Development Against Democracy: Manipulating Political Change in the Third World

Description

This new, updated edition of the influential Development Against Democracy is a critical guide to postwar studies of modernisation and development. In the mid-twentieth century, models of development studies were products of postwar American policy. They focused on newly independent states in the Global South, aiming to assure their pro-Western orientation by promoting economic growth, political reform and liberal democracy. However, this prevented real democracy and radical change.Today, projects of democracy have evolved in a radically different political environment that seems to have little in common with the postwar period. Development Against Democracy, however, testifies to a revealing continuity in foreign policy, including in justifications of 'humanitarian intervention' that echo those of counterinsurgency decades earlier in Latin America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.Irene L. Gendzier argues that the fundamental ideas on which theories of modernisation and development rest have been resurrected in contemporary policy and its theories, representing the continuity of postwar US foreign policy in a world permanently altered by globalisation and its multiple discontents, the proliferation of 'failed states,' the unprecedented exodus of refugees, and Washington's declaration of a permanent war against terrorism. Acknowledgments vi Foreword by Thomas Ferguson vii Introduction by Robert Vitalis ix 1. The “New Look” in Development Studies 1 2. Making Connections 14 3. Discourse on Development 32 4. Transparent Boundaries: From Policies to Studies of Political Development 54 5. Defining the Parameters of Discourse 80 6. The Academic Translation: Liberal Democratic Theory and Interpretations of Political Development 105 7. The Impossible Task of Theories of Political Development 144 Epilogue 180 Notes 182 Index 213