Beyond Colonialism, Development and Globalization

Social Movements and Critical Perspectives

Dominique Caouette, Dip Kapoor, Dominique Caouette, Dip Kapoor

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781783605859
• eBook ISBN: 9781783605873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Development studies is in a state of flux. A new generation of scholars has come to reject what was once regarded as accepted wisdom, and increasingly regard development and globalization as part of a continuum with colonialism, premised on the same reductionist assumption that progress and growth are objective facts that can be fostered, measured, assessed and controlled. Drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives and approaches, this book explores the ways in which social movements in the Global South are rejecting Western-centric notions of development and modernization, as well as creating their own alternatives. By assessing development theories from the perspective of subaltern groups and movements, the contributors posit a new notion of development 'from below', one in which these movements provide new ways of imagining social transformation, and a way out of the 'developmental dead end' that has so far characterized post-development approaches. Beyond Colonialism, Development and Globalization therefore represents a radical break with the prevailing narrative of modernization, and points to a bold new direction for development studies.

1	Beyond Colonialism, Development and Globalization
	Social Movements and Critical Perspectives
	Dominique Caouette and Dip Kapoor

Introduction

More than sixty years ago, US President Harry Truman announced that his nation would undertake the project of improving what he described as underdeveloped countries (Escobar 1995; Parpart and Velmeyer 2004). The idea of a ‘developing world’ (Ferguson 1994; Rist 2001), later named Third World (Beaudet et al. 2008; Dansereau 2008), captured the imagination and energy of several generations of individuals and institutions dedicated to the project. The international development industry was not just the domain (chasse-gardée) of the West; the Communist bloc also promoted development aid programmes. Although capitalist and socialist-driven aid programmes differed widely in terms of the role of the state and commitments to equality, the notion of political participation and the ultimate goals of development were infused with ideas embedded in the philosophical liberalism of the Enlightenment and of modernity, science and industrial modernization.

Although the origins of the ideology of unlimited scientific progress and its intrinsically positivist character go back as far as Greek Antiquity, it is with the onset of the Enlightenment period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the doctrine of social development took root. As development became institutionalized, it started to embody various corpuses of knowledge, each with its own underlying disciplinary effects, including productivity, homogeneity and division of labour. Such ideas were not detached from the daily realities of the time, as newly consolidated Western European nation states were experiencing social tensions and new problems with increasing industrialization and urbanization. Liberal philosophers and intellectuals, who advised policymakers and the emerging bourgeois regimes, worked to avoid or stabilize social disorder. This period was thus marked by the maintenance of and concern for order and progress. This prompted the construction of public institutions and agencies capable of regulating social practices, ranging from hygiene to transportation to market transactions, in order to move towards modernity in the eighteenth century. Development gradually became the end rather than the means of government intervention, because it embodied the ideas of progress and modernity. Anything that fell outside this path was considered as disorderly, archaic and backwards and eventually became linked to underdevelopment.

Associated with the tension between development and under-development, the era of social Darwinism in the nineteenth century strengthened and legitimized the myth of Western superiority (Cowen and Shenton 1995; Hopkins 2002). Acting as a justification for the ongoing process of colonization, a universalizing language of ‘trusteeship’ of developed and modern nations towards their colonies started to emerge. With development becoming an intrinsic part of the civilizing mission of the West, colonization acquired an appearance of legitimacy for its important and much more ‘real’ motivations, namely the extraction of resources and wealth from the colonies. The strength of development as the embodiment of modernity and progress intensified during the second half of the nineteenth century and the race for colonies. Colonial administrations, despite their intra-imperial competition, promoted the European model as the natural way (voie royale) to be followed towards progress and modernity. Scientific positivism, the epistemological basis for action, bred the first experts of scientific development.

Not surprisingly, as early as the turn of the twentieth century, dissenting voices and attempts to construct a counter-hegemonic discourse were heard among anti-colonial and anti-nationalist movements (Anderson 2007). Soon after the wave of independence that followed the end of WWII, several intellects from the ‘Global South’ and elsewhere, were able to point out continuities between colonial and development projects and development theory or thinking (Connell 2007; Fanon 1963/2005; Nandy 1967/1999). Both types of international assistance programmes aimed at modernization and were rooted in notions of progress, scientific rationalism and what some scholars have referenced as development racism (Dossa 2007; Fanon 1952/2008; Kothari 2006; Wilson 2013).

Underdevelopment was described as a pathological condition at worst and as a transitive moment towards development at best. International assistance programmes were then conceived to move the underdeveloped nations towards development. Both the East and the West were convinced that their own historical trajectories could chart a model to be followed. Providing international assistance was hardly philanthropic, but instead rooted in geopolitical and economic interests of the ‘ex-colonial’ powers. Nonetheless, assistance was cloaked in a discourse of philanthropy and/or internationalist solidarity. The international development project of the 1950s, which extended well into the 1980s, required the deployment of new elites, oftentimes administrators, technocrats, social scientists, engineers and other applied scientists, as well as ambitious and opportunist politicians and well-meaning idealists, scholars, and large contingents of volunteers – the new missionaries of this era (Barry-Shaw and Jay 2012; Beaudet 2009; Crush 1995; Favreau, Fréchette and Lachapelle 2008). More than anything else, at the core of the international development project was a strong economist perspective. Local political institutions, local knowledge, cultural diversity, ecologies and identities were set aside since economic growth through industrialization and urbanization held the promise of positive and unequivocal transformation.

