Introduction
The role of foreign aid has been understood as a means of kick-starting or accelerating economic development. Foreign aid, in the form of state resources provided bilaterally or multilaterally, has been understood as a means of filling finance gaps and providing recipient governments with the resources to build infrastructure and production sites. For Western donors, economic development has been assumed to be market-based capitalist development. This assumption was summed up later by Jeffrey Sachs in the “big push” thesis on savings and investment as well as state planning for development (Sachs 2005). This was particularly ironic given that Sachs had made a career out of promoting neoliberal structural reform policies.
New donors such as Korea then based their official development assistance (ODA) policy on their own development experiences with recipient countries in the Global South. Whilst the assumption was that aid was to be based on state resources, aid is increasingly used in the context of defining development as neoliberal. These neoliberal development policies are based on policies such as the privatization of industry and land and the opening up of the state to transnational foreign investment. Foreign aid is now increasingly regarded as breaking infrastructure and administration bottlenecks to allow markets to work. It is a paradox that state-led grant and loan aid encourages an economic model based on less state economic intervention in recipient countries. This “hollowing out” of the state has now manifested itself as the creation and designation of low-tax export processing zones and as changing territorial geography. Paradoxically, the liberal- and market-based policies of economic deregulation have also created a state that is more interventionist, in terms of creating a stable investment climate based on monitoring labor and territorial surveillance, so as to create a disciplined, precarious, and nonunionized labor force. This is neoliberalism.
In the foreign aid community, reforms such as aid effectiveness and an interest in the role of the private sector in foreign aid distribution (such as loans) and public–private partnerships began emerging in the 2000s. Korea has been a major stakeholder in the aid effectiveness debate, which has evolved along with new labels of development, such as sustainable development and green development. Within Korea, there were also debates regarding the role of the developmentalist state, family-owned business monopolies (Chaebols), and the issue of neoliberal reforms in Korea. One view has been that the sustainable development and human development agendas represent a new stage in accelerating and justifying neoliberal-defined capital accumulation interests. This has also led to debates that an ideational focus on neoliberalism has been taking attention away from the structural fundamentals of capital accumulation and thus ideologically reifying historically specific capitalism.
As we will note here, neoliberalism is represented and supported by a heavily regulated state apparatus. For instance, in the wake of the financial crash of 2008, and to protect economic and speculative interests, there was increased state help in the form of the bailouts provided to banks and capital interests. These interests then began to fuel the next round of speculative and asset-owned interests and prices, whilst labor became ever more precarious and increasingly subject to the discipline of the free market, leading to the supposition of “state socialism for the rich and market capitalism for the poor.”
This article recognizes the current privatization of aid debates but looks more closely at the more fundamental links between neoliberal development and the state mechanisms of neoliberalism in a Korean aid-recipient state. The argument made is that neoliberalism itself is changing, by no longer being strategically focused on regulating a secure investment climate, as well as through the preparation of designated populations for the “unknowns” and uncertainties created by neoliberalism. The emphasis of regulating neoliberal governments is increasingly placed on changing and reforming land ownership and land use law for specific capital interests. This means that compliant populations are designated to live in a constant state of economic precarity, through targeted and resilient constructions of national identity classifications.
The article argues that South Korean (hereafter referred to as Korean) foreign aid is being used to “authenticate” a new form of neoliberalism in the East African region. The article focuses on the case study of Uganda (Chun, Munyi, and Lee 2010). More specifically, we examine an aspect of Korean foreign aid that relates to the exporting of the Korean new village movement or Saemaul Undong (Kim and Kim 1977) as a neoliberal strategy of producing disciplined and compliant populations under the guise of promoting “hard work,” diligence, and conformity to and for neoliberal economic interests. There is a view that Korea has achieved rapid economic development on the basis of these “national” values and has done this without any recourse to neocolonial aspirations (Heo 2020). Korea has a reputation as having a results-based economic model that is of relevance to the Global South and a strategy based on shared development experience. Korean foreign aid has also been criticized for its use of tied aid and loans, rather than the grant norms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Development Assistance Committee. There are also concerns regarding the limited sector emphasis (administration / infrastructure), regional emphasis, and institutional fragmentation. There are further tensions between Korea’s dash for geopolitical adherence to global norms and public diplomacy as a middle power, on the one hand, and the strong role and influence of Chaebol economic interests, on the other (Kim and Gray 2016; Kim 2011; Yoon and Moon 2014).
Korean foreign aid to Africa since the mid-2000s has been understood in terms of Korea promoting national interests and gaining access to natural resources through building new infrastructures. This is often promoted as a “win–win” for both donor and recipient development partners, especially at the elite and diplomatic levels (Kim 2011). Aid has also represented a policy of neo-mercantilism and been used as a means of exporting Korea’s developmentalist economic model for geopolitical status (Kim and Kang 2015). The Korean expanded foreign aid program has also been understood as a spatial response to an economic crisis of accumulation and underconsumption within Korea (Kim and Gray 2016). Kim and Gray (2016) argue that Korea’s recent interest in Africa is linked to economic objectives but, crucially, these are not to be regarded in any deterministic sense.
