Book Review: Rethinking Democracy and Development Assistance in the Middle East and North Africa

Reviewed Book: Making Aid Work: Dueling with Dictators and Warlords in the Middle East and North Africa. Lynne Rienner Publishers (2025) – Guilain Denoeux, Robert Springborg and Hicham Alaoui

Book review by Antonia Ricciardiello

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Authored by political scientists Guilain Denoeux (Colby College), Robert Springborg (Simon Fraser University and Istituto Affari Internazionali) and Hicham Alaoui (University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University), Making Aid Work: Dueling with Dictators and Warlords in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) offers a penetrating analysis of why traditional development and democracy assistance strategies have struggled to achieve their intended goals in the region. Building on earlier scholarly debates on Western aid in the MENA, the book contends that, given the region’s political transformations, strategies designed in the 1990s and 2000s are no longer viable for today’s much harder forms of authoritarianism (p. 18).

Although already in production in 2024, this book was published in the wake of the Donald Trump administration’s systematic dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2025 through extensive program cuts and staff reductions, a trend mirrored by concurrent budgetary retrenchments across European donor states. At a time when the very foundations of foreign aid face existential questioning, this work gains heightened relevance. Far from advocating the abandonment of foreign assistance altogether, the authors draw on their extensive hands-on experience with democracy, human rights and governance (DRG) programming in the MENA to advance a fundamental rethinking of donors’ approach to the region.

The book argues that, since the mid-2010s, MENA states (except the Gulf monarchies) have been shaped by two interrelated phenomena: hardening authoritarianism and what the authors call “militianization” (p. vii), meaning state capture by armed groups. These developments have made most aid-recipient countries increasingly resistant to traditional assistance practices. Against this backdrop, the book seeks to address the central question of how external actors can effectively promote political reform and development in such an “inhospitable context for assistance” (p. 13).

To address this query, the book is structured into four parts. The first part (namely, Chapter 2) establishes the historical and analytical groundwork for the argument that traditional assistance has reached its limits. By retracing the evolution of US DRG programming in the MENA, it demonstrates how successive initiatives repeatedly fell short, often because they tried to reconcile democracy and development support with other conflicting priorities (e.g., conflict prevention, countering violent extremism, securing access to regional resources, managing migration), all while relying on rigid assumptions divorced from local realities.

The second part (Chapters 3 to 5) examines the political economies of MENA aid-recipient states and the twin phenomena of militianisation and hardening authoritarianism. These two chapters are devoted to in-depth case studies of Egypt and Morocco, tracing their shift from relatively “soft” forms of authoritarianism to increasingly repressive ones, and showing how these trajectories have further undermined the effectiveness of external aid.

The third part (Chapter 6) then highlights the internal constraints of US and European foreign-policy and aid-related bureaucracies, arguing that, despite official rhetoric, both actors exhibit declining capacities and political will to sustain democracy and development in the region. Considering this, the final part of the book (Chapters 7 to 10) outlines more pragmatic policy recommendations aimed at reorienting aid practices in the MENA, even as it remains open to debate whether these proposals can be fully operationalised.

Making Aid Work’s central strength lies precisely in its dual contribution as both a rigorous diagnosis of the limitations of the traditional assistance playbook and an elaborate proposal for more realistic donor engagement in the region.

The book is indeed particularly compelling in its analysis of how the underlying assumptions of conventional aid models collide with the political and economic realities of recipient states. Drawing on Douglass North et al.’s (2009) concept of Limited-Access Orders (LAOs), the authors describe MENA political economies as elite bargains that secure power-sharing pacts to suppress violent competition and keep control of state rents (p. 53). Within these systems, the majority of the population is structurally excluded from meaningful political participation and economic growth. As powerfully demonstrated by the case studies of Egypt’s entrenched military elite and Morocco’s Makhzen (deep state), the standard democracy-assistance toolkit, whether aimed at fostering bottom-up demand for political reform or strengthening state institutions, has limited traction in such contexts.

However, despite their depth and historical richness, the findings from these case studies cannot be readily generalised to all MENA aid-recipient countries. Notably, the lack of a dedicated case study on militianised states, one of the book’s key analytical categories, represents a significant gap. More extensive evidence from cases such as Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, or Palestine would have further substantiated the authors’ claims about how fragmented sovereignty hinders the effectiveness of external assistance. Moreover, although insightful, not all sections of the case studies contribute directly to the central argument. The comparison between Mussolini’s Italy and Sisi’s Egypt (p. 89), for instance, while offering an intriguing analytical angle, may seem tangential to the book’s core critique of standard DRG programming and would likely require more space to be persuasively sustained.

The book’s most original contribution to the foreign aid literature lies undoubtedly in its section on proposals, where the authors, building logically on the preceding chapters, outline a fundamentally revised strategy for assistance providers in the MENA. Instead of directly supporting democracy and development, they argue that external actors should prioritise improving policy design and implementation within recipient states. The rationale is that MENA elites are keenly aware of the structural challenges facing their regimes and recognise that long-term survival depends on delivering broader economic and social benefits to their populations. Accordingly, donors should focus on enhancing regime performance in ways that generate meaningful development gains and, over time, create openings for incremental political reform (p. 195).

Yet, while the book’s proposals are both innovative and readily actionable, their effectiveness ultimately rests on the critical assumption that MENA elites will prove receptive to such policy guidance. This scenario seems at odds with the book’s own portrayal of authoritarian governments as lacking the political will to undertake meaningful political, economic, or governance reforms, rhetoric notwithstanding (p. 177). 

Regardless of limitations, Making Aid Work offers a timely reassessment of the traditional democracy and development assistance toolkit in the MENA, particularly at a moment of profound uncertainty for the future of foreign aid. Its operational insights will be especially valuable for policymakers and donors seeking more realistic strategies of engagement, while the analytical groundwork of the early chapters will benefit scholars and students interested in DRG practices in the region. For all these audiences, the volume delivers a thought-provoking and much-needed rethinking of how to make aid effective in some of the world’s most challenging political landscapes.

References

North, D.C., Wallis, J.J. and Weingast, B.R. (2009) Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.