“1. Washington, DC” in “A Global Idea”
1 WASHINGTON, DC
A Global Ideas City
On September 11, 2001—infamously known as 9/11—Ronald Bruder lost contact with his daughter for a few hours. He was terrified, and she was traumatized. After that day, Bruder started to read more about international politics, as he wanted to know what had gone wrong with the world, to know what makes “Muslim youth commit suicide to kill Americans,” and why “Muslims hate Americans.” A serial entrepreneur, who started his business in the oil sector, shifted to the pharmaceutical sector, and now owns a real estate company in Brooklyn. Bruder moved from New York, where he ran his real estate business, to Washington, DC, and started to talk to political and business leaders about how he could help directly with the US war on terrorism. He thought at first of starting a terrorism hotline to follow terrorists wherever they are. But then, through intensive talks with policymakers and a lawyer who works with the CIA, he realized he needed to do something more sustainable. He decided to focus on working on issues of youth and education when he learned about the “youth bulge,” the large number of unemployed youth in the Middle East, and the huge economic gap between the region and the West that was growing greater every year.
Bruder hired the Brookings Institution to get better informed, and, through extensive travel to places he had never been before—Afghanistan, Egypt, and other Muslim countries—he discovered that the education systems there were not preparing youth for jobs. Bruder’s way of helping support the US war on terror was modelled explicitly on the post-Second World War Marshall Plan. “The money spent on shock and awe should be used for a Marshall Plan, that’s how we marginalize the terrorists,” says Bruder: “We should be spending our money on books not on bombs” (personal interview, Washington, DC, January 2006). Thus was born the idea of the Education for Employment (EFE) Foundation.
The mission of EFE, as Bruder puts it, is “no less than world peace through fighting terrorism.” It aims to achieve this goal by “creating job opportunities for young people through career training in vocational, technical and managerial skills” and helping “Muslim countries address the growing challenge of youth unemployment” (NBC News 2008). Bruder believes that “if youth have jobs, they will change all their perceptions and philosophy about the world. Jobs resolve the other issues, like the environment that breeds extremism” (personal interview, January 2006). EFE was first established in Washington, DC, in 2002, and effectively started working after years of planning in 2005 with a $10 million endowment from Bruder. Fifteen years later, by 2020, EFE had reached and trained more than one million youth in fifteen different countries around the world with its three core teams: EFE Global, the DC office that oversees all EFE operations; EFE Europe, which targets Muslim Youth in Europe; and EFE MENA, which as of 2019, was operating in nine Arab countries (EFE 2020). EFE (2020) claims it has connected 111,000 youth to the world of work, that 73 percent have been placed in jobs, that 57 percent of EFE graduates are women, and that three thousand companies have hired EFE alumni. EFE was one of the first NGOs given license not only to operate in Saudi Arabia but also to target mostly female students there (personal interview, April 2006).
But if Bruder’s aim was to prepare Muslim youth in the Arab world and Europe for the job market to help in fighting terrorism, why did he need to establish the headquarters of EFE in Washington, DC? Why would Bruder, a New York businessman, move to DC, if he wanted to work on helping youth find jobs elsewhere, all over the world? Why would he not stay in New York? The EFE founding story is similar to many other corporations, nonprofit organizations, and wealthy individual philanthropists who have moved to that city to lobby for new global policies, projects, and practices.
More than eighty years before Ronald Bruder came to Washington, DC, and founded the EFE foundation, three wealthy American industrialists—Horace Moses, Theodore Vail, and Winthrop Crane—created a youth education organization that would become known as Junior Achievement (JA). Established in 1918, JA aimed to provide American youth with a hands-on, practice-based form of business or enterprise education that would train youth in the aims, skills, and habits of developing and running business enterprises—and, more generally, to inculcate in youth an appreciation of the value and importance of a capitalist, free market economy. For decades, Junior Achievement operated as a national youth organization that ran after-school business clubs for American teenagers across the United States, operating out of schools, churches, scouting organizations, YMCAs, and settlement houses (Box 2006; Langton 1956; Sukarieh and Tannock 2009).
JA received strong political support from its earliest days. Senator Murray Crane of Massachusetts was a cofounder of the program; and in 1925, Junior Achievement was honored with a reception at the White House, where President Calvin Coolidge said that “Junior Achievement is a first-class proposal—very much worthwhile” (quoted in Francomano et al. 1988, 11). By the time of the Cold War, Junior Achievement also started running in-school enterprise education programs, as a core part of the everyday school curriculum (Piro, Anderson, and Fredrickson 2015). By 1970, Junior Achievement President Donald Hardenbrook (1970, 188) felt emboldened to proclaim that “the test of time has proved that Junior Achievement is the best system of teenage economic and business indoctrination ever devised.”
Then, at the end of the 1980s, JA went global. While Junior Achievement had previously opened a scattering of overseas branches since the 1960s, it was after the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union that JA turned into a truly international youth enterprise organization (Associated Press 1994; Heilman 1995). In rapid succession, Junior Achievement began opening offices in one country after another: Russia, Hungary, and Latvia in 1991; Armenia, Estonia, Poland, and the Czech Republic in 1992; Lithuania and Romania in 1993; Kazakhstan and Slovakia in 1994; Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and Turkmenistan in 1995; and so on (Sukarieh and Tannock 2009). By 2020, Junior Achievement was running youth enterprise programs of one kind or another in more than one hundred countries worldwide and operating in five different regions: JA Africa, JA America, JA Asia Pacific, JA Europe, and Injaz Al-Arab (as the organization is known in the Middle East and North Africa), in addition to the original JA USA (Chu and Larson 2006; Sukarieh 2016; Sukarieh and Tannock 2009). The organization claims to mobilize over 500,000 volunteers from the business sector to work with more than ten million students internationally each and every year (Junior Achievement 2019). In the Middle East, Injaz Al-Arab now operates in fourteen countries, reaching more than three million young people with 45 thousand volunteers, working in three thousand schools, 418 universities, and fourteen ministries of education (Injaz Al-Arab 2020). Over the last decade, Injaz has become the largest nonprofit organization dedicated to youth in the Middle East region (Injaz Al-Arab 2020).
For most of its hundred-year existence, Junior Achievement worked out of headquarters that were based initially in Massachusetts, then later in Colorado Springs, Colorado. However, when JA started to take its free enterprise youth curriculum and programming worldwide, it came to Washington, DC, opening an office there in 1989 inside the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue (Chu and Larsen 2006; personal fieldnotes, April 2006). Once again, the question needs to be asked: Why would a well-established organization like Junior Achievement, once it wanted to influence the enterprise education of young people around the world, feel it needed to come to Washington, DC? Why couldn’t this be done as effectively out of its already existing national headquarters in Colorado Springs?
This chapter seeks to answer such questions by focusing on the distinctive role Washington, DC, has come to play in facilitating the global spread of ideas; and it uses the examples of EFE and Junior Achievement—as well as the broader global youth development complex, of which these two organizations are a key component—to illustrate the ways in which cities such as Washington are able to play this key role in spreading ideas around the world. The global cities literature has highlighted the ways in which cities such as New York, London, and Tokyo play a pivotal role in supporting the construction of transnational business and financial networks (Sassen 2001). This chapter develops the idea that there exists an overlapping set of global cities that play a parallel role in the production and global dissemination of the ideologies, discourses, and policies central to the reproduction and expansion of global capitalism. In this, the city of Washington, DC, plays what is, perhaps, a singularly unique role that is dependent on the broader role the United States continues to play in the organization and management of global capitalism.
The chapter focuses on the role Washington has played in the construction of a global youth development agenda for the Middle East region and highlights the vital interplay of a dense network of both global and intensely local spatial and institutional connections in this process. In the neoliberal era, it is not just the state that is active in organizing and disseminating this global policy and ideological project. Rather, within Washington, we find a clustering of headquarters of international aid and development organizations, philanthropic foundations, corporate foundations, think tanks, universities, PR agencies, and lobbying groups alongside the various departments of the US government. It is the fact of physical proximity and everyday casual and personal interactions between individuals working in these organizations, as well as the broader networks of finance and institutional partnerships, that link Washington, DC, externally to other cities and sites across the world and facilitates the assemblage, global dissemination, monitoring, and feedback mechanisms of key ideologies and discourses such as these centering on youth and youth development in the Middle East and beyond.
