Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania

Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: underdevelopment and an uncaptured peasantry Goran Hyden London: Heinemann. 1980. 270pp. £7.50. £3.50 pb     

Beyond the Blame Game

The drama between the secularist legacy of Ataturk and the popular surge of Islamist‐rooted politics continues in Turkey, centered on the debate over the headscarf. Is it a sign of religious reaction, or a sign of non‐Western modernization that will ensure higher education for Muslim women? We represent here all sides of the debate. Elsewhere in the Muslim world are the reformers and critics listening to each other, or impeding progress with a blame game? Europe's most controversial figures in this debate—Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan—engage here.     

Beyond Being and Becoming

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.     

Beyond Impoverished Anti-poverty Paradigms

More subtle than the manifestations of poverty are the paradigmatic means of sustaining, deepening or lessening it. Indeed, dominant knowledge structures are insinuated in policy making and conventional anti-poverty measures, some of which reflect the poverty of the intellect. Ensconced in distinctive contexts, poverty itself is shaped by the template of neoliberal globalisation. This paradigm promises that economic gain will benefit all who are faithful to its principles. It evokes a vision not only of economic well-being but also of distributive justice, including poverty reduction. In its centrist and reformist guises, the orthodox anti-poverty paradigm may be best understood as a chain of relationships: neoliberal concepts, a preoccupation with methods for measuring results, a loathness to tackle underlying factors that generate widespread privation, gender ideology, and the delinking of economic reform and social policy. On the rise, too, is growing resistance to this consensual thinking, mainly from transnational civil society organisations and allied intellectuals. Six priorities are suggested as the basis for forming multiple, decentred paradigms to expunge poverty. The challenge is to produce homegrown knowledge structures that open to learning from other experiences.