Geopolitics and Development

Marcus Power

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781134614462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Geopolitics and Development examines the historical emergence of development as a form of governmentality, from the end of empire to the Cold War and the War on Terror. It illustrates the various ways in which the meanings and relations of development as a discourse, an apparatus and an aspiration, have been geopolitically imagined and enframed.

The book traces some of the multiple historical associations between development and diplomacy and seeks to underline the centrality of questions of territory, security, statehood and sovereignty to the pursuit of development, along with its enrolment in various (b)ordering practices. In making a case for greater attention to the evolving nexus between geopolitics and development and with particular reference to Africa, the book explores the historical and contemporary geopolitics of foreign aid, the interconnections between development and counterinsurgency, the role of the state and social movements in (re)imagining development, the rise of (re)emerging donors like China, India and Brazil, and the growing significance of South–South flows of investment, trade and development cooperation. Drawing on post-colonial and postdevelopment approaches and on some of the author's own original empirical research, this is an essential, critical and interdisciplinary analysis of the complex and dynamic political geographies of global development.

Primarily intended for scholars and post-graduate students in development studies, human geography, African studies and international relations, this book provides an engaging, invaluable and up-to-date resource for making sense of the complex entanglement between geopolitics and development, past and present.

Introduction: geopolitics and the assemblage of development

Introduction: the anti-politics of development

“development” has beyond doubt been widely used as a hard drug, addiction to which, legally tolerated or encouraged, may stimulate the blissful feelings that typify artificial paradises.

(Rist, 2010: 19)

ALTHOUGH it has consistently been imagined and represented as a neutral and depoliticised technical or managerialist domain, questions of international relations, geopolitics and foreign policy have always been at the very centre of the theory and practice of development. With its in-built sense of design, development has always represented forms of mobilisation associated with order and security (Duffield, 2002) and has various “strategic” effects: in its depoliticisation of poverty, for example, or in the (inconsistent) expansion of state bureaucratic power (Ferguson, 1990). While different strategies and technologies have come and gone, development has consistently served as a kind of antidote to the unruly material politics created by the challenges of governing fluid and changeable spaces, attempting to reconcile the inevitable disruptions of progress with the need for order (Cowen and Shenton, 1995: 27–43) – an objective it has consistently failed to achieve (Li, 2007). This book seeks to further interrogate this sense of development as a set of ameliorative and compensatory technologies of security and argues that what has consistently been central to the very logic and fabric of development is a desire to counter crises of disorder, insecurity and insurgency. In particular, the book explores the repeated enrolment of development in projects of counterinsurgency and the long-standing idea of development as a form of (violent) pacification. To fully understand the interface between security and development, or its uses as a form of countering insurgency, it is necessary to understand the wider nexus between geopolitics and development. In particular, the book argues that development is fundamentally a form of governmentality, is very much about diplomacy and has historically had multiple associations with questions of territory, governance and sovereignty or been implicated in various (b)ordering practices. (In)security and insurgency are not incidental to theories and practices of development and neither is development’s obsession with questions of order and security somehow “new” or a recent rediscovery – they have always been at the very heart of (and are constitutive of) the development enterprise and imaginary.

As an arena of theory and state practice, development came to prominence in an era when the legitimacy of colonial rule was in rapid decline, such that it quickly became a mechanism for trying to shape, manage and control socio-economic and political change in an era of formal sovereignty and to create particular kinds of states in the process. The primary threats development was meant to “neutralise” included decolonisation, communism and various crises within industrial capitalism and, most recently, terrorist insurgencies in the global war on terror. This book will argue that geopolitical knowledges, discourses and practices have always played a key role both in the construction of development and in its contestation and seeks to build on Slater’s (1993) contention that all conceptualisations of development contain and express a geopolitical imagination which conditions and enframes its meanings and relations. Development is conceptualised here as simultaneously a discourse, an apparatus and an aspiration (Sidaway, 2011: 2792) and in what follows I argue that the political geography of development requires and rewards much further critical scrutiny. Development Studies has tended to avoid a direct and sustained engagement with questions of (geo)politics in the global South whilst much of the literature in (sub)disciplines like IR and Political Geography has ignored or misrepresented questions of development in the non-Western world and has been characterised by a certain degree of parochialism (Power, 2010). Seeking to adopt a more interdisciplinary approach to transcend sub-disciplinary boundaries in Geography, the book provides a synthesis of scholarship in critical geopolitics, critical IR and critical development studies and seeks both to re-theorise development as an apparatus or assemblage and to make the case for a post-colonial approach to understanding its complex and dynamic geopolitics.