Washington, DC, as a Global Ideas City
Today, Washington, DC, is the site of a dense, extensive, interlocking network of public, private, and nonprofit institutions that work both independently and collaboratively to produce and disseminate ideas around the world—in particular, ideas central to the operations of the global capitalist economy. As Ralph Nader points out, “this apparatus did not always exist in Washington, not to that density at least,” as “DC, previous to the market economy turn, was host to state organizations more than the … advocacy groups” (personal interview, November 2014). The pivotal role played by Washington in disseminating ideas globally has not always been recognized by the literature on global cities, which, due to its economistic bias and focus on the command and control operations of global corporate and financial capital, has tended to focus, instead, on cities such as New York, London, and Tokyo (Grosfoguel 1995). The Globalization and World Cities Research Group, for example, lists Washington, DC, as being only a third tier (gamma) world city, on a par with other cities like Melbourne, Prague, and Santiago (McGrath and Means 1980; Taylor, Walker, and Beaverstock 2002, 100).
On the other hand, Kent Calder and Mariko de Freytas (2009) and Herman van der Wusten (2012) have developed the concept of “global political cities” as a complement to the “global economic cities” that receive the attention of most of the global cities literature. Calder and De Freytas (2009) define the “key elements” of global political cities as: “(1) being a policy hub and exercising disproportionate influence on global policy debates; (2) having a political-diplomatic community, with dense networks of official and non-official actors shaping global affairs; and (3) functioning as a strategic information complex” (81).
Van der Wusten (2012) similarly argues that “political global cities” have at least one of three key attributes:
- It is from here that political actors with global reach operate or it is here that globally relevant decisions are taken.
- It is the site of significant manifestations of a transnational civic society encompassing the globe.
- It is widely considered in all parts of the world as a global political city (42).
Based on such criteria, Calder and de Freytas argue that “Washington, DC is undoubtedly the most important ‘global political city’ in the world” (84).
This global role played by Washington, DC, is obviously linked directly to the presence of the principal arms of the US government in the city, along with the continuing dominance and influence of the US government in other countries around the world. However, DC’s significance as a global city is not solely about supporting the interests and agendas of the US state internationally. Rather, Washington has developed a global “strategic information complex” comprised of public, private, and nonprofit organizations that seek not just to serve the US state but to impact and engage with it as well—along with the other major national, foreign, and international actors headquartered or based in the city (for example, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) (Calder and de Freytas 2009). This strategic information complex includes “embassies, think tanks, academic institutions, lobbying firms, politicians, congressional staff, research centers, NGOs, and intelligence agencies” (Calder and de Freytas 2009, 87). The limited literature that exists on DC as a global city all emphasize its pivotal global role in the worldwide production and dissemination of information, education, administration and policy, consulting, and research (Ricci 1993; Abbott 1990; 1996; Calder 2014; Calder and de Freytas 2009; van der Wusten 2012).
Thus, in this book, the term “global ideas city” is used to describe Washington, DC, to highlight the role the city plays in the global production and dissemination of ideas and also to clearly signify that this global role is not limited or reducible to policy or politics, or to the massive state political apparatus of the US government. It is also to break down the false and misleading dichotomy constructed between “global economic cities” and “global political cities.” The ideas produced and disseminated worldwide in Washington often are pivotal not just to global political engagements and policy circles but to the continuing legitimacy and smooth operations of the global capitalist economy as well.
The role of Washington as a global political city or global ideas city is relatively new. While there is a long history of antecedents, this role fully emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s with the rise of the era of global neoliberal capitalist restructuring (Abbott 1996; Knox 1987). In its earliest form, the policies and ideologies at the heart of global neoliberal restructuring were widely known as the “Washington Consensus,” a term that highlights the pivotal role played by an emergent “strategic information complex” in DC in driving this restructuring process forward: “The ‘Washington’ of the Consensus, as it was originally defined, included the top decision-makers at the IMF, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the US Executive, and ‘those members of Congress who take an interest in Latin America, and the think tanks concerned with economic policy’ ” (Babb 2013, 270; see, also, Lora 2009).
The growing importance of Washington as a central “generator” of international policy ideas triggered a rapid “proliferation” of international organizations headquartered in the city during this period, as DC eclipsed the central roles previously played in this arena by New York, along with a number of older European capital cities:
As late as 1962, Washington housed the headquarters or regional office of only 47 international organizations compared with 164 for New York, a ratio of 3.5 to 1 in favor of the economic capital.… As of 1985, in contrast, Washington had the principal secretariat of 462 such organizations and secondary or regional secretariat of 45 more, largely closing the gap on New York, whose total of 701 gave it only a 1.4-to-1 edge. The list of such organizations ranges from specialized academic societies, such as the German Historical Institute, to giants such as the World Bank or Organization of American States (Abbott 1996, 581).
The move to Washington, DC, was a deliberate move from the industrialists and corporations at the time. In 1972, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) announced its plan to relocate its offices from New York to Washington, DC. As its chief executive officer, Burt Raynes, observed: “We have been in New York since before the turn of the century, because we regarded this city as the center of business and industry. But the thing that affects business most today is government. The interrelationship of business with business is no longer so important as the interrelationship of business with government. In the last several years, that has become very apparent to us” (Powell, 1971).
“From 1969 to 1972,” as David Vogel (2003, 120) summarizes, “virtually the entire American business community experienced a series of political setbacks without parallel in the postwar period.” In particular, Washington undertook a vast expansion of its regulatory power, introducing tough and extensive restrictions and requirements on business in areas from the environment to occupational safety to consumer protection (Vogel 2003). In corporate circles, this pronounced and sustained shift was met with disbelief and then alarm. Lewis Powell, an American lawyer who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1971 to 1987, in reaction to labor and other progressive movements in the seventies, wrote a memo urging capital to create a collective project that mobilized both the Chamber of Commerce as well as the Business Roundtable. The Powell Memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding politics and law in the United States and may have sparked the formation of several influential right-wing think tanks, such as the Business Roundtable, which was founded in 1972, and the Heritage Foundation in 1973 (Shmitt 2005; Schmidt 2008). The Powell memo also inspired the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to become far more politically active and get behind the free trade agreements all around the world. Moreover, Powell stressed, the critical ingredient for success would be organization: “Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations” (Savitch and Vogel 2009, 124–126). The move hence would unleash a new era in business activism that manifested itself in the creation of NGOs, supporting existing ones, or supporting government efforts within and outside of the United States to protect their own interests.
Today, Washington, DC, is home to the world’s most dense concentration of headquarters of powerful international nongovernmental organizations, built up around the offices of the US national government. This concentration is so dense that Calder (2014, 46) writes not just of a “Washington information complex” but a “Massachusetts Avenue information complex” as well:
Two of the four most influential think tanks in the world, the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment, are located next to one another on that “policy street” [Massachusetts Avenue], amid embassies, university buildings, and the Confucius Institute US Center, while a third (the Center for Strategic and International Studies), recently moved to Rhode Island Avenue, roughly 500 yards away. Seven of the top twenty think tanks on earth, plus the United Nations Foundation, are located within less than a mile of the 1700 block of Massachusetts Avenue, NW, and nine are based in Greater Washington. And all of these analytical bodies also lie in close proximity to Washington’s increasingly influential strategic advisory firms.
Just as the global cities literature has demonstrated for the headquarters of global corporate and financial capital, close “physical proximity” and “increasingly intimate geographical … connection with one another” within the urban space of Washington has proven to be vital for the city’s global “idea industry” and “information complex” to function effectively, for it facilitates “networking, recurring social contact, information exchange, and advocacy along many dimensions” (Calder 2014, 44).