In the 2018 OECD peer review of Korean ODA, Korea was praised for its emphasis on what was termed “request-based aid” and its emphasis on what the recipient country actually asked for (OECD 2018). Korea was also praised for implementing 15% of the 2012 OECD recommendations. It was further reported that Korea was moving toward untying its aid and had increased its aid volume from 0.12% of GDP to 0.16% in 2017. Moreover, freestanding technical cooperation aid had also increased significantly (OECD 2018). Out of 18 African recipients of Korean ODA, in 2015, Uganda was ranked fifth and Rwanda was ranked sixth, with Tanzania and Ethiopia being ranked first and second respectively. From 2006, these states had the highest rates of increase in Korean ODA, with Uganda and Rwanda becoming of key interest to Korea’s geographical positioning in East and Central African economic, strategic, and resource networks (Kalinowski and Park 2016).
Korean ODA is increasingly focused on providing mobile and flexible health centers. Emphasis has been placed on village visits and liaising with community leaders, indicating an emphasis on the new village legacy and the era of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Yonhap News Agency 2016). Research has also shown that patterns of similar spatial location and interest can be noted regarding the places of activity of interest to the European colonial powers (Lee and Lee 2014). This has led to concerns that the “aid industry” is a means of controlling the developing world through the reinforcing of variants of neo-dependency (Six 2009).
We argue that Korea is not intentionally promoting neoliberalism in Uganda; however, it emerges that aspects of Korean ODA, in terms of the new village movement, are in particular being strategically selected by the Ugandan government to cultivate and justify a pre-emptive policy of state “rollout” and neoliberal intervention. Our findings show that the Ugandan government is using Saemaul Undong as a means of generating shifts of community and village mindsets and behaviors to create disciplined, regimented, docile, diligent, and resilient economic units of present and potential labor value. The state is able to rearrange rural community relations, as Uganda phases in pre-emptive strategies of state-led hollowing out. This is typically understood as privatization/government cutbacks, on the one hand, and state rollout, on the other—as well as in the form of top-down state surveillance and control or what Gill (1995) called “the new constitutionalism.” Thus, the research explores a new form of neoliberalism that has not been covered previously. This is the issue of the creation of resilient subjects and an emerging neoliberal subjectivity and identity.
This article makes fresh contributions, by (1) examining this new form of neoliberalism that results from capitalizing upon specific types of aid to produce and monitor a docile and resilient community, and (2), as a consequence, discursively shifting the debate to, and within, sets of contrived and contested narratives as to what counts as “authentic” neoliberalism. The article also makes a further contribution by examining how neoliberalism is not only manifested in different local forms (neoliberalism with Ugandan characteristics), ideologically justifying itself as “natural,” but also how it is instead manifested as an elite-led politics of nurturing regime legitimacy through exploiting aspects of donor foreign aid. The article thus provides some insights into who defines the status and trajectory of neoliberalism and why, specifically in terms of its place in national history and as an issue of national identity. These interlinked processes have often been overlooked by previous studies on neoliberalism and foreign aid.
The article is structured as follows. It begins with an introduction, which provides information about Korean aid and presents the core argument and authors’ contribution. This is followed by an elaboration of the Korean new village movement, theoretical perspectives relating to Saemaul Undong aid, methodology, and the application of the new village movement in Uganda. The concepts of neoliberal marketization and the neoliberal context are explored, before the issue of changing neoliberal spatiality in Uganda’s own domestic and subregion corridors is analyzed.
The Korean New Village Movement—Saemaul Undong
The Korean President Park Chung-hee launched the village movement in Korea in the 1970s and indicated that the villages were to learn to have self-sufficiency through community self-help and self-reliance (Park 2009). Emphasis was placed on discipline in lifestyle and training, diligence, self-help, and cooperation (Park 2019). For the Korean elites, Saemaul Undong is often identified as being one of the most successful parts of the “miracle on the Han” project and an element of the Korean development model that can be exported worldwide. The official aim is to increase the technical efficiency and productivity of agriculture and land management in rural areas. This is regarded as a key part of poverty reduction program strategies (Doucette and Müller 2016; Park 2009; Kim and Kim 1977).
International organizations such as the United Nations, the OECD, and the Asian Development Bank have all endorsed the new village movement as a replicable model for developing countries (Douglass 2014; Kim 2017). In fact, during the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit in New York on September 26, 2015, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the OECD agreed on Korea’s development experience as a proven impact policy for the New Rural Development Paradigm and for the Inclusive and Sustainable New Communities (ISNC) Model (UN 2015).
In 2016, the Korean government announced plans to increase its ODA budget to 2.7 trillion won ($2.26 billion). This was an increase of 10.6% from 2016. The amount allocated for Saemaul Undong, which was to be increased to 62.9 billion Korean won in 2017, was 4.4 times the current amount. Saemaul Undong was subsequently selected by the UN for the 2015–2030 SDGs as representing a new agricultural global development paradigm. Emphasis was placed on the “sharing of experience,” “inclusivity,” and model replication, offering a “win–win” and “can-do” approach (Kim 2017; Doucette and Müller 2016; Gore 2015).
