Decolonizing Civil Society in Mozambique

Governance, Politics and Spiritual Systems

Tanja Kleibl

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786999313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de desarrollo global

By demonstrating that Western conceptions of 'civil society' have provided the framework for interpreting societies in the Global South, Decolonizing Civil Society in Mozambique argues that it is only through a critical deconstruction of these concepts that we can start to re-balance global power relationships, both in academic discourse and in development practices. Examining the exclusionary discourses framing the support for Western-type NGOs in the development discourse - often to the exclusion of local social actors - this book dissects mainstream contemporary ideas about 'civil society', and finds a new means by which to identify local forms of social action, often based in traditional structures and spiritual discourses. Outlining new conceptual ideas for an alternative framing of Mozambique's 'civil society', Kleibl proposes a series of fresh theoretical issues and questions alongside empirical research, moving towards a series of new policy and practice arguments for rethinking and decolonizing civil society in the Global South.

PART I

INTERROGATING CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE DEVELOPMENT DISCOURSE

Civil society: Historical notions and colonial linkages

The concept of contemporary modern civil society is the product of Greek and Roman thinkers, who in a general attempt established a kind of geometry of human relations. Indeed, it was the tendency to prioritize political matters that oriented them towards the reflection about ‘civility’, the common good and the requirements of effective citizenship. Political commonwealth and the recognition that life is lived in different spheres made a more nuanced notion of social complexity and the limits of political life possible (Ehrenberg 2011, p. 15). For Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC), it was the political sphere’s deliberation, self-rule and mutual recognition that defined civil society. Civil society as an organized commonwealth became the organization of public power that made civilization possible, and justice was its organizing principle (ibid., pp. 16, 17).

For Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), civil society was made possible only by sovereign power constituted by politics and, accordingly, he did not distinguish civil society from the state. Only the fracturing of European societies and the spread of markets finally accompanied the development of modern forms of centralized and bureaucratic political organizations. John Locke (1632–1704) announced the appearance of modern civil society. He suggested that preconditions for prosperity and peace were present in the state of nature. For him, a resident of civil society is an economic person first and foremost and the state’s task was to protect the rights of acquisition and accumulation. Adam Smith (1723–90) later shared Locke’s sentiment that the activity of people in markets, rather than in politics, is the real glue of civil society (ibid., pp. 20–1). Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and Karl Marx (1818–83) eventually developed an alternative theory of modern civil society.

Nowadays, civil society is a hotly contested concept in social sciences and one that is being applied very broadly within ‘development’ practices, although mainly from a liberal point of view, as part of the so-called Good Governance debates. Alexander offers the following critical assessment of the concept, having in mind its contested origins:

But civil society has not disappeared. It is not everywhere, but it is not nowhere, either. Rather than dancing on its grave, we need to transform the idea of civil society in a critical way. It needs to be recentered on the promise of community of individuals, centered on solidarity of a distinctively civil kind. Civil society is not everywhere except the state. A differentiated sphere of justice, it contends with and often conflicts with the value demands of spheres. (Alexander 2006, p. 551)

It is worth highlighting that there are two very broad strands in the literature about modern civil society. One strand is the literature emerging from the French liberal political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59), who saw civil society characterized by voluntary, non-political associations that strengthen democracy (Ilal, Kleibl and Munck 2014). Bearing in mind the global turn towards neoliberal politics, it is not surprising that de Tocqueville’s ideas linked to democracy and markets are mostly referred to in current mainstream civil society debates. Another strand is linked to the problematizing and politicizing of civil society, emerging from the ideas of Hegel. He saw civil society, the family and the state as the central components of his ‘social theory’ (Neuhouser 2000). Both strands facilitated the formation of a substantive concept that nowadays cannot be excluded from any serious discourse about development, democracy and politics. Whilst both ideas have been developed substantially, it needs to be recognized that they are built on colonial pillars. Both Hegel and de Tocqueville legitimized the colonial project of their times in their theories:

The Negro, as already observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality – all that we call feeling – if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character. The copious and circumstantial accounts of Missionaries completely confirm this, and Mahommedanism appears to be the only thing which in any way brings the Negroes within the range of culture.

(Hegel 1956, p. 93)

To be able to colonize with some importance … we have necessarily to implement laws that are not only violent but necessarily unfair.

(de Tocqueville in Fattal 2011, p. 40)

The negation of morality and feeling (Hegel) and the call for violence against and unfair treatment of ‘the Negro’ (de Tocqueville) disqualify both theorists from providing a framework for analysing civil society from a post-colonial perspective in Africa. Using their frameworks would entail supporting a meaning of ‘civility’ that would be highly problematic. Indeed, Dussel (2010) sees Hegel as the founder of Eurocentrism in ‘development’, because Hegel saw the people of the North (in particular Germans and English), as holding ‘absolute rights’, as ‘bearers’ of the spirit in its ‘moment of development’. According to Hegel, no other people can be said to have any rights proper to it, and certainly none that it could post against Europe (Dussel 2010, p. 301). Consequently, from a post-colonial perspective, development discourse needs to be decolonized through the deconstruction of its dominant meaning. This might lead to better understanding how the current patterns of civil society are embedded in the dominant Western development discourses and how that ‘embeddedness’ is linked to the prospects of social transformation.

