Making Aid Work: Dueling with Dictators and Warlords in the Middle East and North Africa By GuilainDenoeux, RobertSpringborg, and HichamAlaoui. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2025. 347 pages. $29.95, paper and ebook.

A “deadlock of imagination in the global north, and a deadlock in the possibility of action in the global south” was how British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El Fattah characterized the obstacles to human-rights campaigning, soon after his release from more than a decade in a Cairo prison.1 Abd El Fattah's contention, linked to his assessment that “there is no opportunity for organising in Egypt” because it is “too dangerous at the moment,” resonates with a central message of Making Aid Work. Forensically researched, the book amasses evidence to testify that neither the United States nor Europe displays the “capacities or political will to advance the cause of democracy” in the Middle East and North Africa. While this may come as no surprise in light of current attitudes toward foreign aid in the White House, the authors assert that policies under Donald Trump in his second term as president, far from marking a sharp departure, simply “eliminate the pretenses that had been carefully maintained by previous administrations.” They similarly decry the European Union's democratization efforts, setting out the reasons for perceived self-interest that explain why, in the words of senior members of the European Parliament, the union has for many years been “bankrolling dictators”—most notably in Egypt and Tunisia—and why the prospects for more effective efforts are “grim.” However, despite the opening admission of defeat in promoting democracy and human rights in Arab states to date, the title points in the opposite direction: that aid for this purpose should be allocated in the future and that such efforts can actually work. The authors make their intentions plain. Having written and rewritten the manuscript after the Trump administration dismantled the US Agency for International Development (USAID), they set out to provide “new rationales for assistance” that are consistent with the “momentous shifts” since the early 2020s in global politics as well as across the Global North. Their aim is “first and foremost” to provide a “how to” manual that makes the case for a “paradigmatic shift” that reinvents foreign assistance, complete with “concrete and practical guiding principles and rules of thumb for future programming.” The first step, they write, is to recognize that dictators and warlords must be “outsmarted.” As is apparent from the study's many sources, criticism of the modalities and impact of American and European funding for democracy promotion has been accumulating for decades. After the US-led Gulf War in 1991, USAID was accused of pursuing “conflicting objectives” and “competing interests” in interpreting democracy to mean market-friendly economic reform, not the right of citizens to contest the effects of reform.2 Erin A. Snider, whose work probes “neglected questions at the heart of the construction and practice of democracy aid,” notes that she was motivated by anomalies she witnessed in 2002 after the invasion of Afghanistan, as citizens were more effective in driving development programs than international staff.3 In the early 2000s, local critics of foreign funding for activism and advocacy appeared on Al Jazeera, labeling it “soft colonization.”4 Others worried that it depoliticized and fragmented civil society, forcing nongovernmental organizations to compete with each other and prioritize donor requirements instead of addressing local conditions.5 Assessments of USAID and EU funding intended to promote development of independent media in Egypt, before and after the 2011 uprising, showed it to be subject to multiple controls by governments determined to block such an initiative.6 The flaws and frustrations identified by aid recipients, commentators, and scholars are legion. The difference in Making Aid Work is that two of the authors spent many years as insiders in US attempts to do precisely what the title says. Denoeux and Springborg were hired by USAID in the early 1990s to help with its democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) efforts in the region. In researching “nearly 300” policy-oriented reports between them, they have consulted, formally and informally, a broad array of local people with varying interests and from all walks of life. Meanwhile, they have remained academics, with Springborg mostly at institutions in Australia, Egypt, and the United Kingdom. His inaugural professorial lecture at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies in 2005 was titled “The Democratization Industry and the Middle East.” Some of his writing sparked controversy. In 2011, the publisher of the Egypt Independent censored an opinion piece he wrote for the outlet that laid out the pitfalls of control by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Another Egyptian paper accused him of conspiring against the country's stability. The episode was part of a drawn-out struggle between management and staff members of the Egypt Independent, who went on to create the groundbreaking Mada Masr, which has been much feted outside Egypt and much harassed inside.7 The authors bring with them a strong grounding in the minutiae of donor activity over a long period and a detailed awareness of what does not work and why. They are also willing to name likeminded practitioners and shame those whose words and actions are deemed antithetical to what the authors believe a rewritten DRG support playbook should contain. The former include Rory Stewart, who has written about his experiences in