Between empires: Middling modernizers and the interstices of development

Abstract

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

Introduction: the interstices of development

The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) marks more than a rupture in the international order. It signals an endpoint of a liberal technocratic consensus consolidated in the postwar era, when development was imagined and promoted as a universal moral project grounded in rational planning, expert knowledge, and state-led intervention. This order represented itself as benevolent and progressive, yet it was also inseparable from imperial power and uneven coercion enacted in the name of progress. While the institutional architecture of this consensus continues to visibly fray, its techniques have not disappeared. Procurement requirements, public–private partnerships, and infrastructural ambitions continue to circulate, reassembled by overlooked actors and idioms across Asia and other parts of the global South. These techniques do not just simply endure; they are repeatedly worked and reworked into new logics of value that construct markets in primary commodities, infrastructure, and extractive industries, while translating competing territorial and resource-security strategies across space.

Following Hart's (2001, 2009) distinction, I differentiate between “big D” Development, the historically contingent project of intervention in the global South forged through decolonization and the Cold War, and “little d” development, understood as capitalism's geographically uneven yet interconnected processes of creation and destruction that continually require intervention. My focus here is not whether development succeeds or fails nor whether its moral claims were ever viable but how its techniques persist even when their justificatory narratives multiply in plain view. Between the reconfiguration of the U.S.-led order and China's ambitious and expansive footprint, a heterogenous and often overlooked set of East and Southeast Asian actors are key operators in these interstices. I refer to these intermediaries as middling modernizers: development agencies, state-linked conglomerates, and experts that neither claim hegemonic authority nor operate at its margins. Middling modernizers are not states as such. They are assemblages of public, para-public, and corporate actors that exercise delegated authority, translating developmental techniques across borders and historical contexts. Operating between empires, they mediate competing centers of power by turning standards and expertise into contracts and infrastructure, as well as speculative claims on valuable resources.

Drawing on comparative sketches from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and a South-South case examining Vietnam's investments in Laos, I argue that development in this late-imperial moment persists less as a coherent project of progress than as a portable set of material and economic practices oriented toward speculation and mediation. The infrastructure that gets built through such development cannot be understood solely as a public good that unifies people or place. Instead, it governs through uneven and selective integration, binding some territories into circuits of accumulation while leaving others deferred and unrealized.

This is not an argument about the end of development, nor is it an attempt to write a postmortem of the old order. My intent here is to identify how development practices continue despite the seeming erosion of the American-led moral center: not as a coherent promise of progress but as a lively repertoire of techniques through which authority and futurity are kept in motion. By foregrounding middling modernizers who operate across the global South, I seek to frame development not as a failed ideal but rather as a recombinant mode of intervention and ambition that has persisted in between.

Sketches from the middle

Japan is a clear case of translation across empire and industry. As a middling modernizer (cf. Rabinow, 1989), it occupies what Merton (1949) might see as part of the “middle range”: neither hegemonic nor at its edges, defined by relation more than by rank. Its early twentieth-century expansion through Taiwan and Korea—and wartime displacement of European powers as a non-white hegemonic power in Southeast Asia—gave way, after defeat, to a reconstituted regional presence routed through postwar reparations and multilateral institutions (Anderson, 1998). Japan's architecture of official development assistance (ODA), which includes the Asian Development Bank (ADB) headquartered in Manila, became a vehicle to reinvest in the technologies of development throughout Asia without the banner of formal empire. Post-1945 policy reframed aspects of Japan's project of techno-fascism (Moore, 2013) in peacetime terms—standards, expertise, and large-scale infrastructure—now presented in more banal terms such as “quality infrastructure” and “human security.”

In practice, however, Japanese development agencies and state-linked firms have remained closely tied to domestic economic growth and industrial concerns. The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the ADB operate not merely as aid institutions but as market-making intermediaries. In JICA's case, instruments such as tied aid and STEP (Special Terms for Economic Partnership) function to extend Japanese engineering and consulting abroad, countering domestic stagnation and labor constraints (Shiga, 2024) while positioning projects within strategic competition with China. In my interviews with JICA officials, many have privately lamented the recent “Abe-ization” of ODA: interpreted as an overt security strategy tied to cooperation layered onto familiar developmental idioms of sustainability and global standards.

South Korea presents a related but distinct configuration, by refitting Cold War industrial policy into a regional development apparatus. Chaebols such as Hyundai Engineering and Construction, once buoyed by U.S. military contracts and state planning, now export turnkey infrastructure across Southeast Asia. Here the middling modernizer role shifts from aid-era dependency to competitive advantage, as engineering know-how moves with financing and contracts. The hard techniques of development double as soft power, opening access to land, infrastructure projects, as well as resource security arrangements.