Development theory and civil society

Development is fundamentally about mapping and making, about the spatial reach of power and the control and management of other peoples, territories, environments and places.

(Crush 1995, p. 7)

Within the broad definition of ‘development’, we may locate many different approaches which have evolved over time, including civil society development. These approaches did not emerge in a linear way but were, rather, influenced by key changes in the international context, such as the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union. Some approaches have been more central to governmental development cooperation whilst others were mainly discussed within civil society and academia. Depending on the power of some development actors,¹ certain approaches have been stronger in the public discourse and have influenced political decision-making more than others. Some approaches were discussed and elaborated in parallel and even in opposition to each other and we can also see an increase in discourse analysis within the study of international relations and development (Milliken 1999), often linked to the analysis of political manipulation (Voeten 2011).

The main approaches and discourses around development started to systematically emerge from the early 1950s, as a response to President Truman’s so-called Point Four Program, announced in his inaugural address in 1949 (Truman 1949). For post-development theorists like Esteva: ‘Under-development began, then, on January 20, 1949 on that day, two billion people became underdeveloped’ (Esteva 1992, p. 7). This statement has, of course, been contested by those who see a much longer history for development, for example the development of capitalism. Since the 1950s, the modernization approach has been dominant in the emerging development debates, which as they further evolved, divided the world into a so-called first, second and third world. With the end of the Cold War around 1989, these divisions were further condensed and many development actors started to refer to the ‘developed’ (industrialized and economically more developed countries) and ‘underdeveloped’ world (economically less developed countries occupying lower ranks on the Human Development Index). What is, however, common to both type of divisions is the fact that the separation of the world is frequently based on quantitative measures in relation to economic growth, which in turn defines a country or region as ‘modern’ and ‘developed’ or ‘backward’ and ‘underdeveloped’. Accordingly, ‘development’ was from its beginning based on the founding belief of the modern world (Peet and Hartwick 1999), defined by Western standards which are influenced by linear, mainly economic, theories.²

‘Modernization’ is the topic that links most of the development approaches. This trend was established in the United States and soon after theorized by various scientists (e.g. Walt Rostow, Samuel P. Huntington, David McCleland). They believed that the ‘underdeveloped’ countries have to transform into modern, developed countries following the industrialized Western model. They assumed that economic growth and social change would bring about poverty reduction. These essential goals should be achieved in part through education and technical assistance from the Western world. Indeed, many of the supporters of this theory were highly influenced by the Cold War and the perceived threat of communism, and therefore had a very market liberal point of view (Leys 1996). They believed ‘that modernization would in any case bring democracy as well as economic growth’ (ibid., p. 10). The fact that modernity is the product of societal cohesion and consequently contingent in time and place is being ignored in this conceptualization of ‘the modern’ as the Western standard is being declared as absolute (and the world is being measured against it).

For Munck (2018) in his analysis of development and social change from a complexity perspective, ‘development became something that one party could do on another’ and ‘the divide between the coloniser and the colonised of the imperial period now became the development-underdevelopment divide which characterised the post-colonial period’. He argues further that:

This paradigm suited the economic and political interests of the now rising hegemonic power, the U.S. Taking credit for decolonization and promoting the equality between nations, the United States moved seamlessly into constructing a neo-colonial order where formal political independence was matched by strong, economic dependence for the ‘developing’ nations. (Munck 2018, p. 7)

The ‘Dependency Theory’ which emerged in Latin America in the 1950s (cf. Prebisch 1950 and 1959) and evolved in the 1960s and 1970s was considered to be an alternative approach, built on the philosophical and theoretical assumptions of Marxism, combining historical materialist ideas with a number of other critical traditions (Peet and Hartwick 1999, p. 107). It can be seen as a major answer by the intellectuals of the ‘Third’ World to the Northern centric ‘Modernization Theory’. In contrast to supporters of the modernization theory, they did not believe that endogenous factors were responsible for ‘underdevelopment’, but rather exogenous factors like colonialism and powerful economic elites. The representatives of this Neo-Marxist approach argue that what in fact they were seeing was not ‘modernization’ but the ‘development of underdevelopment’. That means ‘development’ is actually the product of the powerful, Western states. For them, the ‘developing’ countries are dependent on/dominated by the ‘developed’ countries which is based on unfair trade agreements, the unjust economic system and political power imbalances (Leys 1996, p. 11f.).

Dependency theory counters the notion that European development derives, exclusively or mainly, from European sources. The theory played an important role in the critique of conventional theories – whether the theory of comparative advantage in mainstream economics or modernization theory in mainstream developmental sociology. It accounted for the historical experiences of the peoples of peripheral societies by proposing, in opposition, that contact with capitalism led to underdevelopment rather than development.