The focus of the book is both historical and contemporary, exploring the geopolitical enframing and imagination of development at key historical junctures such as the end of empire, the Cold War and the War on Terror. In a variety of ways however, the landscape of international development has shifted quite dramatically in the last three decades and thus in addition to attending to the historical role of global hegemons like the US and the USSR in shaping international development theory and practice, the book seeks to make an original contribution by exploring what the rise of “new” state donors from the global South (such as China, Brazil and India) means for established modes of development cooperation and for the theory and practice of development more generally. In doing so, my analysis is informed by some of my own recent research on China–Africa relations and South–South development cooperation (SSDC). For much of the post-war period the drivers of the global economy and the trustees of international development were unproblematically seen as the wealthy countries of Europe and North America whilst historically much of the theory and practice of development has been focused around North–South relations and interactions. Yet over the past few decades the order of international development has fundamentally changed with (re)emerging or “rising” powers from the global South taking a greater role in the global economy and international politics. The ontological hierarchy of Northern donors and Southern recipients has been upset by the rise of the South and the growth of SSDC, by the global financial crisis and by wider changes in global geographies of poverty and wealth, which have collectively contributed to decentring the field of international development, in terms of both the agents authorised to play and the practices considered legitimate (Mawdsley, 2017). The book charts this gradual disintegration of established ways of categorising global development and the meta-geographies and geopolitical divides that have previously structured North–South relations. As the world is experiencing rapid geo-economic transformations, marked by a downturn of European and American hegemony and the rise of Southern economies, the book argues the case for a renewed approach to unpacking the emerging dynamics of accumulation, dispossession and poverty, one that puts questions of international relations and geopolitics front and centre in the study of development.

In addition to tracing the rise and fall of the “Third World” as a geopolitical category and the rise of the South and SSDC, the book examines the growing articulation between security policies and aid dynamics, or the creeping “securitisation of development” (and “developmentalisation of security”). Driven by the security imperatives of the post 9/11 era and the ensuing War on Terror, underdevelopment has once again been framed as highly “dangerous”. This has been marked by a wave of Western humanitarian and peace interventionism that “empowers international institutions and actors to individuate, group and act upon Southern populations” (Duffield, 2006b: 16) but also by a growing collusion between military and humanitarian actors around the idea of development. As an assemblage of practices that connect “violence to order, force to persuasion, civil to military power” (Bell, 2015: 18), counterinsurgency has experienced a renaissance in recent years following military setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, placing human social and economic development, the protection of civilians, political solutions and the reform of state security sectors at the forefront of military doctrine and practice, further blurring the line between security and development. This incarnation of security seeks to reprioritise development criteria in relation to supporting intervention, reconstructing crisis states and, in order to stem terrorist recruitment, protecting livelihoods and promoting opportunity within strategically important areas of instability (Duffield, 2002). In the “security–development nexus”, fragile statehood and concerns about unstable or stateless regions have been linked to a range of threats to international security, shifting the Western emphasis to the containment of risks emanating from “undergoverned” spaces. Along with important geographical shifts in aid disbursements and allocations, the War on Terror has fundamentally altered the nature of donor cooperation with developing countries as the subordination of foreign aid to military, foreign policy and economic interests has increasingly altered the context in which development aid is framed and implemented.

