Post-development,Foucault and the colonisation metaphor

Post-development, the most recent radical reaction to the problems of postwar development efforts, has been the focus of both strident criticism and restrained defence in Third World Quarterly . This article shows that addressing post-development's shortcomings is more useful than dismissing or limiting its potential. By using the work of Foucault, one of post-development's theoretical departure points, a clear distinction is drawn between the operation of power in colonial and development eras. This requires a shift away from repressive views of power, ideas that a singular force directs development, and the colonisation metaphor used by some post-development writers. This article then shows that combining Foucault's notion of dispositif with his concept of normalisation is useful for understanding the operation of power in the postwar development project, and for comprehending how power operates through the World Bank. In this way a critical engagement with post-development can improve our understanding and analysis of development.     

The Developer's Self: a non-deterministic Foucauldian frame

Recent development studies literature has begun to consider the developer's self. This welcome enlargement of the field deserves to be deepened and extended by moving beyond opposition to post-development critics, and by articulating an explicit theoretical frame for examining developers' selves. By exploring Foucault's suggestion that modern approaches to knowledge and selfhood may be entwined through developmentalism, this paper proposes a flexible and non-deterministic cultural–historical framework for considering developers' selves. Foucault's analyses of relations of power and subjectivity provide strategies for examining developers' selves, but this does not suggest that such selves can be read off the proposed framework. Examining developers' selves is necessarily a reflective ethical task, and one which requires engaging the external relations that constitute the self. Foucault provides valuable resources for this task, but there is also a need to extend upon and complement a Foucauldian approach. Pursuing our new-found interest in developers' selves by working through and beyond Foucault promises to open new professional futures and possibilities for development practice.     

Pearson and Responsibility: (Mis‐)Understanding the Capabilities Approach

Aboriginal Australian public intellectual Noel Pearson has gained prominence and influence for his brand of policy reform in Indigenous affairs by drawing upon the capabilities approach. This article challenges the coherence of Pearson's position, arguing that his unrelenting focus on personal responsibility leads him to conflate different elements within capabilities thinking. Pearson 1) mistakes social capabilities (to which people are entitled) for human potential to be unfolded, and 2) casts and prescribes personal responsibility as a type of latent capability. The latter a) inverts the capabilities approach wherein phenomena such as personal responsibility arise as an effect of the realization of latent capabilities rather than serving as latent capabilities themselves, and b) is at odds with the liberal basis of the capabilities approach that rejects imposing “good” ways of life on people. This is illustrated through reference to Pearson's advocacy of Direct Instruction teaching and engagement with the “real economy”. The paper recognizes Pearson's contribution to the policy debate and that the problems he highlights are real, but argues that the remedial approaches adopted are problematic, including in terms of Pearson's stated stance against assimilationist policy agendas.     

Humanitarian symbolic exchange: extending Responsibility to Protect through individual and local engagement

Moral common sense frames the relationship between privileged and at-risk populations underpinning contemporary Responsibility to Protect (R2P) discourse. This article develops an alternative by considering the relationship between archetypes of would-be rescuers and victims through Jean Baudrillard’s theorisation of symbolic exchange. Baudrillardian analysis connects personal morality and affective intersubjective symbolic exchange with the politics of international order. This leads, first, to an argument that current foundations for advocating R2P risk participating in a problematic moral economy of symbolic exchange between would-be rescuers and victims. Nonetheless, and secondly, the article deploys symbolic exchange to develop suggestions for partially re-figuring R2P’s humanitarian impulse by engaging ‘locally’ – both through one’s self (in the ethical relation suggested by Emmanuel Levinas) and with diverse forms of political order (following Jacques Rancière’s conception of politics). Doing so supports moves to engage a wide array of individual actors in a more interactive and less hierarchical form of R2P, to drive deeper consideration of local complexities of R2P through engagement with diverse local forms of political order, and to develop a more inclusive understanding of ‘humanity’ in order to bolster R2P’s normative foundations.