Washington, DC, and the Rise of the Global Youth Development Complex
One of the global ideas that Washington, DC, has been extensively involved in spreading around the world over the past three decades is the idea that youth development is centrally important to global, national, and local social, economic, and political development. Washington is one of the most important global cities helping drive the rise of the global youth development complex, and the opening of Junior Achievement’s globally oriented Washington, DC, office in the late 1980s is one core part of the emergence of this global youth development complex, as is the establishment of the Education for Employment Foundation in Washington in 2005. The global youth development complex, as discussed earlier, is marked by the rapid proliferation around the world of youth-oriented policy, programming, and research during the period of global neoliberal restructuring from the late 1980s on. This includes the spread of national youth policies, strategies, and ministries and the creation of youth-oriented NGOs, youth-focused development programs, and a range of institutions dedicated to increasing youth participation in society, including youth councils, youth parliaments, youth forums, youth consultations, youth mayors, etc.
In the Arab world, for example, Jordan launched a National Youth Strategy in 2005; Lebanon launched its National Youth Development Strategy in 2012; Egypt launched a youth strategy in 2014; followed by Morocco in 2015, Tunisia in 2016, and Qatar in 2021 (Badr 2021; Sukarieh 2012b). National and international development organizations have held a continuing succession of youth summits, youth conferences, and youth reports; and major funding organizations have made youth issues a priority in their charitable giving to the degree that we can speak of the rise of a “youth philanthropy” movement (Sukarieh and Tannock 2008).
At the heart of the global youth development complex stands a set of key ideas about youth in contemporary society. First, there is a claim that youth as a social category is universal around the world, and that youth constitutes an increasingly important group to engage with across all societies. Second, there is an argument that the processes and stages of youth development are central to social, economic, and political development more generally. Third, there is an insistence that youth is a pivotal social actor for successfully bringing about radical social, political, and economic change, in particular, for the spread of free markets, liberal democracy, and capitalist enterprise. Discourse about youth in the global youth development complex is positively saturated with the language of human capital, as youth are constantly referred to as being vital “assets” and “resources” that need to be developed and used effectively. All these key ideas are relatively new in global development policy and practice, which, for decades previously, tended to approach the topic of youth as a fairly marginal concern of little consequence to core development agendas (for an extended analysis of the rise of the global youth development complex, see Sukarieh and Tannock 2008; Sukarieh and Tannock 2009; Sukarieh and Tannock 2015).
This shift in thinking around youth and global development that has accompanied the rise of the global youth development complex has not been random or accidental. Rather, it has been driven, in part at least, by the direct agency of a dense network of foundations, NGOs, international organizations, theorists, and researchers. At the national level, the United States has played a central role in promoting this global turn to youth, as much of this network is comprised of American or US-based organizations. But the networks of global influence over the spread of new ideas about youth and development need to be analyzed at an even smaller scale than this, at the level of cities. For here we can find that Washington, DC, as perhaps the world’s most important global political or ideas city, has been at the heart of the worldwide spread of the global youth development complex.
Much of this has been driven directly by the US government itself. Immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the State Department launched a global “winning hearts and minds” antiterrorism public diplomacy project, which focused in large part on targeting Muslim youth in the Middle East and beyond. TV broadcast programs, a new magazine called Hi Magazine, and an extensive youth exchange program in the United States for students from the Middle East all sought to promote the “American way of life” to Arab and Muslim youth (Pittinsky 2010; Snow and Taylor 2006; Zaharna 2010).
The US government’s Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), launched in 2002 as part of the winning hearts and minds campaign, created new partnership programs with American universities in Beirut and Cairo to provide scholarships to talented, promising young Arab students from across the region. Through MEPI’s Future Leaders program, these students would be given opportunities to participate in exchange programs with universities in the United States. MEPI also funded a series of partnerships with NGOs working with youth in the Arab world, including EFE, Injaz, and Arab Civitas (Salime 2010).
The State Department subcontracted a number of Washington-based educational organizations, including the Center for Education Development (CED), World Learning, and CIVITAS, to work on developing educational reform packages for use in schools across the Middle East (Marx 2005). In 2012, the State Department created a new Office of Global Youth Issues and a global network of youth councils to “empower” youth and “elevate” youth issues as a global policy priority (US State Department 2014). That same year, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) adopted its first ever Policy on Youth in Development (USAID 2012). According to USAID (2012), this policy seeks to reinforce the principle “that young people must be a central focus when developing country strategies and recognizes the need to support, prepare, engage and protect youth today as well as harness the energy and creativity of young people for positive change.”
The World Bank, also headquartered in Washington, has closely followed suit. The Bank has formed a worldwide Youth Employment Network with the United Nations and International Labour Organization (in 2001), established a Children and Youth Team (in 2002), created a network of national youth advisory groups (also in 2002), created a Y2Y (Youth to Youth Community) network of young World Bank staff members (in 2004), launched Youthink!, an interactive youth website (in 2006), dedicated a World Development Report to addressing the state of the world’s youth (in 2007), and hosted its first Youth Summit in Washington (in 2012) (Sukarieh and Tannock 2008 YouthPolicy.org 2012a). The World Bank also partnered with the International Labour Organization, International Youth Foundation, Plan International, the RAND Corporation, and Youth Business International, among other organizations, to create a new Solutions for Youth Employment consortium, which is a “multi-stakeholder coalition at the World Bank aiming to increase the number of young people engaged in productive work” (Solutions for Youth Employment 2020).
Washington-based think tanks, likewise, have launched a series of new initiatives on global youth over the last two decades. The Brookings Institution established a new Middle East Youth Initiative (MEYI) in 2006 through its Wolfensohn Center for Development—which was funded by an endowment from the previous director of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn (Middle East Youth Initiative 2022). The Heritage Foundation—which, like Brookings, is headquartered on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington—started its Young Leaders Program in 2001 to train young high achievers from around the world via a suite of summer programs and internships (Heritage Foundation 2022).
The American Enterprise Institute, also based on Massachusetts Avenue, trains youth from across the world to create a new generation of policymakers, and has produced a series of reports on global youth—the latest of which is titled Tackling Terrorists’ Exploitation of Youth (Darden 2019). The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), around the corner on Connecticut Avenue, developed a new research program on youth employment, youth transitions to work, youth and social movements, and youth and democratization, regularly producing reports and articles on these topics, as well as advice on how to ensure new policies effectively address youth issues (Yamamoto 2012).
The Hudson Institute, originally headquartered in New York City, moved to Washington in 2004 to be in closer proximity with the government and other think tanks and lobbying groups. It, too, has been producing a series of reports on Arab youth in the Middle East even since its move to DC a decade and a half ago (Doran 2020).
The list goes on. The Cato Institute on Massachusetts Avenue, the Middle East Institute on N Street, the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Rhode Island Avenue, the National Democratic Institute on Massachusetts Avenue, the International Republican Institute on I Street, and other similar organizations—all close neighbors in the core of downtown Washington, DC—all have been producing reports polls, or studies, on youth in the Middle East region (and elsewhere) for the past decade and more (RAND 2007).
Washington also has become home to a growing number of organizations that work primarily or exclusively on global youth issues. This includes the Education for Employment (EFE) Foundation and Junior Achievement. It also includes many similar organizations: Global Visionaries, Global Youth, Young Global Leaders, Young Business Leaders, the International Youth Forum, the International Young Leadership Assembly, Youth Business International, Young Professionals for Public Policy, the International Youth Alliance for Family Planning, and so forth (personal fieldnotes, May 2014).
There also are now umbrella organizations that work to help these different youth-focused organizations learn from one another and coordinate their work together. For example, the Alliance for International Youth Development was established in Washington, DC, in 2011, with the aim of providing “an opportunity for engaged organizations and individuals to share effective practices across all sectors of international youth development, and to inform programs and policies that support and impact youth” (International Alliance for Youth Development 2020).