Taiwan and Singapore occupy parallel yet contrasting positions in the region. Taiwan leverages development finance as an instrument of diplomatic recognition in a world that increasingly denies its sovereignty. Through the International Cooperation and Development Fund, agricultural and infrastructure projects are extended to late-socialist partners for whom Taiwanese firms are acceptable, non-western and non-colonial counterparts. In the early years of doi moi, or market renovation, Vietnam drew on this liminal positioning: neither western nor communist, Taiwanese partners helped inaugurate export processing zones and master-planned new towns that signaled a controlled market opening and catalyzed a decades-long urban infrastructure and real estate boom. 65Singapore, by contrast, exports urban managerialism grounded in its reputation for efficiency and technical wit. Master plans and smart-city technologies delivered through state-linked firms that fuse high rationality with the legitimacy of a well-respected, albeit authoritarian, state. For both cases, Singaporean and Taiwanese intermediaries operate as middling modernizers, translating expertise under conditions of opportunity to exercise calculated flexibility that is both geopolitical and geographical.

Taken together, these cases demonstrate that middling modernizers function as crucial intermediaries, operating relationally, sometimes in tandem, all in the name of development that is diffuse both in practice and in approach. These are not aberrations or isolated instances. Far from seeking to replace western or Chinese hegemony in the region, these middling modernizers work hard to deploy their technical expertise and aggregate power, while attentive to conditions that shift due to the global economy and, of course, geopolitics.

Late-socialism abroad: south-south collaborative development

Vietnam's outward expansion into Laos illustrates how a late-socialist state can function as a middling modernizer even while remaining deeply dependent on foreign aid for its own infrastructure. Under the dictates of global capitalism, socialist fraternities have rejiggered their bureaucratic apparatuses and shared revolutionary legacies into mutually beneficial instruments of regional brokerage. Vietnam is now the second-largest investor in Laos after China, with cumulative commitments exceeding US $5 billion since the 1990s. Vietnam's foray into Laos is precipitated by China's growing developmental influence in the country, particularly its hydropower projects upstream, which threaten water security for downstream countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Further yet, China's insatiable thirst for extractive resources is on full display in Laos as well, introducing new regional competition and regional resource security concerns for Southeast Asia.

This relationship unsettles the usual donor–recipient hierarchy without undoing it. Laos—often portrayed as a “weak” or peripheral state—has become a testing ground for Vietnam's regional development ambitions, while Vietnam, long positioned as an aid recipient of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the European Union, and the World Bank, increasingly exports its own capital, labor, and urban expertise to its nearby neighbors. These South–South investments are not only strategic but enabled by shared socialist lineages that include overlapping timelines of market socialism, and homologous bureaucratic norms. Vietnam's doi moi reforms and Laos's New Economic Mechanism, both started in 1986, created institutional compatibilities that facilitate privileged access to ministries and state-owned enterprises, and, crucially, land concessions.

These socialist affinities allow Vietnamese state-linked firms and private conglomerates to operate in Laos not simply as national emissaries but as development intermediaries. Companies like Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL)—a domestic real-estate conglomerate turned regional investor—have leveraged their urban development expertise in housing, malls, and hotels in exchange for concessions in rubber, sugar, and hydropower. This strategy reflects a broader regional logic of “turning land into capital” (Baird, 2011; cf. Harvey, 1983). What appears as socialist histories function as future-oriented frontier-making (Shatkin, 2022), extending Vietnam's post-socialist economic growth into a geographically adjacent postsocialist satellite.

Notably these investments collapse distinctions between urban development and primary-commodity production, if not between socialism and capitalism. Urban capital and expertise are marshalled to reorganize peri-urban and rural geographies for extraction, while infrastructure projects secure future claims on land, energy, and water. Fragmentation here is neither secondary nor inconsequential. By binding select geographies into circuits of accumulation while leaving others deferred, contingent relations become operative.

Laos, for its part, is far from passive. It has mastered donor diversification, not unlike Vietnam, by leveraging competition among China, Vietnam, and Thailand to maximize rents as well as expensive public infrastructure projects. The Kunming–Vientiane railway, part of China's Belt and Road Initiative, materialized only after Laos secured Vietnamese commitments for a parallel line linking Savannakhet to Lao Bao. Development unfolds then as a competitive marketplace of projects between disparate actors.