In Uganda, between 2014 and 2018, Korean foreign aid helped to complete projects such as the National Farmers Leadership Center in Mpigi ($4.4m), the Agro-Processing and Marketing Strategy ($2.5m), and a Model Village in Mpigi ($2.5 million) (KOICA 2015). A further Korean ODA project was implemented in the Kabarole, Luuka, and Maracha districts, having over 251 Village Savings and Credit groups registered at subcounty level. In 2014, the “best new village model” competitions were held and over 140 villages across Uganda participated (Okoth 2015). However, peer competitions are also regarded as being more likely to shift the focus from controversial issues of land ownership and resource extraction to a situation where villages are increasingly focused on winning prizes from donors and nongovernmental organizations. Part of this emphasis can therefore be a justifying of aid reduction in terms of aid resources as a means of promoting efficiency and effectiveness and a case of “show us what you can do with even less.” This opens the arena for later narratives of self-sufficiency and resilience, as propagated by the rollback neoliberal state. One further neoliberal justification of aid reductions can also be the remit that such reductions decrease local dependency on external actors and can help promote local democracy as “owning” the problem.
General Park Chung-hee’s daughter, President Park Geun-hye, who was in office from 2013 to 2017, reiterated the mantra of the national “can-do” spirit argument that had, as she put it in Kampala, Uganda, in 2016, “rebuilt our nation.” According to the World Food Programme, Saemaul Undong constituted the backbone of Korea’s social and economic progress, by focusing on issues of rural productivity and technology. Critics, however, argue that Saemaul Undong was a cover for state authoritarianism and that, by promoting diligence and inter-village competition, it became a diversionary tactic as well as a divide and rule strategy to neutralize rural radicalism during the early 1970s (Park 2009). The liberal view is that the conservative narrative ignores how the authoritarian state had promoted the rural village movement solely as a means of controlling the rural population during the Cold War / post-Vietnam era (Park 2009). Despite the criticisms of liberals, however, the new village movement continues to be a crucial part of Korea’s own national identity.
The Context of the Village Movement in the Aid Debates
The economic growth resulting from the village movement and advocacy has been placed into the wider context of foreign aid debates (Wilson 2014, 2015). One of these debates was between Jeffrey Sachs (2005) and William Easterly (2009). For Sachs and the UN, the village movement projects were appropriate models for applying Sachs’s “big push” theory of top-down donor-based technical developmental aid / finance to increase savings and ultimately reduce the extreme poverty of developing nations and their dependency on foreign aid (Sachs 2005).
In contrast, Easterly (2009) viewed Sachs’s approach as a form of what might be characterized as state-led social engineering, which ultimately leaves the developing world more dependent. This is due to institutional corruption, a lack of accountability, and institutional abrogation of responsibility. Hence, the debate is typically framed as one between a neoliberal who became a “Keynesian planner” and a former “employed planner” (World Bank) who became a grassroots and free market “searcher.”
Even so, Wilson (2014) regards this as a false debate, because ultimately both Sachs and Easterly do not question the reality of capitalist social relations and accumulation crises. The binary or imposed dichotomy between framing top-down government planning as non-liberal and grassroots efforts as market-based and “liberal” is also problematic. This is because top-down institutional planning—such as the village movement—also prepares for and enables, we suggest, a specific type of neoliberalism, known as state rollout or what has been termed institutional “disciplinary neoliberalism” (Gill 1995; Young 2000). It is also possible that a country providing aid as a result of its own successful state-planned and developmentalist path, such as Korea, can intentionally or not allow its aid to be used to instigate economic neoliberal reforms in the recipient country. As mentioned, the new village movement has usually been regarded as a key strategic part of the Korean “miracle on the Han” (Gill 1995; Kim and Kim 1977). It has also been regarded as state-led East Asian developmentalism ( Dong-a-Ilbo 2016). Korea’s new village movement has also been exported to many Korean ODA recipient countries (Seitz 2017; Doucette and Müller 2016).
South Korea is one of the new donors that are typically regarded as “post-colonial states” (Six 2009). This means that the domestic elites narrate and determine what counts as the official national story of the colonial experience. New donors often emphasize the sharing of similar cultures and having fewer hierarchical sovereign relations between donors and recipients through a language of South–South relations or “mutual partnership” (Mawdsley 2012; Kim 2011). Korea, indeed, emphasizes the donor–recipient relations as more Westphalian-sovereign-recognition-based, mutual, and perhaps even as equal. This is also illustrated by the recipient state’s national obligation and the duty to “pay back” aid. This sense of obligation is sold as trust and as friendship. There is also a view that the elite language of equality obscures underlying dependency relations of inequality.