Blurred Boundaries with the US Government
Thus, one central reason organizations like EFE and JA move to Washington when seeking to launch global youth programs, policies, and practices is the presence of the US government. “It is more effective to operate from DC,” says Michael Hagar, the director of EFE, in explaining the organization’s decision to set up its headquarters in Washington: “DC provides us with the connections we need to work in the Middle East,” most importantly, “proximity … to the US government and policy-makers” (personal interview, April 2006). The director of the JA Washington office—which actually was opened within the physical headquarters of USAID—makes the same argument: JA opened its office in Washington “to be in proximity with USAID, as they were helping us open offices around the world” from the late 1980s onward (personal interview, April 2006).
Like other US-based NGOs working on global youth development issues, both EFE and JA have close funding, programming, and personnel ties with the US government. Since its inception, EFE has collaborated with and received operating funds from MEPI for its youth development work in the Middle East region. In 2007, EFE won a $1 million MEPI grant to support its youth work in Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, and Yemen; and EFE’s Tunisia Initiative is entirely funded and directly supervised by a $1.45 million grant from MEPI, with the agenda of supporting “training and employment programs for … young Tunisian jobseekers and entrepreneurs” (Prnewswire 2011). In Jordan, Egypt, and Yemen, EFE’s youth development work also is funded and supported by USAID. For the three-year period from 2018 to 2021, for example, EFE received a $4 million grant from USAID to train Jordanian Youth (USAID 2021). In Jordan, EFE was also one of the main grant recipients of the Jordan Competitiveness Program, through which EFE was commissioned by USAID to place 650 young job seekers into private sector employment (USAID 2019).
Indeed, the very idea for EFE was born out of a conversation Ronald Bruder had with US government officials, including representatives from the CIA, who advised Bruder that “the war on terror is long, we need to look for long term solutions, and education is more effective than just monitoring youth” (personal interview with EFE director, Michael Hagar, April 2006). The EFE mission responds directly to one of the main recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Report, also officially known as the Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, which is to prepare young Muslims in the Middle East for market employability and bridge the gaps that exist between education and the needs of the market, and between the Middle East and the West (Kean and Hamilton 2004).
Many of EFE’s core personnel also have direct links with the US government. The first director of EFE, Michael Hagar, previously worked for the US State Department for decades. According to Hagar, this experience “helps in my current work, I bring in many connections and networks, not only in DC but also in the countries where I worked previously in the Middle East” (personal interview, April 2006). The EFE board of directors includes Lee Hamilton, the co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, US congressman from Indiana for thirty-four years and previous chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs; Ellen Laipson, who worked in a range of US government foreign policy roles for twenty-five years; and Jeffrey Smith, who worked for years in both the executive and legislative branches of the US government (EFE 2006). Several of the leading officers of EFE Global—including Jamie Bowen, Abbey Walsh, and Amr Abdallah—previously worked for USAID and/or held senior executive positions in previous USAID-funded projects (EFE 2020).
While the domestic work of Junior Achievement within the United States is almost entirely supported and directed by the private sector, this is not the case for its international work. The organization has received millions of dollars of start-up and operational grant funding and institutional support from the US government, through the US State Department, USAID, and the US Information Agency, especially in the former Soviet bloc countries and throughout the Middle East (Sukarieh and Tannock 2009). This includes, for example, a $3.6 million USAID grant for work done in Russia, and a $2.7 million USAID grant in 1994, followed by a $2.5 million USAID grant in 2003 for work done in Africa (USAID 2003;2006). Junior Achievement signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the US Peace Corps in 1991 for Peace Corps volunteers to launch and run Junior Achievement programs overseas (JAI 1992).
Peace Corps is an outgrowth of the Cold War that was established in 1961 and subsequently has sent millions of Americans overseas to volunteer in development projects in lower-income countries (Rice 1980). It works closely with US ambassadors and their staffs to coordinate its programming in other countries; and US embassies frequently host Junior Achievement fund-raising events and awards ceremonies (see, for example, JACR 2007). Sam Taylor, who became acting president and chief operating officer of JA’s international wing, was initially a twenty-year veteran of the US State Department, who, in 1988, contacted JA to propose he work for them “on loan” from the State Department while remaining on the US government pay roll (JA 1988, 6). Subsequently, Junior Achievement’s expansion into the Middle East, where it is known as Injaz, has taken place under the umbrella of USAID and the US State Department’s MEPI. Junior Achievement opened its first Injaz offices in Jordan in 1999, then rapidly expanded after 2001 to Lebanon, Egypt, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Palestine, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.
Injaz was launched with a $1 million seed fund from USAID and was incorporated into a broader curriculum reform project across Jordan that was being led directly by USAID. Injaz programs in Jordan, Tunisia, and Egypt were funded mainly by USAID in the first instance (Angel-Urdinola, Semialii, and Brodmann 2010).
Many of the other US-based NGOs working in the global youth development complex, likewise, have on their staff or boards of directors people who previously served in the US government—most commonly in the US State Department. The American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) Middle East Director of Operations Larry Specht, for example, worked in the State Department in Eastern Europe for years before taking up his current post with the AFT (Sukarieh and Tannock 2010). The CEO of the Center for Civic Education (CCE), which has a major project in the Middle East called Arab Civitas that specializes in reforming civic education programs and training civic education teachers, was a US cultural attaché in Jordan for ten years before he became CEO of the CCE (Succarie 2008). Arab Civitas was launched in 2002 through a USAID grant, which also allowed the organization access to primary schools in Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan. In 2003, MEPI included Arab Civitas as one of the main organizations it supports to promote civic education and to link educators and students throughout the Arab region (Rabasa et al. 2007).
Georgia Bean, vice-director of PACT, is a previous USAID employee. Like the Peace Corps, PACT is an outcome of the Cold War and was established in 1971 with a grant from USAID to support development projects that can improve lives in marginalized communities all over the world (Succarie 2008). The list goes on—a simple look through the websites of most of these organizations will quickly uncover names of high-profile personnel who have had previous employment in the US government.
Such close ties between NGOs and the US government constitute a clear continuation of the phenomenon that has been widely discussed in the earlier literatures on cultural imperialism and public diplomacy (Arnove and Pinede 2007; Gienow-Hecht 2010; Parmar 2012; Roelofs 2003). As in previous eras, the US government in the early twenty-first century deliberately works in the Middle East through NGOs as a way to win cooperation with groups that would not work or want to be seen working directly with the US government. In their overseas work, US NGOs tend to adopt a nonpartisan, “non-governmental” status that creates a halo of altruism and independence. As a Jordanian interpreter who had worked with a wide range of US NGOs in the country explains:
Almost all of the workshops by American NGOs and regardless of where they get their funds from or their field of specialization, would start by the lead of the workshop denying any relation with the US state or its policies in the Middle East … The American army is invading Iraq, but we are the good people just trying to spread knowledge, build capacities, help youth get funds, help NGOs and small businesses to start up, we have nothing in common with the army in Iraq or even the American bases in Jordan, in fact we are all anti-war (personal interview, July 2019).
Such claims of independence from the US government are particularly important in shaping the way their programs are received in the Arab World, denying attempts to relate the work of these NGOs to US military occupation, US government interests, or the interests of US or global capital, more generally. The claim provides a way to ease tensions in the Middle East over the decision to work with Americans and gives an alibi for local NGOs working with American NGOs, saving them from the accusation of being spies. “We work with American NGOs, not with the American government,” is the line one often hears from Arab NGOs involved in work with American NGOs. “We have nothing to do with the Bush administration, we are against the war,” is how American NGO staff often would start their workshops tailored to Arab NGOs (personal fieldnotes, November 2006).