development-related ministerial appointments in the UK government between 2015 and 2019. He discovered wildly unrealistic objectives written into country programs, alongside a lack of relevant knowledge, language skills, and autonomy among staff. This group also features Matt Andrews and Brian Levy, two former World Bank officials with experience in post-apartheid South Africa. Their respective publications on development encourage an iterative and adaptive approach that can yield modest, incremental gains. Those whose actions they see as counterproductive include UN Special Representative Volker Perthes, whose dealings with warlords in Sudan disastrously sidelined civilians, and Samantha Power, who is blamed here, without elaboration, for introducing diversity, equality, and inclusion policies at USAID, which the authors allege helped to discredit it. They also include General John R. Allen and Ranj Alaaldin, who apparently favor working with selected regional militias. Further, the authors deride SHAPEDEM-EU, a 12-member consortium intended to create and test a policy toolkit that would reshape the EU's support for democracy among its eastern and southern neighbors. The book describes as “fanciful” the “basic assumptions” on which the €2.7 million project is said to rest, such as the blossoming of civil-society initiatives and civic movements representing democratic trends at the grassroots level. This evaluation of SHAPEDEM-EU, whose coverage includes Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia, is demonstrably inaccurate and unfair. Of the three other states in its ambit—Lebanon, Palestine, and Tunisia—only Lebanon is subject to close scrutiny in Making Aid Work, while democracy support to Palestinians is barely mentioned. Both Lebanon and Palestine are classified by the authors as “militianized,” along with Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Sudan and, provisionally, Syria. Such states are either infiltrated by militias or must turn to those nonstate actors for assistance with critical tasks. By contrast, as indicated in Alaa Abd El Fattah's pronouncement and in the book's chapters on Egypt and Morocco—two states that have experienced a severe hardening of authoritarian rule—it is perfectly reasonable to ridicule any notion of a blossoming of political rights. Civil society's ability to engage in public advocacy is shown to have “declined markedly in Morocco” and “simply disappeared” in Egypt. Yet USAID's strategy documents for Egypt between 2020 and 2025, quoted as referring blithely to the country's commitment to “ambitious reforms” and inclusive development, display total disregard for realities on the ground. Despite a “wealth of presently underutilized human resources and technical expertise across civil society and the private sector that could inform policy-making,” entities that previously engaged in dialogue have become inactive or atrophied as experts avoid policy issues for fear of “vengeful regimes.” Recent events illustrate the authors’ point about how regimes’ contempt for citizens creates the conditions for destabilization. In Morocco, eight pregnant women died in an Agadir public hospital in August 2025 due to medical neglect; in September and October, Gen Z protesters called out the extreme inequalities reflected in the state's heavy investment in cohosting the 2030 football World Cup.8 The book contains a harrowing account of a Moroccan fish vendor crushed to death in a garbage compactor after officials seized and dumped his haul in 2016. Much of Making Aid Work is about bad decisions, cynical neglect, and the arguments not to deploy in advocating for foreign assistance. Its 12 chapters wend their way through past practice, current limitations on assistance programming, and analysis of why it is ineffective. It arrives at a final section highlighting dead ends and offering a “radically new vision,” along with ways of translating it into projects and initiatives for countries run by both dictators and warlords. The prescription is for such hallowed principles as long-termism, donor coordination, and the flexibility to constantly question a given project's theory of change. It is in this section that readers may find themselves wondering if the authors’ detailed, deeply considered, compelling advice may itself be overly optimistic. Skepticism could have been somewhat allayed by references to how those principles have been applied beyond the USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives, which the authors credit with espousing a promising model when it was launched in the 1990s. Examples include the original 20-year version of the Danish-Arab Partnership Programme (2003–2022) and work done by the Global Forum for Media Development with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which led in 2024 to guidelines aimed at promoting coordination, innovation, and effectiveness.9 There is still room for doubt, however. The idea that seemingly apolitical artistic activity can provide a path toward countering “militianization” by nurturing self-expression and self-confidence among young populations is attractive—until one remembers what happened in 2017 to UK development funding for a “girl band” that highlighted sociocultural issues in Ethiopia through music and drama. Under political and media pressure claiming waste and corruption, the support was abruptly cut.10 With aid budgets across the Global North now raided for defense spending and tax cuts, proponents of foreign assistance aimed at improving the lives of Arab citizens will need to familiarize themselves with the abundance of arguments presented in Making Aid Work, especially regarding donor self-interest, to begin to convince ordinary taxpayers of its value.