In contrast, older aid donors often have a history of sovereign inequality and intervention, through a non-subtle form of overt power based on conditionality, which also emphasizes cultural diversity and abstract universal rights, yet obscures the reality of structural power inequality and genuine access (Easterly and Pfutze 2008; Moyo 2009; Musasizi, Arunachalam, and Forbes-Mewett 2024). The cultural and paternalistic connotations (from donors) are evident in the assumption that a lack of development is due to a lack of diligence and “hard work” in the recipient country, rather than due to centuries of European plunder and ongoing neo-colonial relations. These values and tensions are increasingly evident in the new village movement in Uganda.
Methodology
Study Participants
This article is based on data collected during six months of fieldwork from October 2017 to April 2018 in Uganda. The participants included national, regional, district, and village coordinators of Saemaul Undong. While one of the researchers was Ugandan, we still recruited a research assistant who was an insider in the new village movement. With the help of the research assistant, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with locals who were recipients of Saemaul Undong training and income-generating activities. Community members (surrounding Saemaul Undong village / project sites in Wakiso), local council leaders / politicians, and key government officials were also interviewed. We were unable to interview the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) in Uganda, but they were supportive and provided us with several brochures and other documents describing their activities, from which we gained a lot of insights for this research. In addition to interviews, the researcher who was from Uganda also attended two Saemaul Undong meetings and interacted with people at the village sites in Wakiso. This allowed the researcher to gather data through participant observation in group meetings and training and community activities. The interviews were conducted in English and Luganda and more than 50 people were consulted.
Participant Recruitment
This research applied criterion sampling to select the most appropriate participants. Criterion sampling is suited to phenomenological research, with participants being selected based on their lived experience in relation to the phenomenon being studied (Moser and Korstjens 2018). Our participants were adults and were selected based on their engagement with the Korean village movement projects (e.g., volunteers, workers, coordinators, or stakeholders). Only community members were stratified by gender (ten male and ten female) and by age (18–29, 30–49, and 50+), and they must have lived in the community for at least two years. The interviews were taped, transcribed, and analyzed manually, to allow the researchers to develop the arguments and themes presented in this article. The interviews were coded with a participant number (for example, P1 and P2), and selected excerpts from the transcripts represented the participants’ strongest opinions. This data, in combination with the secondary materials, formed the key findings and the researchers’ core argument.
The New Village Movement in Uganda
The village movement in rural development has been recognized as a key to Ugandan development and as instantiating sites of potential resistance to government intervention and the re-organization of rural and subregional space. Ugandan subnational spaces have also been the site of particular development strategies, such as the United Nations’ Millennium Village Projects (MVPs) (Tollefson 2015; Musasizi 2017). The MVPs were instigated—as a result of the “big push” infrastructure and empty space policies advocated by the likes of Jeffrey Sachs—with the support of the UN to generate economic growth in areas of extreme poverty (Aboubcar 2014). This was also at the time of Korean politician Ban Ki-moon’s tenure as UN Secretary-General. The villages were intended to offer an innovative integrated approach to rural development as well as addressing the challenges of extreme poverty in many overlapping areas, such as the use of agriculture technology, education, health, infrastructure, gender equality, and local business development (Lee 2011; Musasizi 2017).
Equally, the view pushed by the conservative Korean government of Park Geun-hye was that Korea’s development was based on the new village movement during the developmentalist period (Kim and Kim 1977). Others would suggest that the “miracle on the Han” was due to US aid and Chaebol activity under an authoritarian state. There was concern that Korea was using this narrative and foreign aid policies to help rewrite domestic Korean history for the specific political interests of the conservative party. The Korean model attracted interest from the Ugandan government. Ugandan Saemaul Undong started in 2009, with two designated villages in Wakiso district in central Uganda, and by 2018 there were eight well-established model villages. This may have resulted from the efforts made by the two presidents visiting each other to promote the project. In May 2013, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni visited Korea to discuss issues regarding the sharing of Korea’s development experience with the then Korean president Park Geun-hye, who later visited Uganda in May 2016 to promote the already implemented new village movement. The movement’s implementation in Uganda had already encountered practical issues in relation to implementing a specific national model in a very different set of political and economic environments. Emphasis was typically placed on promoting the mass production of the food value chain as a comparative trade advantage issue. This would be based on encouraging the profits of farmers and increasing individual savings.
The subregion of northeastern Uganda is becoming a key target area for Korean aid, trade, and infrastructure interests. The Korean ambassador to Uganda, Kim Yoo-churl, stated that Uganda has immense natural endowments that, if unlocked, could ultimately generate the “golden age of development” ( Monitor 2018). The message here is that Uganda, in terms of national growth and poverty reduction, is currently experiencing the same economic situation that Korea was experiencing in the 1950s and 1960s, following the Korean War. Yet according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF 2017), Uganda has actually had annual growth rates of over 8% since the mid-1990s and is now fully expected to become a middle-income country before 2025.
This elite-led and top-down development approach from the donor and recipient agencies is viewed here as sets of policies (or a “disciplinary neoliberalism”) initiated by the recipient country as a state “rollout” of regulations to manage a state “rollback” of resource distribution, in favor of a narrative of “unlocking” potential and breaking through what have been designated as inauthentic market bottlenecks with unproductive labor (Gill 1995; Young 2000). If initiated by the donor, this strategy operates at a macro / transnational level through the structural power of capital, which can impose market and fiscal discipline on public institutions. Yet micro-power also operates at a micro / local level, as nudging a form of behavior through which individuals and communities are scrutinized by the agents of surveillance (the panopticon gaze).