Departments within the US government often determine projects they wish to see carried out in the Middle East region and then ask for bids on this work from partner NGOs—who often, then, subcontract this work out to other, smaller NGOs, further obscuring the visibility of who is actually directing such program initiatives. As a director of the USAID-funded World Learning organization—yet another NGO working as part of the global youth development complex in the Middle East—explains: “The US government issues proposals to address certain areas in some hit countries—I mean target countries—and they define for us which organizations to work with, so we work in this framework. We never go and do something that is against US strategy and needs” (personal interview, March 2006).
This remark was echoed by the Center for Education Development, an NGO based in Washington that has been reforming curricula all over the world since the 1980s. As the Center for Education Development project director in Jordan explains:
Since we started our global work, we always had to bid for projects that the State Department, USAID or other government departments set out a call for proposals. At the beginning, it was through bidding, by the mid 90s, however, we became known to be conducting certain projects related to education oversees, and it became more of an assignment, State Department assigns projects to us, and ensures our connection with ministries of education in the country where the projects are implemented. This has been the case for our projects from Latin America to Central Europe and lately the MENA region (personal interview, April 2006).
Centralized coordination of US government overseas development grants also takes place via PACT, a corporate NGO that distributes small grants allocated by USAID to various NGOs, in parallel with the role of EQUIP 123, another NGO funded by USAID and maintained by the Educational Development Center, which distributes USAID’s large grants (USAID 2021). Even small projects in the Middle East are not randomly or independently created by freestanding NGOs; their proposals are created to fit projects that have been initiated by USAID, in the service of US government foreign policy, and put out to bid. Since 1992, PACT has managed over five thousand subgrants in its program portfolio, amounting to more than $100 million in USAID funding. PACT not only distributes these funds but also manages and oversees funded projects, which entails, for example, giving “advice to clients on how to improve internal controls and properly handle U.S. government grants” so as to result in “minimal audit findings for these clients” (PACT 2002).
A quick look at the geographical areas where American NGO youth projects operate shows how they have been shifting according to where US government interests are focused. In the 1980s, NGOs carried out youth development projects in Latin America; in the 1990s, they mainly worked in Eastern Europe, and now, at the start of the twenty-first century, they operate in Africa and the Middle East. The US government also directs NGOs in terms of who they should be working with as local partners on the ground in the Middle East to help execute their projects. In response to a question on how relations with Middle East partner organizations are constructed, a director with World Learning says:
In most cases it is via USAID—through the American embassies, which have a list they built with the local government of certain NGOs we could work with.… In some situations, where there are no organizations working on certain issues that we need to address, as per the demand of the US government in certain countries, we help create organizations—we call it capacity building. It means that we help them work in a democratic environment on some societal problems. We also help building a network … so we do capacity building and then we help network these civil society organizations together so their work will be effective (personal interview, March 2006).
Yet, despite these close programming, personnel, and funding ties, the NGOs at the heart of the global youth development complex are not operating solely as the willful foreign policy agents of the US government overseas. As noted earlier, directors and staff at these NGOS are often adamant that they work as separate and independent entities from the US government. “We do not care to work with governments,” insists Ronald Bruder, the head of EFE, for example, even though EFE has worked extensively with the US government ever since it was founded: “I work more with business people, business can be enrolled to fund institutions and to spread culture that is anti-fundamentalist and anti-terrorist.… I do not talk politics. I am not a politician, and I do not care about politics” (personal fieldnotes, May 2007).
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a private, nonprofit foundation, dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions worldwide, that makes more than two thousand grants each year to support NGO projects in more than one hundred countries—including youth and education related projects in the Middle East (NED 2021). Yet, despite being funded directly and entirely by the US government, Carl Gershman, the director of the NED, insists on the sacrosanct nature of his organization’s nongovernmental identity: “We are a non-profit and non-governmental organization with the pure aim of promoting democracy abroad. We have been working since 1983 in Latin America and Eastern Europe, and we launched our programs in the Middle East before the [US government’s] war on terror [began]. We support any non-governmental and non-profit organizations abroad in any part of the world to promote democracy in their own country. We do not work with the state, either in the US or abroad. We work to promote democracy (personal interview, April 2006).
Such claims should not be dismissed as pure ideological dissimulation, as most of the US-based NGOs working in the global youth development complex have their own missions and agendas that precede any engagements they have undertaken with the US (or other) governments, and virtually all these NGOs serve a range of private sector and civil society stakeholders that go well beyond the interests of the US state itself. While an organization like EFE has worked closely with the US government from its inception, taking large amounts of funds from the state and including current and former government officials on its board, EFE is even more strongly tied to the private sector. Approximately 95 percent of the EFE board of directors come from the private sector (personal fieldnotes, July 2021). “Yes, we have USAID and MEPI as our partners,” states an EFE senior director, “but we also have many other private organizations on board, including HSBC, Boeing, CITI, Bank of America, Starbucks, Marriott, JP Morgan, Google, Western Union, LinkedIn, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations, and many private corporations from the Middle East, such as Emirates Airlines, Petrochem, Al Turki, Olayan, and many others” (personal interview, April 2006).
While EFE has received large grants from the US state via MEPI and USAID, the organization was established with a $10 million endowment from Ronald Bruder; and in 2019, for example, forty-three of the forty-five named funders of EFE came from the private sector (personal fieldnotes. July 2021).
Junior Achievement, meanwhile, has never had any state representatives on its board of trustees; and its domestic work in the United States has been entirely funded by the private sector (personal fieldnotes, June 2020; Sukarieh and Tannock 2009). “We were always proud to be private sector led and funded,” proclaims a senior JA director in Washington (personal interview, April 2006). In 2019, JA’s global budget was a little over $37 million. Of this, $14 million came from private sector and foundation donations, and $13 million came from sales of JA products and services (Junior Achievement Worldwide, 2019). The relationship between NGOs in the global youth development complex and the state also tends to be dynamic and changes over time. At key moments of political and economic crisis—for example, the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 or the spread of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2010—these NGOs tend to establish very close relationships with US government agendas, and levels of state funding and programming coordination increases. During other periods, the availability of state funding decreases and NGOs often are much more independent and disconnected from the US government in pursuing their own institutional agendas.
This relationship with the state is, thus, highly complex and constantly changing for NGOs in the global youth development complex to manage. One of the keys to managing this relationship effectively is close physical proximity. Actually being in Washington, DC, enables NGOs to monitor and negotiate shifting funding streams, programming priorities, personnel movements, and rhetorical and ideological frameworks. Close geographical proximity provides for a sort of community, where government and NGO staff have brown bag lunch seminars together, coordinate activities, and exchange ideas among themselves. A lunch hour talk on Madrassahs in Pakistan at the United States Institute of Peace in April 2006, for example, drew an audience from the State Department, USAID, the Department of Education, the World Bank, several foreign government embassies, as well as members of the National Endowment for Democracy and its five affiliated NGOs (personal fieldnotes, April 2006).
This dense social and geographical network allows for the close coordination of projects and exchange of ideas. That which is so often presented in the Arab world as being separate, independent, and not related, is, in Washington, revealed to be the collective project of a close-knit community where all know each other, see each other, and work with each other on a first name and day-to-day basis. As Ronald Bruder explains, “It is not the formal meetings that makes it here [in Washington], it’s the endless informal talks in restaurants over lunches, in workshops, in talks. That’s what makes DC even more appealing. I could have settled in New York and come to appointments whenever I secure one, but everyone advised that this is where I need to be, this is where informal talks are more important, this is a space that is creating ideas every day. If I wanted to be part of that, I needed to set the office of EFE in DC” (personal fieldnotes, April 2006).
Frequent conferences, workshops, book talks, seminars, and policy meetings are part of the integral life of DC-based youth development NGOs. In these gatherings, reports circulate and become the engine that drives the spread of key ideas. As Wendy Larner and Richard le Heron (2002, 765) argue, learning often occurs in these “globalizing micro spaces.” In these places—the meeting rooms, hallways, cafés, bars, and restaurants at conferences where issues of youth, terrorism, and the economic crisis are discussed by policymakers, NGO heads and think tank researchers—“ideas are made and remade” (McCann 2011, 118–119).