While the colonial project metamorphosed into the development credo in the 1950s and 1960s, another discursive shift has occurred more recently, in the last twenty years or so, with globalization embodying the new face of old ideas of modernization, progress, productivity and scientific rationalism (Caouette 2010; McMichael 2010). Today, fundamental ontological, epistemological and methodological challenges are shaking up and cracking the foundations of this four-part edifice of liberal modernity. Hardly comfortable sitting under a single label, postcolonial, post-development, après-development, subalterity, or alter-globalization scholars (Amoore 2005; Appadurai 2001; Gandhi 1998; Martell 2010; McEwan 2009; McMichael 2010) and indigenous scholarship and activism addressing decolonization (Alfred 2005; Coulthard 2014) share three important qualities: none of them claim to be totalizing, all-encompassing or even true in the limited sense of positive truth, but rather partial, subjective and context-driven, and with varied commitments to decolonization and anti-capitalism.

This process of radical questioning has informed current development studies’ debates that have been marked by a rejection of mainstream discourse on development. Key authors within the dominant discursive circles of development studies have included Escobar (1995), Esteva and Prakash (1998), Nederven Pierterse (2000), McEwan (2009) and McMichael (2010), among many others. They have been instrumental in shaping and generating a large and dynamic field of contention within development studies around key issues, such as the notion of development itself, but also how discourse, narratives and rationales have been constructed to justify and give meanings to a major attempt at spreading liberal modernity. This collection takes up these development-centric and other related interdisciplinary critiques and lively conversations on the continuities and discontinuities that exist between three modernizing projects (colonization, development and globalization), by inviting activists and observers of grassroots social movements to highlight a series of multiple, heterogeneous and diverse perspectives on alternative and dissenting paths away from a colonial capitalist modernity. These perspectives are emerging from the practices of the movements themselves as well as from analysts, fellow academics, observers and activists. The goal here is not programmatic nor paradigmatic, but rather inductive and localized within a particular historical moment, marked by the new duality of a hegemonic colonial project of market driven globalization and its various counter-hegemonic responses (Dupuis-Déri 2010; Pleyers 2010).

This collection of case studies and rooted reflections interrogates the practice of social movements in order to identify whether these constitute the seeds of alternative scenarios, visions, scripts and of different narratives of the present. While the contributions stand in parallel and in solidarity with much of the counter-discourses and practices, there is also a keen awareness of the gradual institutionalization of such radical and reformist departures from the dominant discourse on globalization by NGOs, transnational coalitions and networks (Barry-Shaw and Jay 2012; Choudry 2007; Choudry and Kapoor 2013; Murphy 2001; Tarrow 2005). The dangers of institutionalization are not new, however, and have marked much of the history of social movements. Subsequently, authors who are placed to speak from a rooted and/or social movement perspective have participated in the development of this collection.

The book challenges the existing body of ‘modernizing’ ideas that have underlined three globalizing and historical projects: colonization, international development and neoliberal globalization. Authors grapple with some of the following questions: what can we learn about these projects and their alternatives using the experiences and perspectives of social movements? Are there ideas, practices and notions that are common or shared by these social movements that are indicative of new counter-hegemonies? From these alternative practices, ideas and concepts can we begin to develop a common syntax and a grammar that is freed from the liberal ideas of modernization, progress and Western scientific rationalism?

The foundational argument being advanced here is that colonization, development and globalization projects have been reductionist and guided by universalizing assumptions, which are rooted in an economic and cultural liberalism that places progress and growth as objective and natural facts that can be fostered, measured, assessed and controlled. Moving away from these meta-narratives, this collection suggests alternative avenues for imagining and acting on transformative practices and resistance to global forces in market, state and international organizations and hegemonic knowledge. While the chapters are characterized by a variety of approaches, some convergent ideas and practices can be identified around the critical notions of local praxis, identity, collective action, learning and pedagogy, and situated knowledge.

Beyond development and globalization: constructivism, post-development, postcolonial and subaltern studies and indigenous perspectives

As part of the larger debate on globalization and one of its antitheses, alter-globalization, the field of development theories has been consumed by a process of soul-searching. Most of these critical approaches (post-development, alternative development, anti-development, beyond development) have veered away from meta-narratives, a critical analysis that has a strong lineage in preceding indigenous and anti-colonial scholarship and practice. Much more modest in their theoretical claims than their development-centric predecessors, these ‘postist’ approaches share the premises of constructivism regarding the social construction of reality and the importance of inter-subjectivity (Crush 1995; Wendt 1999) and have put to rest linear or teleological conceptions of development and modernization. Some of the most critical views are in keeping with post-modernism, questioning and deconstructing modernity as discourse and practices (Ferguson 1994; Loomba 1998; McEwan 2009). These approaches mark the transition from a critical view of development to a foundational critique of globalization and modernity.

Constructivism and development

Similar to the alternative development perspective that was first put forward in the 1980s emphasizing local initiatives and bottom-up approaches, the post-structural constructivist approaches (post-development and beyond development) argued that the development project had reached a dead end. This is not to say that policy prescriptions or development projects had disappeared, but rather that the lost decade of the 1980s – when many of the development achievements of the previous decades (reduction in mother and infant mortalities, gains in education and reduction of poverty) vanished – had revealed how development was essentially an euphemism for the continued extension of Western interests and conceptions of progress in the ‘postcolonial era’. Confronting the illusion of development and re/colonizations became an imperative for scholars and activists alike.

Constructivist approaches marked an important breach in the hegemonic discourse on development. One of the first to offer a systematic critique of the development project was Arturo Escobar in his seminal work Encountering Development (1995) where he provided a systematic and well-articulated attack on the concept of development. In his ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Beyond Colonialism, Development and Globalization: Social Movements and Critical Perspectives
• Part I: Indigenous and Peasant Movement Perspectives
• Part II: Acting across Borders
• Part III: Reflections on Critical Knowledge, Culture and Pedagogy
• About the contributors
• Index