“From factory to field”: USAID and the logistics of foreign aid in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan

Abstract

Emerging critical scholarship on logistics has shown how the field is implicated in a broader necropolitics of violence, disposability, and exploitation. While much has been made of logistics’ historical linkages to military and market forces, this paper, in contrast, explores how logisticians have played an increasingly central role in development and humanitarian missions to theatres of conflict and emergency. It focuses on the effort of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to supply mujahideen forces in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan with the non-lethal materiel necessary for their insurgency. It argues that USAID understood its relief and rehabilitation mission as a problem of logistics. By sketching the shifting contours of USAID’s cross-border programming, this article offers a more nuanced diagnosis of how logistics has become essential to the management of life and death across multiple temporalities, spaces, and scales.

Refugee Shelter in a Logistical World: Designing Goods for Supply‐Chain Humanitarianism

“…Starting from April 2020, UNCHR has been using the shelter also “as isolation rooms for confirmed and suspected cases of COVID‐19”, in refugee settlements in Brazil, Colombia, Niger and Jordan 6 . As this article has argued, the resilience of this cleverly “branded”, flat‐packed shelter in metal and plastic offers empirical insights on the role logistics plays in the spatial entanglements of capitalist accumulation and the “management of life and death across multiple temporalities, spaces and scales” (Attewell 2018:734).…”

“…Humanitarian aid is not exempt from this global hegemony. Yet engagements with humanitarian logistics in human geography and other critical social sciences remain scarce (for recent exceptions, see Attewell 2018; Moulin and Magalhães 2020; Ziadah 2019). In business, economics and managerial sciences, on the other hand, the expansion of the technoscientific discipline of humanitarian logistics (HL) is dizzying (see Ziadah 2019).…”

“…The work of Mark Duffield (2010, 2011, 2018) has authoritatively shown how the aid industry has been a driving force in the re‐spatialisation of security diagnosed by Cowen (2014), particularly, but not exclusively, in the global South. Building on his analysis of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) material support to the anti‐Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan, Wesley Attewell (2018:734) argues that “development and humanitarian interventions functioned during the Cold War as dense transfer points of logistical knowledge between military and civilian actors”. In these rigorous and important genealogies, critiques of humanitarian logistics focus on the politics of circulation through the lens of biopower and necropolitics.…”

Circulating Power: Humanitarian Logistics, Militarism, and the United Arab Emirates

“…This type of labour is often written out of the narrative of humanitarian operations, although aid delivery is highly dependent on this very material movement of emergency supplies. As Attewell (:722) points out: “humanitarian and development actors have relied upon the labour that is performed in network spaces such as docks, warehouses, highways, and ports to intervene in theatres of conflict and emergency”. The overlap between commercial, military and humanitarian supply‐chains has meant that HL is dependent on the same racialised labour regimes that characterise supply‐chain capitalism.…”

“…In what follows, I seek to highlight a fundamental component to this transnational shift: the question of logistics and the increasing overlap in the cross‐border spatial cartographies of military operations, humanitarian aid delivery, and private logistics firms . The “logistics revolution”, as Attewell (:722) perceptively notes, holds a “central yet largely unacknowledged role in shaping humanitarian and development practice”. How aid travels to where it is to be delivered—who controls the logistical nodes and supply chains, how these intersect with activities of military and private actors, and the resultant reorganisation of the geographies of power in conflict‐affected regions—are essential but understudied lacunae in the scholarly work on humanitarianism.…”