In such encounters, space is, as Henry Lefebvre (1991) claims, produced and reproduced through social interactions within physical locales. It is face-to-face interactions within the city of Washington that enable the exchange of verbal, visual, and symbolic information, which later facilitates the global movement and attachment of key youth policy models. “This infrastructure is both the cause and effect of wider transformative processes,” write Ian Cook and Kevin Ward (2012), as it provides opportunity for the formation of policy and its worldwide circulation.
Third Sector Networking Ties
However, the move to Washington by organizations like EFE and Junior Achievement is not only about facilitating their engagement with the US government. It is also to be in close proximity to the mass of other third sector organizations—foundations, think tanks, NGOs, etc.—working as part of the global youth development complex that also operates out of the city. The history of Ronald Bruder and EFE provides a classic example. As discussed earlier, EFE began through a series of conversations between Bruder and officials from the CIA and US State Department. But very quickly, these officials put Bruder in touch with a political analyst working at the Brookings Institution (personal interview with Michael Hagar, April 2006).
Brookings is one of the key actors in the creation and spread of global youth development discourse, along with a close-knit set of other third sector organizations also located in Washington, such as the World Bank. Their Middle East Youth Initiative serves as a hub for networking between policymakers, regional actors in development, government officials, representatives from the private sector, and youth (Brookings 2022). These organizations tend to work closely together, often coauthoring and coproducing the key research and policy texts that constitute the heart of global youth development discourse. For example, the first book produced by Brookings’ Middle East Youth Initiative, Generation in Waiting, has a foreword by James Wolfensohn, the head of the World Bank, as well as six chapters (from a total of ten) written by current or former World Bank employees (Dhillan and Yousuf 2011). Over time, these organizations work in tandem, alongside the US government, to produce what is a continually shifting analytical framework around youth development in global society that responds to emerging political and economic crises such as the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the global financial meltdown of 2008, and the rise of the Arab Spring in 2010.
When Ronald Bruder first met Graham Fuller, the political analyst at Brookings, in the early 2000s, Fuller was working on producing a major report for the institution on how the United States should address the growing problem of Muslim youth in the Middle East. Youth constituted a majority of the population throughout the region, and US-based analysts were increasingly starting to focus at the time on youth as a key actor to consider in their foreign policy planning (Fuller 2003). This report became the founding project that led to the establishment of EFE in 2005, and that provided the conceptual framework for the following projects EFE would work on over the coming years.
Bruder contributed funding to the production of Fuller’s report, released in 2003 and titled, The Youth Factor: The New Demographics of the Middle East and Implications for US Foreign Policy (Fuller 2003). Bruder points to this early engagement with Brookings on global youth development issues as a key factor in his decision to base the EFE headquarters in Washington rather than his native New York: “After all, it was my connections with Brookings and their advice that created the idea of EFE, and EFE’s first activity was the sponsorship of the Brookings report on the youth factor. Later on, in 2005, I finally took the decision to start the [EFE] office in DC” (personal interview, April 2006).
The Youth Factor report was the first of a series of influential reports on youth in the Middle East produced out of Washington—in particular, by individuals based at Brookings and the World Bank—that set the frame for how youth in the region were talked about in US (and subsequently, Middle East) policy circles and the nonprofit sector. In 2006, the World Bank focused its annual world development report on global youth. The report warned that “unemployment, economic marginalisation and political exclusion” could “foster resentment, oppositional identifications, defiance, indifference, political extremism, terrorism and revolutionary ideas among the developing world’s burgeoning youth population,” and argued that the most important policy response to such a threat was to develop a focus on youth employment “as the most crucial issue involving youth all over the world: get youth a job, the argument goes, any job really, and we are on our way to resolving all other social and political conflicts and problems” (Sukarieh and Tannock 2008, 306–307).
Also in 2006, Brookings launched its Middle East Youth Initiative, to focus on youth in the Middle East, through publications, events, blogs, and research with the aim of connecting academics with policymakers and creating a network between the United States and the Middle East that can work on changing policies surrounding youth. The initiative was a program that, for the next six years, would produce a continuing stream of reports, studies, and papers on the status of youth in the region: Inclusion: Meeting the 100 Million Youth Challenge and From Oil Boom to Youth Boom: Tapping the Middle East Demographic in 2007; Missed by the Boom, Hurt by the Bust: Making Markets Work for Young People in the Middle East and Anthology: Generation in Waiting in 2009; Social Entrepreneurship in the Middle East: Toward Sustainable Development for the Next Generation in 2010; and so on (Abdou et al. 2010; Dhillon et al. 2009; Dhillon and Yousuf 2011; Salehi-Isfehani and Dhillon 2008).
The emphasis in these reports was on the size of the younger generation in the Middle East—as Ragui Assaad and Farzaneh Roudi-Fahimi (2007) note, “the Middle East currently has 108 million young people between 15 and 29, which is the largest in history”—and on Middle East youth as constituting an essential opportunity for regional prosperity, provided they were effectively integrated into national, regional, and global economic structures and agendas. Almost all these reports start with the issue of youth demography. Brookings’ Stalled Youth report, for example, opens with the following statement: “Young people in the Middle East (15–29 years old) constitute about one-third of the region’s population, and growth rates for this age group are the second highest after sub-Saharan Africa. Today, as the Middle East experiences a demographic boom along with an oil boom, the region faces a historic opportunity to capitalize on these twin dividends for lasting economic development. Thus, tapping the full potential of youth is one of the most critical economic development challenges facing the Middle East in the twenty-first century” (Salehi-Isfahani and Dhillon 2008, 1).
Similarly, Brookings’s Missed by the Boom report also opens with the threat posed by a large youth population in the Middle East:
For Middle Eastern economies, the global downturn coincides with a historically high share of 15- to 29-year-olds in the total population. This report shows that, even during the “boom” years of 2002 to 2008, young people in the Middle East did not benefit from high quality education and struggled to find decent jobs. Now, with labor markets already under pressure to generate employment for record numbers of graduates, the region faces a new set of challenges due to the global downturn and its effects on oil prices, exports, remittances, and foreign investment. For Middle Eastern economies to emerge stronger, policies forged during the downturn must be consistent with long-term goals of cultivating a skilled workforce, expanding the role of the private sector, and reducing the appeal of government employment (Dhillon et al. 2009, 5).
These reports regularly are referred to by organizations working as part of the youth development complex in the Middle East as a way to explain and give legitimacy to their youth development work. In the PBS television show aired in 2008 Jobs for Jordan, Ronald Bruder of EFE and Queen Rania both directly invoked Brookings’s Generation in Waiting and Missed by the Boom reports (PBS 2008). Similarly, in a media interview, Jordan’s King Abdullah II invoked Brookings’ Generation in Waiting report: “There are over 100 million young people in the Middle East between the age of 15–29, representing the largest cohort in the history of the region. Some analysts are referring to them as ‘the generation in waiting; They are waiting for quality education and training, meaningful opportunities, decent jobs, the kind of security that will allow them to build a life for themselves, nurture their talents and pursue their aspirations. And none of this will ever be fully realized without peace” (Shin 2012).
As the Brookings Institution, through its Middle East Youth Initiative, began disseminating this work, there was a marked shift throughout the US and international development community, as other research institutes and development organizations, likewise, took up the banner of Middle East youth. Some developed their own initiatives on Middle East youth in parallel to the Brookings model, including the Open Society Foundation (in 2011), the Clinton Global Initiative (2011), Mercy Corps (2011) and the Center for Mediterranean Integration (2013) (personal fieldnotes, May 2006).
