Between empires: Middling modernizers and the interstices of development

The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) marks more than a break in the global order, but the exhaustion of a liberal technocratic consensus forged in the postwar era. Despite the resulting rupture, modernization projects continue—not only through Washington, Beijing, or the World Bank but via a heterogeneous set of East and Southeast Asian actors operating in the physical and ideological spaces between competing empires. I refer to these actors as middling modernizers or development institutions and corporate consortia that translate and repackage the practices of postwar development through flexible instruments of influence. Through comparative sketches of these middling modernizers, this commentary seeks to foreground how development persists through recombinant strategies in the interstices of empire and development.