For both Korea (donor) and Uganda (recipient), emphasis is increasingly placed on moral monitoring. Lee and Lee (2014) identified that Ugandan villagers often voluntarily participate in Korean development initiatives, but only if such villagers have a complete understanding of the causality and ownership of the initiatives and they can benefit from the projects. The former Korean Ambassador to Uganda Park Jong-Dae noted:
Saemaul Undong is promoted as a mindset reform and wellbeing movement wherein the people themselves shape their future development and villages engage in mutually reinforcing competitions so that competition and voluntarism are some of the best practices that can be used to transform rural dwellers from being dependents to a happy self-reliant community. (Kiiza 2016, 1)
Park Jong-Dae also noted that Saemaul Undong was timely and he was convinced that Uganda could realize its full potential. It was expressed that Korea is committed to sharing its experiences and working closely with Uganda in rural agricultural development (Park 2019).
Similarly, Chung Kap-jin, the Vice President of the Saemaul Undong Training Centre—Kampala, pointed out in an interview that Saemaul Undong is not only an action-based project, but also a mental reform, based on the conviction that anything is possible if people choose to do it, and this spirit is the driving force of the new village movement. It is also reflected in Korea’s foreign aid to Africa, Latin America, and Asia (Doucette and Müller 2016; Douglass 2014). Emphasis is placed on “discipline in lifestyle” and training, “diligence, self-help, and cooperation.” These perspectives are also emphasized in Saemaul Undong’s training with the chosen farmers, village leaders, and government officials, especially those from Africa, Latin America, and Asia, who are regularly invited to attend the arguable “mental change” training in Korea (Park 2019).
Various UNDP reports indicate that the success of the new village movement is premised on “empowering the poor and most vulnerable,” whilst noting that national leadership “is the main driver for transformation” (UNDP 2015). This form of micro-power discipline in the community can increasingly be found in the designated new village movement in Uganda. As P06, a Coordinator, noted: “I am a village coordinator . . . I monitor people’s activities here . . . I report to the regional coordinator whose activities are also monitored by people from the embassy.” Regarding the training, P03 explained: “Community members must attend several trainings about Saemaul Undong before they can benefit from the project. Also, as leaders, we must attend many trainings . . . sometimes we are invited for like three weeks of intense training in Korea.”
This was in line with the earlier research, which indicated that discipline manifests itself in the form of daily training, a focus on individualized self-discipline, and a preparedness for economic and climate crises through the production of new resilient subjects that are technically active and yet politically docile (Darracq and Neville 2014; Sung-Hee 2018; Joseph 2010).
Similarly, Gill (1995) had earlier described “disciplinary neoliberalism” as involving “everyday” space and having impacts on the everyday “habitus” of community life, as well as defining community expectations and behavioral choices that are constantly reshaped by the agents of capital accumulation. This type of neoliberal legitimacy project is intended to control a variety of contested narratives as to what counts as authentic through a trajectory of national nostalgia and the normalization of “economic crises.” This strategy is ultimately predicated on the state-based defining and recovering of chosen lost customs of community resilience through an authentication or naturalization of a historically specific and exploitative neoliberalism.
A closer analysis also seems to show that it is in fact an interest-driven, top-down, and planner-oriented neoliberal and regulated model. This is reflected in the participants’ views about how the Korean embassy controls most of the projects. For instance, the regional coordinator noted that the villages are “more facilitated and controlled by the Korean embassy” (P11, Coordinator). This was further emphasized by another participant, who noted that “Saemaul Undong coordinators and volunteers often have no knowledge about other KOICA projects” (P2, Coordinator). The limited self-sufficiency and land ownership of the community also means that by decentralizing power through the “empowerment” and resilience narrative, the central government is distanced from the negative impacts of its decisions and neoliberal reforms, justified on the basis of legal regulation rollout and technical efficiency.
Deepening Marketization and Creating Neoliberal Resilience
Harvey (2005) argued that neoliberalism can be regarded as ideologically driven and/or as a technical tool that maintains (and represents) the protection of specific capitalist-defined relations, such as private property, free-market interests, and free trade. Neoliberal policies also need to make sure that the domestic currency is stable and tradable to bond and finance investors. There are a number of issues emerging from this, but crucial to our argument is the relationship between neoliberalism and its reliance on community resilience. Resilience itself has been regarded as an ideological product and justification of neoliberal state restructuring, to further limit the distribution of wealth and resources to local populations and to justify this as a specific transfer of responsibility from government to population, under the guise of autonomy and self-sufficiency.