The physical and social infrastructure of Washington, DC, was again pivotal to enabling this cross-organizational work on global youth and youth in the Middle East. Most of the major think tanks, NGOs, and international development organizations based in DC are situated within a two-square-mile area centered around Massachusetts Avenue and Dupont Circle, what Calder (2014) calls the “Massachusetts Avenue information complex,” located in the heart of the city. The World Bank and Brookings, located a mere five blocks apart in Washington, not only worked together on these issues but also regularly shared personnel. James Wolfensohn, director of the World Bank from 1995 to 2005, subsequently came to Brookings to set up the Wolfensohn Center for Development—within which was housed the Middle East Youth Initiative. It was also Wolfensohn who brought in Navtej Dhillon to head the Middle East Youth Initiative, as Dhillon had led on the World Bank’s 2006 world development report focusing on global youth during the previous years (Dhillon and Yousuf 2011; World Bank 2006).
Such circulation and exchange of staff within the DC third sector is widespread. The World Bank recruits armies of interns to work in its various departments every year, who then move on to work in other Washington-based NGOs. One young intern I interviewed for this project had previously been a volunteer doing development work overseas in Lebanon, before coming to DC to intern at the World Bank, where he was working on the World Bank’s youth focused world development report; a few years later, this former intern was now working for the International Youth Foundation (IYF) as a coordinator of activities between the Middle East and the IYF global office in Washington (personal interview, November 2005).
Many of the young staffers who join the DC nonprofit sector working on global youth development issues, likewise, come from previous overseas volunteer experiences in Latin America, the Middle East, or Africa with older institutions like the Peace Corps and Mercy Corps. These staff bring with them their personal networks that they have built up within these organizations and the knowledge they acquired while volunteering overseas, which they are able to draw on in their new nonprofit-based work.
Other nonprofit staff circulate more locally. One of the main EFE staff leads, for example, prior to joining EFE, had previously worked in five different nonprofit organizations in and around DC (personal interview, November 2005). “Once you are in the sector, it becomes easy to move from one job to the other,” the EFE staffer said. “In fact, it is a sector where no-one has a permanent job in any one institute, we all keep moving around” (personal interview, November 2005). If there is a revolving door of staff between the US government and youth development NGOs in Washington, there is a similar revolving door at work within the DC-based nonprofit sector itself (LaPira and Herschel 2014).
Staff from the DC-based NGOs working within the global youth development complex also meet regularly with one another in workshops, conferences, and informal sessions held in local hotels, cafes, and restaurants. Reports and papers on youth and development produced by Brookings, the World Bank, and other international development organizations in Washington, DC, are regularly disseminated through gala launch events, conferences, seminars, and workshops held throughout the city—and these events are important opportunities not only to receive advance notice of new agendas and research on global youth issues but also to network and trade ideas and information about new projects, collaborations, and funding opportunities.
For example, in May 2008, the Brookings Institution held a launch event for congressional staff on the Foreign Relations Committee for a new report from its Middle East Youth Initiative that had been written by Navtej Dhillon (2008), The Middle East Youth Bulge: Challenge or Opportunity? Dhillon was joined on the panel by Marwan Muasher, senior vice president of the World Bank. The presentation was followed by a gala dinner, organized by Brookings and the World Bank and hosted at the Capital Hilton—where Brookings holds most of its dinners and receptions. The hall was packed, with representatives from the congressional committee, USAID, the World Bank, the National Endowment for Democracy, RAND Corporation, and staff from a number of Middle East embassies.
At the end of dinner, more speakers from Brookings and the World Bank made remarks based on Dhillon’s Middle East Youth Bulge report. Dhillon told the audience that youth are “the most critical 21st century economic challenge facing the Middle East,” and argued that to “advance US interests in the Middle East, we need more than an anti-radicalisation strategy; we need a strategy that elevates youth development alongside defense and diplomacy, both in principle and practice.” The solution, according to Dhillon, was to “reform the education system, and integrate the education system to the job market like in the USA.” Muasher pointed to the work being done by Injaz, the World Bank, and USAID in Jordan as key examples of the kind of youth development work the rest of the Middle East region needed. Others in the audience, likewise, shared their experiences of working with youth in the Middle East. A staff person from Street Law, for example, spoke about how youth in the Middle East “want change, they are dying to implement change in their countries,” and called for more funding to work with youth throughout the region (personal fieldnotes, May 2008).
“In a normal day in DC, tens of workshops around issues related to international development will be held,” says Bebs Chorak, an organizer with Street Law, which is an American NGO created to promote the rule of law around the world, with projects working with youth in Jordan and Iraq on transparency and rule of law. “These meetings are great ways to learn who is who, who is doing what where, and exchange ideas about effective ways to go forward and sometimes build common projects” (personal fieldnotes, February 2006). Workshops and conferences are spaces “to disseminate ideas within the same circles in DC, we can learn what the other NGOs are doing,” says one of the lead staff people at EFE (personal fieldnotes, November 2005). The exchange of ideas also occurs informally, in conversations held over meals, as Chorak explains: “My favorite is the coffee breaks and lunches, where you discover new people all the time. Most of these events also have networking as part of their program, and mostly they have speakers from the Middle East and North Africa, where we can either get connections to build relations there or we learn more about the situation. It has been better than taking a degree in Islamic Studies or in Middle Eastern Studies” (personal interview, February 2006).
A staff member at EFE makes much the same point about the important role informal and sometimes impromptu and unplanned meetings over meals in Washington play in supporting collaborative work in the sector: “Mostly, these are unplanned meetings, as there are famous cafes and restaurants around [Washington that] everyone goes to. Sometimes you meet people you know and sit and discuss ideas, and other times you bump into familiar faces you have seen in workshops, and never met [before]. The lunch becomes an opportunity to discuss further the ideas discussed in the conference, and to get to know the person more. The network gets wider in this sense, and ideas can still be followed up in emails and other occasions” (personal fieldnotes, November 2005).
These informal chats over meals and refreshments become an essential space for newcomers—new employers just hired by global youth development NGOs, or new youth NGOs just entering the scene—to learn the language of the global youth development complex. “Sometimes I do not understand half of what is said [in the formal sessions], sometimes the lectures are dense,” says one youth NGO leader newly arrived in DC from Jordan: “But in the informal chats during the coffee breaks at conferences, I get to learn the catch words I need to use in my proposals for funds, I learn the language of power, in other words” (personal fieldnotes, December 2005).
For an organization like EFE, physical presence in Washington, DC, is critical to enable it to be deeply integrated within this networked dissemination of global and Middle East youth development agendas and research. Over time, the prevailing discourse on youth and development in the Middle East has subtly shifted. By being embedded within DC’s third sector networks, EFE has been able to ensure it always keeps abreast of these shifts, thus preserving its ability to maintain its larger sector relevance and secure new funding streams as these come online. When EFE first opened its doors, youth development policy and programming in the Middle East was highly securitized, still closely linked with foreign policy agendas of stemming terrorist threats in the United States and globally. But subsequently, after the release of the World Bank’s world development report on youth and the Brookings Institution report on the youth bulge in the Middle East, youth policy and programming shifted to a more positive and proactive emphasis on youth empowerment, leadership, and participation (Sukarieh and Tannock 2008, 2011).
Closely attuned to the changing rhetoric and policy frameworks that were coming out of Washington, DC, EFE was able to shift the framing of its own youth development work in the Middle East as well. This can be tracked through the development of the speeches of Ronald Bruder, who started EFE as part of “the war on terror” but subsequently shifted to speak more of youth as “an asset to development in the region,” while invoking the “need to train them [youth] for leadership roles” (Harbus 2006, Murphy 2008). At the same time, the reports and research of Brookings and the World Bank were able to point to the youth development and training work that was starting to be done by organizations like EFE and Junior Achievement on the ground in the Middle East, as a way to shift broader discursive and policy frameworks around global and Middle Eastern youth as well.
