strengths.

The new pragmatism

Rather than abandon engagement, the authors propose a shift in purpose. They argue that aid to authoritarian states should focus on improving governance processes rather than promoting democracy.

The goal is to make policy more rational, transparent, and evidence-based, on the theory that better governance can indirectly open small spaces for participation.

Their approach is pragmatic, even minimalist. Instead of pouring funds into elections or NGOs that regimes can easily control, they suggest supporting independent experts, think tanks, professional syndicates, and universities.

Autocrats, they reason, have an interest in competent policymaking if only to survive. Donors can exploit that self-interest to insert data, analysis, and debate into closed systems.

It is an argument that rejects moral grandstanding in favour of patient, technocratic work. For practitioners disillusioned by decades of failure, it offers a compelling middle ground between cynicism and naïveté.

Areas that invite debate

The book's pragmatism is persuasive, yet at times too confident in its own feasibility. The belief that technocratic engagement can soften authoritarian systems appears to assume that rulers will act rationally in their long-term interest.

Experience in Egypt, however, suggests otherwise. Governance initiatives that aim to improve efficiency often end up reinforcing the very structures that block reform.

The authors acknowledge this danger but treat it as a secondary risk. In practice, programs designed to enhance policymaking can become tools for control rather than spaces for dialogue.

There is also a broader question about how far "governance" can go without politics. By focusing on improving procedures and expertise, the book risks sidelining the contentious social struggles that give reform its meaning.

Civil society is sometimes presented as a partner in technocratic collaboration rather than as an autonomous sphere of resistance or creativity.

Labour unions, syndicates, and advocacy groups appear as policy inputs rather than as agents of political transformation.

A related gap lies in the book's treatment of the economic foundations of authoritarianism. Its critique of donor bureaucracy is compelling, but it stops short of questioning how aid reinforces the neoliberal policies that sustain these regimes: privatisation, subsidy removal, and debt dependence.

The authors propose to make aid leaner and smarter, yet they rarely confront the global economic order that shapes the conditions of aid itself.

Even so, these are debates worth having. None of them diminishes the achievement of Making Aid Work as an honest and thoughtful intervention. Instead, they show that the book succeeds in what few policy texts do: it invites disagreement without defensiveness.

Cracking the toughest nut

The chapters on "militianised states" are among the most original in the volume.

The authors reject fatalism about countries torn apart by armed groups and argue that even in fragmented contexts, islands of governance persist. Municipal councils, women's cooperatives, and professional syndicates continue to function, however precariously.

Their advice to donors is both practical and humane: support these local institutions directly, bypass central authorities, and invest in micro-initiatives that build credibility and trust.

It is a strategy grounded in humility and respect for local agency. The authors provide a welcome corrective to the grand reconstruction schemes that have so often enriched contractors and warlords while leaving societies hollowed out.

A manual for reinvention

The book's concluding chapters make a broader claim: that the global aid regime, born in the 1960s, has reached the end of its legitimacy. The dismantling of USAID and cuts to European budgets are symptoms of a deeper exhaustion. To survive, aid must be reinvented.

The authors propose a leaner, more flexible system that privileges local knowledge, field-based decision-making, and measurable learning. Their model is not revolutionary, but it is coherent. They want donors to be smaller, quicker, and more honest about limits. They see aid not as an instrument of Western virtue but as a pragmatic investment in global stability.

This vision will appeal to practitioners who crave a credible way forward after decades of rhetoric and waste. The writing, dense with experience, feels like a distillation of lessons painfully learned in ministries, embassies, and field missions.

Reading between the lines

If the book's analytical precision occasionally shades into managerial language, that is partly its genre.

Making Aid Work speaks from within the world it critiques. Its authors know that total rupture is impossible, so they focus on reforming the system they helped build. Some readers will find this too cautious, others refreshingly honest.

The tone throughout is professional rather than polemical. There is no nostalgia for the Arab Spring or for democracy promotion as a crusade. Instead, there is a sober insistence that engagement, however limited, still matters. This balance between pragmatism and moral purpose is the book's defining strength.

Despite its modest title, Making Aid Work is one of the most significant contributions to Middle East policy writing in recent years. It combines empirical depth with a clear ethical stance: that even in an era of authoritarian resurgence, external actors bear responsibility for how they engage.

The book's achievement lies not only in what it prescribes but in the conversation it reopens. It challenges aid professionals, scholars, and activists to move beyond nostalgia and despair, to confront the region's political realities without surrendering to them.

Even when one disagrees with its prescriptions, the clarity of its reasoning demands engagement. The authors write with an intimacy that few outsiders can match, and their willingness to rethink assumptions from inside the aid establishment is rare.

A necessary debate

Making Aid Work is a book that will divide readers in the best sense. For practitioners, it offers a toolkit; for critics of foreign aid, it provides a map of how the industry thinks; for scholars, it re-anchors the debate about assistance in political reality rather than moral aspiration.

Its pragmatism can feel narrow, its tone sometimes managerial, but its intellectual honesty is disarming. It invites readers to argue with it, not to dismiss it. In a field long dominated by slogans, that alone is a reason to read it carefully.

In the end, Denoeux, Springborg, and Alaoui remind us that foreign assistance is neither salvation nor futility. It is a human enterprise shaped by compromise, contradiction, and hope. Their book insists that even amid failure, there is value in trying to make aid work. And that, today, is a radical position.

Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian scholar-activist in Germany, focusing on the military, policing, and labour

Follow him on Instagram: @countermaspero