Through this narrative, populations and individuals begin to internalize and naturalize an elite-led selection of neoliberal norms, through constant monitoring (and self-monitoring) by the new neoliberal subjects, which reinforces disciplinary neoliberalism on the basis of the existence of a perennial state of emergency and urgency that outweighs “luxuries” such as accountability, state support, and democracy. For the designated “resilient” populations, this is experienced as a permanent existence of training, discipline, the monitoring of communities by the state, continual self-monitoring, and finally what the state promotes as the “liberating” of the officially designated “traditional” culture. These constructions are then used to prepare selected populations for an unknown future. Here, resilience constitutes the specific manufacturing of a docile neoliberal subject as one who, simultaneously, engages in hard work, takes on new responsibilities, and fulfils obligations. This allows the state to reduce resource distribution and resource support. The state is also wary of producing too much individual pro-action, as this may produce what is designated by the state as “disobedience” or “ingratitude” to the foreign aid donor. This is an environment of precarity and anxiety, and it needs to be produced by the neoliberal state as it rolls back responsibility. As a result, everyday culture and behavior are designated as “liberated” by the state, to enable the communities to manage precarity. This is promoted by the state as unlocking cultural forms that had previously been repressed by state development strategies. These are promoted by the neoliberal state as “traditional” village cultural values, such as self-sufficiency and resilience. The neoliberal state exploits this shift to enable the narrative that the first phase of neoliberal economic development repressed cultures, while this new phase is now more open to traditional diversity and inclusivity. Neoliberal subjects are to gain their resilience (or unlock their resilience) by learning how to use and apply new technologies and early-warning cultural knowledge. This is promoted as national resilience and middle-income national pride. According to Joseph (2009, 2010), resilience clearly fits with the wider “neoliberal discourse” of monitoring, discipline, and state territorial rollout of both coercive and consensual power. Joseph (2010) and Zebrowski (2008) argue that the concept and practice of resilience include several assumptions that make it “ideally suited” for managing economic neoliberal restructuring.
This elite-led donor and recipient South–South strategy is placed as a key shift in the neoliberal narrative, which reworks crises in terms of what counts as being natural or unnatural as well as in terms of legitimacy and authenticity. Therefore, neoliberal government legitimacy paradoxically emerges from an elite-defined “South–South” acceptance, with an open or transparent admittance of an inability to manage neoliberalism and thus the need for community resilience. This epistemological shift potentially represents a move from an era of defined ideological politics and critiques to one of constant risk and uncertainty, which may also lead to different forms of power, resistance, and understanding of freedom (Kalberg 1980).
Saemaul Undong is strategically being used by elite donor and recipient interests as a national “anthem” for the village communities. This means that the Ugandan government can begin to exclude (or scapegoat) any local discontent about its neoliberal policies as unpatriotic, as undisciplined, and as impolite to the Korean donor, by not conforming to the authentic local traditions that the government and donor country are promoting as the national protectors. This strategy can inevitably help to nurture a cultural and social narrative that also helps to distance the current government from both the previous neoliberal structural adjustment programs and what can be framed as “inauthentic” but necessary stages of neoliberalism. This chronology then legitimates what is designated as a new and more authentic and ongoing neoliberalism, which is known in Uganda as “no joke” development.
Foreign Aid and the Neoliberal Context
Foreign aid is an extension of national interests in the context of national and global capital accumulation (Hansen and Tarp 2000). Foreign aid also aims at achieving various political goals (Gülseven 2020). Institutionalized foreign aid is further used to manage the developing world’s natural resources. This can be done through either coercive means or through “silent” legal changes to land ownership rights in national constitutions. This is often justified on the basis of a narrowly defined and elite-defined version of national economic development and national sovereignty. Foreign aid can also obscure these activities as a “payoff’ to placate local communities with promises of better facilities.
Critical approaches focus on the way in which neoliberalism has recently impacted global aid institutions as a result of the increasing privatization of aid, which is also regarded as a form of specific state-led relation and intervention that is adept at managing and constructing a neoliberal ethics of individuals being treated for purposes of economic utility (Gill 1995). This is not just a question of neoliberal reform and ideology but the construction of neoliberal and disciplined subjects. Uganda is regarded as one of the few East African countries to be publicly dedicated to what are widely considered to be the classic neoliberal reforms, beginning in the 1980s (IMF 2017).
For Wiegratz (2016), the neoliberal reforms in Uganda specifically have been increasingly focused on nurturing a more profit-based environment, through ensuring institutional streamlining and technical efficiency and by promoting and orchestrating social individualization. As a result, urban commercialization is being promoted for the aspiring new middle classes, while initiatives such as Saemaul Undong have been regarded as a way of reintroducing a sense of community spirit in the rural villages. This is resulting in territorial deregulation and creating specific spatial zones that are justified through a narrative of diversity. Yet diversity can also enact subtle forms of coercion and exclusion. The villages are portrayed as spaces of cultural nostalgia and homogeneity that are separated from economic benefits and growth yet are also constructed as resilient and being preparied for subjection to future neoliberalism under a banner of inclusivity. The government claims that such a spirit has been lost through a series of previous problematic and “inauthentic” neoliberal reforms, such as individualism and the commercialization of rural economy. In this respect, the Ugandan state seems to be reacting in order to undermine a specific type of rural individualism that historically has represented a form of economic autonomy from the state and therefore has been interpreted as a threat to the state in terms of issues such as natural resource and community versus transnational capital land ownership. Neoliberalism is therefore promoted as offering a more authentic timeline and “patriotic” and resilient nationalism, based on authentic neoliberal subjectivity being diligent and disciplined. Any resistance to this mode of subjectivity becomes portrayed as anti-patriotic, insulting to donors, and unrealistic.