Global Links in a Global (Ideas) City
“I meet more Arabs here in DC than I did when I was living in Yemen,” a Yemeni staffer working with the National Democratic Institute—a quasi-NGO that leads youth training projects around the world, including in the Middle East, on civic culture, democracy, youth participation, and leadership—told me in Washington. “I do not feel I am living away, every day I meet with people from the Middle East, I speak Arabic, yes, sometimes I have to speak it in formal Arabic, because of the different accents, especially with the North African Arabs” (personal interview, October 2005). “I think I can effect change on youth policies [in Egypt] from here in DC more than if I were in Egypt,” an Egyptian researcher based at a youth NGO in DC reflects. “It is unfortunate, but it is true.” Partly, this is because Washington allows this researcher to meet Egyptian politicians and policymakers who he would never have access to if he were still living in Egypt. “Many [Egyptian] academics, state employees, ministers come here from Egypt for conferences or meetings, and DC makes them accessible,” the researcher explains, so “it is a good time to push your ideas as you can have their ears here.” Partly, this is also because the youth NGOs working out of DC are well connected to Arab governments—connections often forged within the social, political, and physical spaces of DC itself. “If I were to start a nonprofit with the same ideas” in Egypt, the researcher says, “my government will be suspicious of me, and I won’t be able to work” (personal interview, October 2005).
There is a third reason NGOs involved in the global youth development complex often feel compelled to open offices in DC to pursue their overseas work. The city has become a central hub to meet and develop relationships with leaders, organizers, educators, and other staff from all over the Arab world. It is a place to build the global networks central to the international youth development work these NGOs do in other countries throughout the Middle East region and beyond. Washington has built up a massive presence of foreign state, civil, and private sector offices, institutions, and representatives.
Indeed, it is not just NGO headquarters that are clustered together on and around Massachusetts Avenue in the heart of DC, but dozens of foreign government embassies as well (Calder and De Freytas 2009, 88). As Stephen Fuller (1989, 114–115) notes, “the presence of large numbers of foreign missions and international organizations [in Washington] is predicated on the need for access to the US government,” but this shared presence also enables these foreign missions and organizations “to interact with each other either directly or indirectly through third-party channels,” and with US individuals, corporations, and civil society organizations, as well. In DC, foreign embassies and other organizations actively seek to pursue their own interests, not just directly and formally with the US government, but with other state missions and organizations that are also based in the city. They do this through hiring lobbying firms, creating quasi “non-governmental, community-based institutions,” partnering with “entrenched non-profit organization[s],” engaging with local community projects, and fostering “interpersonal networks and thus transnational relationships” through hosting formal embassy parties, along with a range of other social, cultural, and intellectual events (Calder and De Freytas 2009, 89–90).
At the same time, NGOs working in the global youth development complex seek to pursue their own interests and agendas by engaging with representatives of foreign states and organizations. For an organization like EFE or Junior Achievement to be able to work effectively in countries in the Middle East, and particularly to do this at scale, it needs to secure domestic governmental consent, sponsorship, and public-private partnership arrangements that can provide funding, institutional support, and political endorsement. As the EFE’s Ronald Bruder explains:
We [EFE] work with Arab governments, and they are very receptive to our work. In Morocco … the King opened up to us all of their youth centers. There are 400 training centers around the country owned by the state, and we use these spaces for our activities. We are helping these 400 training centers to provide better training to link young people to jobs. Also, in Morocco and in the largest public university, King Hassan University, which has more than 200,000 students, we are enabling them to increase the numbers of their graduates that will go to the labor market. (Bruder 2019)
These kinds of foundational relationships often are developed with Arab governments through Washington, DC, networks. Sometimes agreements are forged at meetings within the city itself, and sometimes DC networks are used to set up high-level meetings with government leaders in other cities across the Middle East and North Africa region. “Not any NGO [in this country] can have access to public education or youth centers,” a Jordanian staff leader of EFE working in Jordan tells me. “It is the US, Washington connections that does it for them.” “I am welcome in the offices of the Queen and King [of Jordan] not because I am a Jordanian with an MBA from a prominent university,” the EFE staffer says, “but because I am recommended to them as a director of EFE” (personal interview, December 2006). It is for this reason that the Washington office of an organization like EFE is explicitly designated its “global office.” For, as Salvator Nigro, the CEO of EFE Europe and the vice president of EFE Global explains, “DC is where the decision making, vision, networking and design of curriculum takes place” for EFE projects right across the world (personal interview, November 2019).
US-based NGOs working in the global youth development complex also have found that their work becomes easier to do, gaining effectiveness and legitimacy to the extent that they are able to employ local, indigenous staff from the countries in which they are working, not just to work on but also to lead their projects: to have Arab staff work on and lead projects they run in the Arab world, or even better, Yemeni staff to work on and lead projects in Yemen, Jordanian staff to work on and lead projects in Jordan, and so on. The employment makeup of the boards of directors for Injaz and EFE chapters throughout the Arab world reflects this basic pattern: Injaz Jordan is run by a Jordanian, Dima Bibi; Injaz Bahrain is run by a Bahraini, Princess Hafsa; Injaz Dubai in run by a Dubayan, Razan Bashiti; and so on. Projects and discourses that have their origin and motivation in US or global contexts, thus, can be presented as being authentically indigenous to the Arab region.
When US politicians and policymakers announce new Middle Eastern foreign policy agendas, they often make sure to index the Arab nationality of the authors of key reports they use to justify these agendas. Colin Powell, for example, when launching the US State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative, invoked the UN’s Arab Human Development Report, a report Powell claimed was written by Arabs themselves. “These are not my words,” said Powell. “They have come from the Arab experts who have looked deeply into these issues” (Yacoubian 2005). The US government’s Greater Middle East Plan (GMEP)—a policy platform for reshaping the Arab world in accordance with US foreign policy agendas—likewise refers to the Arab Human Development Report and its (allegedly) Arab provenance: “The three “deficits” identified by the Arab authors of the 2002 and 2003 Arab Human Development Reports have contributed to conditions that threaten the national interests of all G8 members. So long as the region’s pool of politically and economically disenfranchised individuals grows, we will witness an increase in extremism, terrorism, international crime, and illegal migration” (Al-Hayat 2004).
This sets up a dynamic whereby global youth development NGOs regularly bring staff from the Arab world to work in Washington, DC, for periods of time, both to learn about the core work of the NGO and also to become public faces for the NGO in its interactions with the US government, other NGOs, and international development organizations, as well as foreign state embassies and representatives. In fact, the US State Department and USAID run regular programs to bring Arab staff from the Middle East to Washington, DC, for training purposes.
MEPI funds the Leadership Development Fellowship, which brings leaders from the Middle East region to Washington for a twelve-month training program in “civic engagement, social entrepreneurship, and leadership,” through which they learn how to work creatively to address social and economic challenges in their own local communities (MEPI 2020). Similarly, the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women—US Department of State Entrepreneurship Program for Women in the Middle East and Northern Africa—brings women from the region who are public and private sector leaders to Washington, DC, for a two-week training program in leadership and entrepreneurship; the program usually concludes with a celebration held at the White House with the US Secretary of State (Meridian 2015). It was through such an exchange program that the first director of EFE in the Middle East was introduced to Ronald Bruder. Following this encounter in DC, the individual was then employed by Bruder to return to Jordan to run EFE there (personal interview, January 2006).
Together, this creates the situation described by the Yemeni and Egyptian NGO staffers at the beginning of this section. It sometimes becomes easier for Arabs to meet, engage with, and influence one another in Washington, DC, than it is in their home countries. Paradoxically, DC, thus, increasingly has become a place where Arabs—along with all kinds of other nationalities—come to the city, whether as visitors or temporary or permanent residents, whether working for NGOs or international development institutions or foreign governments, to discuss and negotiate and plan projects with one another that will be launched and carried out in the countries from which they originally come. “Sometimes I am better able to recruit staff to work on our projects in the region from here, than when I go and interview in different countries in the Middle East,” says Raswan Masmoudi, the head of the Center for Islam and Democracy (personal interview, February 2014). This is part of the essence of how a global ideas city like Washington, DC, works. It is not just that it projects its discursive and ideological work onto the rest of the world but that the rest of the world comes to the city precisely to carry out this global and international discursive and ideological work together.
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