ASTK12317U Course: The Politics of Post-development: Critical thinking about development practice and its predicaments

Volume 2014/2015
Education
Bachelorlevel: 10 ECTS
Masterlevel: 7,5 ECTS
Content

After Afghanistan, can we still hold on to our conception of development? The replication of market democracies via state-building and democratization in post-colonial countries in the Middle East and Africa is neither spontaneous nor easy and it seems obvious that ‘development’ has serious limits – including limits which the idea of ‘development’ itself sets on our ways of interacting with the world. 

The course begins with an historical overview of development thinking since the end of the second world war, leading to a thorough look at the current state-of-the-art consensus amongst development practitioners, who link development policy and security policy around a ‘rights-based approach’ aimed at ‘human security’.


This provides the platform for an engagement with postdevelopment, the currently most influential critique of main-stream development thinking. Postdevelopment draws on postcolonial and poststructuralist
thought as represented by major thinkers from the global South such as Fanon, Said, Spivak, Mbembe, Chatterjee and others.

The course dismisses polemic suggestions of “Western Imperialism”. Instead, we will try to undertake a sincere interrogation of our notion of development in terms of the solutions that it makes thinkable, the practices it enables and endorses and the consequences it produces for recipients of ‘development’.

The course will attempt to articulate ‘development’ as exemplary of a deeper predicament - political, ethical, democratic – that arises from the interlocking of differing modes of social being. What hopes and miseries emerge from this meeting, and what is the way forward?

Course content:

Introduction

Modernization theory

Dependency and underdevelopment theory

Market versus state and the structural adjustment programs

The Rise of Good Governance

Human Security and the Rights-based approach

The Security-development nexus

Postdevelopment – what is it, what are its claims, potentials and problems?

Way forward

 

 

Learning Outcome
  • Overview of major approaches to development since the Second World War
  • Specific focus on current ‘state of the art’ development (as doctrine and practice) since the end of the Cold War: peacebuilding, state-building, democratization and the interlinking of development policy and security policy.
  • Specific focus on the most significant critique of Western development practice and development thinking, namely postdevelopment thinking.

 

 

Brigg, M. (2002). "Post-development, Foucault and the colonisation metaphor." Third World Quarterly 23(3): 421-436.
Chandler, D. (2010). International statebuilding, the rise of post-liberal governance. London: Routledge.
Dillon, M. and J. Reid (2009). The liberal way of war - killing to make life live. London, Routledge.
Dirlik, A. (2014). "Developmentalism." Interventions - International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16(1): 30-48.
Duffield, M. (2007). Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples. London, Polity Press.
Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering development, the making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton.
Fanon, F. (2004). The Wretched of the Earth, transl. from the French by Richard Philcox, with commentary by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Babha. New York, Grove Press.
Ferguson, J. (2007 (1994)). The anti-politics machine, "development", depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Minneapolis.
Fukuyama, F. (2004). State Building - Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century. London, Profile Books.
Giri, A. K., Ed. (2003). A Moral Critique of Development: In Search of Global Responsibilities. London, Routledge.
Harrison, G. (2010). "Practices of Intervention: Repertoires, Habits and Conduct in Neoliberal Africa." Journal of Intervention and State-building 4(4): 433-452.
Leftwich, A. (2000). States of Development: On the Primacy of Politics in Development. London, Polity.
Moyo, D. (2009). Dead aid, why aid is not working and how there is a better way for Africa. New York, NY, New York, NY : Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2010). Development theory (Second Edition). London, London : SAGE.
Paris, R. (2010). "Saving liberal peacebuilding." Review of International Studies 36: 337-365.
Rasmussen, L. R. (2012). "The liberal dilemmas of a people-centred approach to state-building." Conflict, Security & Development 12(2): 103-121.
Reid, J. (2009). The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity and the Defence of Logistical Societies. Reappraising the Political. Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Rodney, W. (1982). How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Washington, D.C.
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a State - How Certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed, Yale University Press.
Sørensen, G. (2011). A Liberal Order in Crisis. Choosing between imposition and restraint. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press.
Ziai, A., Ed. (2007). Exploring post-development: theory and practice, problems and perspectives. New York, Routledge.

  • Category
  • Hours
  • Class Instruction
  • 28
  • Course Preparation
  • 140
  • Exam Preparation
  • 34
  • Preparation
  • 4
  • Total
  • 206
Credit
7,5 ECTS
Type of assessment
Oral examination
Oral
Marking scale
7-point grading scale
Censorship form
External censorship
Criteria for exam assesment
  • Grade 12 is given for an outstanding performance: the student lives up to the course's goal description in an independent and convincing manner with no or few and minor shortcomings
  • Grade 7 is given for a good performance: the student is confidently able to live up to the goal description, albeit with several shortcomings
  • Grade 02 is given for an adequate performance: the minimum acceptable performance in which the student is only able to live up to the goal description in an insecure and incomplete manner