Vietnam's participation both mirrors and amplifies this tension. Its investments function both as pragmatic responses to domestic overaccumulation as well as instruments of competition with another postsocialist neighbor: China. Acting through state-linked and quasi-private firms, Vietnam occupies a doubly liminal position: dependent on external money to finance development at home while exporting development capital and expertise abroad. China's growing influence in the Asia Pacific region also represents an interesting twist on the typical “South-South” collaboration narrative. In this case, collaborations of urbanism, infrastructure and investment between Saigon, Vietnam and Vientiane, Laos function less as alternatives to the hegemony of Western development principles and instead are efforts to offset China's dominance as a global development actor. Here, Vietnam reanimates the socialist Sino-Soviet split in Southeast Asia, effectively recasting old socialist ties between Soviet-aligned allies (Laos and Vietnam) to engage in fierce resource competition with the other late-socialist market-oriented player, China (implied as part of the Sino-Maoist legacy). And yet, these purely historical reanimations of past socialist allegiance are invoked to engage in new and novel configurations of infrastructure and resource competition under an increasingly zero-sum configuration of global capitalism.

This configuration exemplifies what Peck (2021) terms recombinant capitalism. Vietnam's ascent as a middling modernizer does not mark an alternative paradigm of development or constitute a break from western or Chinese paradigms. It also does not signal a South-South solidarity. By repurposing developmental rationalities borrowed from western and socialist repertoires, it illustrates how developmental rationalities redeployed through intermediary actors unfold unevenly through competition and growth. In this sense, Vietnam's forays into Laos are neither exceptional or strange; they are expressions of development's vibrancy as it operates within and between.

Between empires: speculation and development

These brief sketches of the work of middling modernizers notably expose ongoing blind spots in the theorization of development. The most immediate of these concerns the liberal technocratic rationale for development itself. As agencies such as USAID have been hollowed out from within, and as American exceptionalism mutates into renewed forms of imperial authority, the foundational pillars of postwar developmentalism—a belief in expertise, technocratic rationality, and utilitarian morality—already appear anachronistic. What remains is not a coherent moral project, even as hegemonic power continues to be wielded by China and the United States, but a durable and portable set of practices. These practices—procurement regimes, public–private arrangements, and infrastructural expertise—continue to be regularly deployed by middling modernizers across shifting political and economic orders.

It is within this context that dominant framings of development, aid, and infrastructure in the geographic literature can obscure as much as they reveal. Even when development fails, it is framed as a moral loss—as manifestations of structural violence and elite capture—rather than as routine and constitutive features of development itself (cf. Anand et al., 2018; Gandy, 2006; Graham and Marvin, 2001). This tradition runs through accounts of the postwar project of development, in which institutions such as the World Bank and United Nations forged global consensus around it as a moral good. While these accounts chronicle the production of liberal norms and the importance of welfare as an individual and societal benefit, what remains largely overlooked are the intermediary actors and financial forms that channel transnational capital into land, real estate, and resource speculation; precisely the terrain on which middling modernizers operate.

A parallel blind spot appears in political economy and economic geography, where capital flowing through ODA agencies and state-linked firms is frequently treated as analytically distinct from speculative finance (Fairbairn, 2020; cf. Goldman, 2011). As Desiree Fields (2023) notes, speculation is a powerful analytic for tracing private financial flows, whether for urban and agricultural development. Yet reducing speculation to high finance, and the money that moves through international financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, obscures how development agencies and state-linked firms themselves engage in speculation and finance. Such practices by hybrid entities and public–private partnerships crucially also blur the boundary between finance capital and development capital (Anguelov, 2023); that is, ODA actors are speculative intermediaries who also hedge their bets.

Agencies like JICA or KOICA, but also increasingly, a host of state-backed and formerly-state-backed conglomerates, operate as de facto or quasi-national state actors that drive geographic change through relational competition and cross-border investment (Peck, 2017; Shatkin, 2022). They compete not only as donors but as stakeholders in real estate, commodities, and resource security across Southeast Asia. These dynamics are anchored in histories and narratives that naturalize the attachment of transnational capital to infrastructure projects. Large state-owned corporations mobilize ties of nation, ethnicity, and geography to organize legitimacy as well as finance (Anderson, 1991).

The Central Trading and Development Corporation (CT&D), formerly the state-owned arm of Taiwan's Kuomintang (KMT), is exemplary in this regard. In the late 1980s, the KMT directed CT&D's CEO, Lawrence Ting, to pursue overseas investment as part of Taiwan's economic diversification and regional strategy. At the same time, Vietnam's leadership sought foreign investment compatible with socialist reform. Taiwan's ambiguous status—neither Western nor communist—made it an ideologically acceptable partner. The resulting partnership resulted in Phu My Hung, Vietnam's first large-scale new town: a mixed industrial, residential, and infrastructural complex which included a large power plant, became a paradigm of transnational investment and urban development in Southeast Asia. In Vietnam's reform-era context, middling modernizers have imagined a shared geography and history, converting it into infrastructure-forward growth.