Buzzwords such as elite “South–South” cooperation, “stakeholder ownership,” and “empowering community responsibility” obscure the negative impacts of forms of state “rollout” regulation. Donor countries such as South Korea can be used to enable domestic regime legitimacy, indicating that the recipient government has access to developmental (neoliberal) and technical strategies that work and that are internationally proven, such as Korea’s own “miracle on the Han.” The Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, and the National Resistance Movement have long searched for a strategic opportunity to ensure domestic regime legitimacy during a time of economic reform and, crucially, as a means of distancing the current government from past regimes. This discontinuity narrative of different neoliberal trajectories also implies that there was a “wrong but necessary” stage of neoliberalism and that now there is a new and therefore “genuine” neoliberalism to help enable Ugandan middle-income country status.
Changing Neoliberal Spatiality in Uganda’s Subregion Corridors
According to the IMF (2017), president Museveni wanted Uganda to have middle-income status before 2025, as part of a “no joke” national economic policy to be based on increasing infrastructure connections to address market bottlenecks. Saemaul Undong is increasingly useful for the recipient government to implement neoliberal reforms and justify investment in connectivity corridors. South Korea positions itself as a nonaggressive and noncolonial state on “Africa’s side” (Darracq and Neville 2014). It is unclear, however, whether the “global” aspect of Saemaul Undong is understood as a collection of separate or interconnected village hubs (as agrarian utopias) or as a more coordinated and top-down plan. Korea is active in key strategic recipient countries that are typically low–middle- and middle-income countries that are rapidly growing yet have pockets of rural and urban extreme poverty. Such strategic choices of aid recipients allow Korea access to new markets and new middle-class consumers, while also allowing it the influence to compete, as an Asian donor, in the areas of natural resource extraction and infrastructure (Figure 1).
Regarding rural development, the UNDP anticipated that the Korean new village movement would bridge the gap between the Millennium Development Goals and SDGs after 2015 (UNDP 2015). This view is influenced by Korea’s strategically positioned projects, such as the 2015–2017 ISNC project. This project, worth US$1m, was funded by KOICA and UNDP and is strategically located at border points in the far northwest (Maracha) and far southwest (Kabarole) and on the eastern corridors through the Luuka region. Such patterns reflect the trade-off for Korea between humanitarian soft power and maintaining a position as an infrastructure network hub in competition with larger Asian donors China and Japan.
Korean ODA villages have been shown to be sited along key and emerging infrastructure corridors from west to east Uganda, which are regarded as part of a disciplinary neoliberal restructuring at the macro level. While not intentionally intended to promote neoliberalism, the locations and spatial interests relating to Korean aid fit into natural resource patterns (Figure 2).
What can be observed from the maps is that Korean ODA interests fit in with and complete the spatial “jigsaw” of previous European imperialism (see Liebermann 2015). Saemaul Undong is effectively being concentrated in areas of west Uganda and, as the map (Figure 3) below suggests (see Ezilion Maps 2009), right along the central and northeastern connectivity corridors. These are territorial spaces where the village units are partially separate yet simultaneously play their parts in a string of connections from Kabarole and Kyenjojo (west) to Mpigi near Kampala (central), to the new trunk road from Entebbe to Kampala, and to the east, along the major trunk roads to Iganga and Sironko. These are economically strategic eastern districts near the Kenyan border. Literally, they mark a horizontal line running and extending across central Uganda from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Kenya.
Korean ODA villages are strategically placed along the roads. So although Korea does not have huge amounts of resources to build or upgrade the previous colonial roads, it is more engaged with “having a presence” along connectivity corridors. Elite-led and elite-defined national sovereign “equality” between bilateral donor–recipient partners that are marketed as South–South relations can also obscure the continuity of the underlying economic and political inequalities in communities. The village program divides national sovereign territory into bounded and fragmented economic units. This spatial division can create both segregated and low-tax economic spaces as well as excluded community spaces in between the subregional infrastructure. Thus, there is increased connectivity for mobile capital interests, foreign aid interests, and investors, but there is an increase in restrictions for labor and communities. This benefits economic interests and is promoted by the state as ensuring community resilience in these spatially fixed community zones. Moreover, there is a designated freedom of movement for donor aid and investment, whilst the village model in the designated enclaves has its own bounded restrictions for rural and ethnic groups and exclusions for those living in the spaces between the economic corridors and designated villages.