Any claim to be able to change the lives of others is ultimately a claim to power (Li, 2007), as is the wider idea of the “makeability” of society which has long been a feature of the theory and practice of development. Whether they seek to move people from one place to another, to better provide for their needs, to rationalise their use of land, or to educate and to modernise, programmes for development are all, as Li (2007: 1) points out, “implicated in contemporary sites of struggle”. The book examines the ways in which development has enabled a series of projects that seek to govern, to control, to bring order, along with its long-standing obsession with (re)modelling states in the periphery. In reference to “high-modernist” approaches to development in the South, Scott (1998) writes of the “blindness” of the state and about legibility as a central problem of statecraft, the gradual resolution of which enables the state to get a better handle on its subjects and their environment through a more permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. The book explores this idea of development as a resolution to problems of statecraft and as enabling particular forms of state power and the “capturing” of populations by increasing the legibility of citizens and territories and considers the changing historical role of the state in development. It also examines the continuing hegemony of neoliberalism in development theory and practice and explores the role of agencies like USAID in its diffusion, along with the various spaces of insurgency that state-led neoliberal models of development have created in their wake across the South.

Neoliberalism is often depicted as a kind of “tidal wave”, emanating from the dominant metropoles, that rolls across all places, but although it is clear that development has long played a role in “strategies of social and cultural domination” (Escobar, 2012: vii), it is important to recognise the various ways in which it has been contested and resisted. Neoliberalism is best understood “as an assemblage of technologies, techniques and practices that are appropriated selectively, that come into uncomfortable encounters with ‘local’ politics and cultures, and that are mobile and connective (rather than ‘global’)” (Clarke, 2008: 138, emphasis added). The book traces these “selective” appropriations of neoliberalism in development along with its “uncomfortable” encounters with local cultural and political spaces. Development can of course operate as much as a discourse of entitlement as a discourse of control (Cooper and Packard, 1997; Nilsen, 2016) and the global South has given rise to some of the world’s most intense and advanced popular struggles against neoliberalism as across Latin America, Africa and Asia movements of indigenous peoples, workers, peasants, women and shanty-town dwellers have challenged the dispossession, exclusion and poverty that have followed in the wake of neoliberalisation. Through practices of resistance, these movements are beginning to transform the direction and meanings of post-colonial development and to reshape conceptions of politics, participation, statehood and citizenship.

A relational view of development is key because neoliberal forms of capitalism did not simply arise in the “core” and spread from there to the “periphery” (Hart, 2010) but are the products of processes of spatial interconnection and it is thus important to hold North and South in a relational view when thinking about the complex and shifting territories of poverty and development (Roy and Crane, 2015). Along with geopolitics, development also needs to be situated in relation to the larger nexus of relations within which it is embedded (e.g. social, economic, cultural and racial) and it is important to examine the different discourses, institutions, forms of management and circuits of capital that have shaped them (Roy and Crane, 2015). The significance of questions of “race” in development, in particular, has often been neglected (White, 2002) yet biopolitics is inherently about race, acquiring its powers as a form of governance by securing a population’s “purity” and “safety” within the context of an imagined, alien, raced, internal or external threat (Foucault et al., 2003 [1975–76]; Macey, 2009). Expressions of biopolitical forms of power always contain within them racialised anxieties and fears (Domosh, 2018) and as Mitchell (2017: 358) has shown, “race was and remains central” to liberal, humanitarian forms of aid.

Theorising (post-)development

The postdevelopment agenda is not, as we see it, anti-development. The challenge of postdevelopment is not to give up on development, nor to see all development practice – past, present and future, in wealthy and poor countries – as tainted, failed, retrograde; as though there were something necessarily problematic and destructive about deliberate attempts to increase social wellbeing through economic intervention; as though there were a space of purity beyond or outside development that we could access through renunciation. The challenge is to imagine and practice development differently.

(Gibson-Graham, 2005: 6)

postdevelopment was meant to convey the sense of an era in which development would no longer be a central organising principle of social life. This did not mean that postdevelopment was seen as a new historical period to which its proponents believed we had arrived.