Japan's JICA and Korea's GS Engineering & Construction illustrate similar processes. JICA's tied-aid model requires Japanese contractors, binding ODA to domestic industrial and property investment. When bureaucratic and political delays in Ho Chi Minh City's Line 1 Metro deterred bids from Japanese firms, JICA was forced to relax procurement requirements, incorporating other middling modernizers, even competitors such as Korea's GS Engineering & Construction. Under a build–transfer agreement, GS received urban land rights in lieu of cash, in effect transforming it into a real estate speculator. Subsequent projects, including ring roads and the planned Nha Be New Town extended this model in which engineering expertise was exchanged for peripheral land. Market volatility, however, exposed immature firms to high risk, forcing GS to divest from several ventures at significant loss. These arrangements are inscribed geographically, where swaths of land like Nha Be and other real estate parcels remain suspended in prolonged states of developmental deferral, a consequential outcome that occurs when an ODA agency unwittingly transforms engineering firms into real estate speculators.

South–South ventures, including Vietnam's projects in Laos, extend this logic beyond national borders. State-owned enterprises act as private speculators abroad, deploying infrastructure expertise to gain concessions in primary commodities and hydropower. Ideological and bureaucratic affinities among socialist regimes serve as gateways for capital accumulation and geopolitical competition, particularly with China. What emerges is a fragmented yet interdependent field of development in which risk, prestige, sovereignty, and history circulate as convertible tools. Development here is less as a conduit of modernization than a speculative medium through which states and corporations materialize power, legitimacy, and futurity. The shift from aid to investment, from development to speculation, signals always-present economy of growth in this era of empire.

Staging development in the interstices

Development in the contemporary moment increasingly operates through staging rather than completion. Particularly as the moral center promoted by the U.S.-led hegemonic order fades, states, donors, and corporations work to assert legitimacy and claims to the future. In Southeast Asia, development stages through overlapping regimes of aid and expertise. Japan's quality infrastructure, Korea's Global Korea initiative, China's Belt and Road, and Vietnam's emerging overseas investments each advance distinct but interoperable principles of development: Japan's technocratic ethic of safety and reliability, Korea's entrepreneurial efficiency, China's state-capitalist pragmatism, and Vietnam's socialist fraternity. These idioms coexist and collide within shared terrains of growth, producing shifting narratives of equivalence, rivalry, and strategic alignment rather than globalized standards of development.

Staging development in these ways also works to reconfigure development's temporality. Projects need not succeed or be completed to be politically effective. In Vietnam and Laos, half-completed bridges, stalled railways, and empty industrial parks are not as much expressions of dysfunction but signal participation in a global field of development and claims to progress even if their material outcomes remain deferred. As Schwenkel (2015) shows, infrastructure in postsocialist Southeast Asia operates through visibility rather than functionality: postsocialist states display infrastructure as proof of socialist mastery and its core visibility a means to legitimize power. Yet this same visibility makes authority vulnerable: when projects stall or unravel, such as unfinished rail projects, idling hydroelectric farms, and new towns unbuilt, development becomes a site through which corruption and incompetence become public diagnoses (Elinoff, 2017; Kim, 2020). The spectacle thus cuts both ways: it renders authority legible through visibility even as it exposes it to critique through the same medium.

Governing through incompletion

The age of heroic infrastructure—the belief that rational planning could unify people and place—has given way to a more fragmented and contingent regime of development. As the moral authority of liberal development appears more anachronistic, elements of its technocratic grammar persist, refracted through Southeast and East Asian intermediaries. The middling modernizers of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Vietnam translate and repurpose this grammar to carve out liminal spaces across shifting imperial formations.

Vietnam's ventures in Laos exemplify this new geography of development: South-South, socialist–capitalist, speculative and fraternal at once. They do not counter hegemonic alternatives, nor do they mark the ascendence of a unified global South. They instead represent recombinant forms of developmental rationality that once emanated from Washington and Tokyo, through the diffusion of infrastructural techniques, epistemologies, and logics across new terrains of power.

In this landscape, development functions less as material substrate than as a global technique. It stages the state's capacity to govern, the firm's promise of efficiency, and the donor's fantasy of the future. Yet behind the stage lies the in-between—a pragmatic strategy of survival and experimentation under conditions of uncertainty. Fragmentation, redundancy, and incompletion of projects are not failures to be corrected but techniques of flexibility that allow states like Vietnam to hedge across multiple futures. Seen in this light, development does not disappear with the end of the liberal technocratic consensus. It endures as a set of staged, portable practices through which the middle negotiates legitimacy, and keeps futurity in circulation between empires.