Korea is also interested in competing for investment opportunities in subregional hub nations such as Uganda. This helps explain Korea’s priority interest in strategic countries such as Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. Not having the resources of China or Japan, Korea’s emphasis is on positioning itself as a preemptive “broker” or “connector” state and by being strategically located in subregional spaces where it is likely that future infrastructure will be connected. Uganda is promoted as a hub of Africa’s Saemaul movement, along with Kenya and Tanzania. The village boundaries delineate Saemaul villages from non-Saemaul villages and are creating different spatial pockets of “independence” that can be used politically as a means to fragment mass discontent by the recipient government.
As mentioned, this is therefore not just an issue of obscuring neoliberalism or using neoliberalism to obscure capitalism, but rather an issue of how villages can be used to legitimate particular forms of neoliberalism through elite-led narratives of cultural authenticity, nostalgia, and historical destiny. Saemaul Undong is also being used to legitimate and authenticate how the government wants to bridge (and lessen) the growing gap between urban and rural poverty. As a result, the existence of poverty becomes an issue of connectivity and network inclusion, to fill bottlenecks, rather than a focus on resource ownership or wealth concentration and distribution. Consequently, any remaining poverty during the process of the transition to and completion of Saemaul Undong is framed as being the sole responsibility of the villages. Therefore, the state responds by encouraging greater hard work and diligence in the village units, thus releasing resources from the previous poverty reduction programs and instead using them to invest in national infrastructure, in order to benefit neoliberal wealth creation and justify methods of resource extraction.
This is a new shift in emphasis, away from ODA as being defined as technical knowledge sharing and toward the regulation of the behavioral lifeworld of individuals in neoliberal-defined communities. This is a regime of neoliberalism discipline that is aimed at producing regimented, resilient, docile, passive, uncomplaining, diligent, and marketable economic subjects. Emphasis is clearly shifted away from “tools” and technology ODA and toward altering actual behavior and identity by constructing neoliberal subjectivity. This is a means for the state to reduce potential opposition solidarity and to justify fewer state resources being used for reducing poverty. In other words, being in poverty or deprivation becomes the individual’s responsibility and, moreover, through the neoliberal narrative of resilience, this existence is promoted by elites as positive in terms of building individual and community “bounce-back” capabilities.
The president of KOICA suggested that the aim of Saemaul is “to transform the spirits of the people” and to help the Ugandan people “to have more diligent and hard-working attitude” ( Dong-a-Ilbo 2016). There is clearly nothing here about issues of resource ownership, income levels, and minimum wages. Therefore, a tension emerges between the “escape” or desire to be “lifted from” poverty and a resilience to the inevitable existence of poverty, which is then naturalized and where paradoxically ahistorical narratives of risk and unknowns become accepted. Emulating Korea’s “miracle on the Han” further restores regime legitimacy and international credibility in the neoliberal marketplace and to enact further reforms.
For the Ugandan elites, Saemaul Undong also provides a constructed moral code that can be used by the government to scapegoat any local disturbances, conflicts, and disruptions as issues of “folk devils and moral panics” relating to ethical and behavioral traits of a lack of discipline. Saemaul Undong enables the government to be seen as siding with values of self-reliance and as siding with both protecting and restoring traditional and moral values through a deepening of economic marketization. Paradoxically, the emphasis on “freeing” resilient individuals from dependency on the state simultaneously produces docile, disciplined, and self-reliant economic neoliberal subjects.
Conclusion
Previous research has portrayed Korean foreign aid as being intended to promote Korean national interests and to export Korea’s economic development model. Saemaul Undong is assumed to be an integral part of Korean development and aid. Our research, however, goes beyond this conventional view of Korean aid by analyzing how it is being used by Uganda to embed and legitimate neoliberal restructuring and the creation of a regulated neoliberal population in an exclusionary rural space. The study’s findings indicate that Uganda is using the new village movement aid to shift from economic and disciplinary neoliberalism to one that is claiming authenticity and national resilience through the manufacturing of a regulated and precarious population. The article has argued that previous critiques of Korean ODA and Saemaul Undong relating to economic development and that recent debates on the privatization of aid have missed the way that such initiatives form a part of the next stage of a wider neoliberalization of development. The article has therefore placed debates on Korean ODA into the context of literature focusing on the emergence of a distinctive form of neoliberalism. This is a disciplinary hegemonic project, based on producing spatially segregated, resilient, and docile populations. This is intended to benefit the recipient government’s political interests. This article has also shown that the Korean village movement activities are located across Uganda in key strategic subregions. These activities also benefit specific Korean stakeholder and economic interests. These domestic interests are also preparing for the deepening neoliberal marketization of Korea’s own economy. The new village movement underscores the state protection of neoliberal economic interests at a time of regular global capital accumulation crises. The village movement aims to naturalize these crises as an issue of national resilience. The village movement is a state rollout attempt to exploit ongoing accumulation crises by preparing the population for resource-based land grabs. This phase of preparation is based on the need for the state to roll back on community resource provision and resource distribution without generating opposition. This is done through creating docile and “hard-working” individuals in fixed and specific economic spaces. This project is justified through the strategic designation at an elite level of what counts as authentic cultural values and national sovereign resilience.