(Escobar, 2012: xiii)

A “toxic” word (Rist, 2010: 24) fraught with a Faustian ambiguity, development is regarded as something which happens simultaneously to individuals, communities, nations and regions but ultimately as a cumulative, organic, natural and inherently progressive process that is somehow above and beyond the realm of the political. The word development itself, Rist (2010: 22) observes, has become a “modern shibboleth, an unavoidable password”, which comes to be used “to convey the idea that tomorrow things will be better, or that more is necessarily better”. In this sense “development” has taken on a “quasi-mystical connotation” (Munck, 1999: 198). Yet the very taken-for-granted quality of “development” (and indeed much of the lexicon of development discourse) leaves much of what is actually done in its name unquestioned. Although its failures as a socio-economic endeavour have now been widely recognised, “development discourse still contaminates social reality” and “remains at the centre of a powerful but fragile semantic constellation” (Esteva, 2009: 1). The language of development essentially defines worlds-in-the making (Cornwall, 2010), animating and justifying intervention with fulsome promises of the possible. As Sachs (2010: 1) contends, “development is much more than just a socio-economic endeavour; it is a perception which models reality, a myth which comforts societies, and a fantasy which unleashes passions.”

Development is also very much an “anti-politics machine” (Ferguson, 1990: 270) that “insistently repos[es] political questions of land, resources, jobs or wages as technical ‘problems’ responsive to the technical ‘development’ intervention”. Lummis (1996: 46) even argues that economic development is essentially politics camouflaged or a way of concealing power arrangements. The anti-politics of development ensures that political issues are “rendered technical” (Li, 2007) or as best addressed by experts and hence the terms of any public debate are limited to trivial or technical matters, constituting the boundary between those positioned as trustees, with the capacity to diagnose deficiencies in others, and those subject to expert direction. Anti-politics is often subliminal and routine as the structure of political-economic relations is written out of the diagnoses and prescriptions produced by development “experts” and as the process of development is perpetually depoliticised. Here, the contestability of many of the words in its lexicon (e.g. civil society) is “flattened” (Chandhoke, 2010) and they become “consensual hurrah-words” that have warmly persuasive qualities (much like “development” itself), gaining their purchase and power through their vague and euphemistic qualities, their capacity to embrace a multitude of possible meanings and also their normative resonance, all of which places the sanctity of its goals beyond reproach and disables any possible critique of “development”, since it was equated “almost with life itself” (Rist, 2010: 20). The related idea of poverty reduction similarly has a luminous obviousness to it, defying mere mortals to challenge its status as a moral imperative (Toye, 2010: 45). The moral unassailability of the development enterprise is similarly secured by copious references to that nebulous, but emotive, category: “the poor” (Cornwall and Brock, 2005). The very concept of “poverty” however “covers up the inequality wrought by capitalism” (Kapoor, 2012: 34) and tends to assume that being poor is a question of unfortunate circumstances, mystifying its structural causes wherein wealth in some parts of the world “is the historical result of the pauperization of others” (34).

Development has often been depicted by some of its critics as a singular and monolithic “project” in a common failure to recognise its multiplicities. In an attempt to move past this, Hart (2010: 10) differentiates between “Big D” Development or “the multiply scaled projects of intervention in the ‘Third World’ that emerged in the context of decolonisation struggles and the Cold War” and “Little d” development which refers “to the development of capitalism as geographically uneven but spatially interconnected processes of creation and destruction, dialectically interconnected with discourses and practices of Development” (Hart, 2010: 119). This also includes a recognition that D/development has historically come to be defined by a multiplicity of “developers” entrusted with the task (Cowen and Shenton, 1996: 4) but also that geographically D/development has been played out in a multiplicity of places and localities such that its geopolitical significance cannot simply be “read off” from any one vantage point or set of coordinates. This useful recognition that development is both a project and a process has also been accompanied by a growing recognition of the plural origins of development discourses: Chinese intellectu...