(Peet and Hartwick 1999, p. 122)

In the 1980s there was a neoliberal revolution in the development debates, supported by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Both international financing institutions (IFIs) claimed that ‘developing’ country governments are often inefficient and corrupt and therefore part of the problem of ‘underdevelopment’. A market versus state debate followed and, in this context, the liberalization of foreign trade and the privatization of state enterprises for economic growth have been advanced through the implementation of so-called structural adjustment programmes (Leys 1996, p. 18f.). The promoted free or unregulated market was not only seen as the source of material wealth but also of freedom and democracy. After the years of the ‘Neoliberalism Approach’, also known as the ‘Lost Decade’ (Escobar 2015), a drastic change took place in the academic development discourse, but only partly within official government politics.

Alternative or critical approaches to development in the 1980s and beyond highlighted social, environmental and sustainability topics and pointed to the need for a paradigmatic change based on a substantial critique on Eurocentrism within mainstream development theory (see Munck and O’Hearn 1999). Around the same time, the focus shifted from the economic growth paradigm to a human development point of view. Examples for this change are the ‘Human Development and Capabilities Approach’, ‘Development from below’ and Amartya Sen’s (1999) view of ‘Development as Freedom’. Global governance and human rights standards were increasingly mentioned. Important conferences organized by the United Nations³ pointed towards key global issues and constituted a platform of discussion and negotiation for all UN member states, accompanied by civil society actors (Nuscheler 2012). However, most of the alternative ideas were not put into practice and the more radical academic discourse of ‘post-development’ emerged around 2000. From a post-colonial perspective, the path of post-developmentalism deserves acknowledgement, as one author argues:

The idea of development stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape. Delusion and disappointment, failures and crime have been the steady companions of development and they tell a common story: it did not work. Moreover, the historical conditions which catapulted the idea into prominence have vanished: development has become outdated.

(Sachs 1992, p. 1)

Development was increasingly considered as simply not successful and bringing about much frustration based on repeated mistakes and lack of lessons learned. Accordingly, ‘post-development’ is based on the critique of development itself and the critique of modernity as its most important target. Development is seen as ‘a mechanism for production and management of the Third World’ and ‘organising the production of truth about the Third World’ (Escobar 1992, p. 413f.). It is seen as a top-down, one-way process, where the so-called developer forces the Third World to accept the values of the modern world in an uncritical way. Development is no longer considered as a process, where diverse cultures and religions have been accepted or even nurtured; it is rather considered as Eurocentric, where everything that was different, was wrong and forced to change (Escobar 1997, p. 91). As Pieterse puts it:

It involves telling other people what to do – in the name of modernisation, nation building, progress, mobilisation, sustainable development, human rights, poverty alleviation and even empowerment and participation.

(Pieterse 2010, p. 117)

Development is now essentially seen as an abuse of power, legitimized through development cooperation; one group exercising power over a so-called poor target group that had no ability to resist or fight back. Post-development thinkers consider power imbalance as a key issue of poverty and analyse it accordingly. The aim of post-development is a transfer of power and a ‘real’ empowerment of people in order for people to become political subjects and not objects of development and to enable societies to define their issues and goals without pressure from the outside (Ziai 2004). Through this transformation, the people should be able to change within their own culture, using their own capabilities. Munck (2018) concludes:

The focus on language, knowledge and power has also helped understand local knowledge as sites of power and also resistance. We now accept much more readily that there are multiple, unstable and permanently reconstructing identities involved in the development and social change processes.

(Munck 2018, pp. 9, 10)

Nevertheless, post-development is firstly criticized for the fact that its supporters criticize development itself and that they want the development myth to end and secondly, that its definition of development uses a rather homogenous and limited perspective to describe a broad approach. At last, opponents claim that the main problem with the post-development approach is that there is no real alternative programme of action. Post-development supporters are then seen as just criticizing the other theories and approaches, analysing their faults rather than developing a practicable alternative concept. The main claim consists of the assumption that the post-development debate is only based on the critique of other approaches but not on practical alternatives (Kippler 2010, p. 7).

However, that critique could appear rather as a misunderstanding. The intention of post-development as it could be understood as well is not to end development, but to end the old, Eurocentric view of development, and encourage a (bottom-up) transformation of power. The call for the ‘end of developme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• Introduction: STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONSHIPS AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN POST-COLONIAL AFRICA
• Part I: INTERROGATING CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE DEVELOPMENT DISCOURSE
• Part II: DEVELOPMENT OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN MOZAMBIQUE
• Part III: GOVERNANCE AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN MOZAMBIQUE
• Part IV: CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE CONTEXT OF ECONOMIC DISORDER AND POLITICAL CONFLICT: A CASE STUDY FROM INHASSUNGE DISTRICT (ZAMBÉZIA PROVINCE, MOZAMBIQUE)
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Web Sites, blogs, online newspapers and videos
• Index
• Imprint