Development Against Democracy
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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.
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.
Irene L. Gendzier is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Boston University, an Affiliate in Research at Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and a research affiliate of the MIT Center for International Studies. She is also the author of Dying to Forget (Columbia University Press, 2016), Notes From the Minefield (Columbia University Press, 2006) Development Against Democracy (Pluto, 2017); and co-editor of Crimes of War (Nation Books, 2006).
Robert Vitalis is Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of White World Order, Black Power Politics (Cornell University Press, 2015) and a contributor to Development Against Democracy (Pluto, 2017).
Thomas Ferguson is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the author of Golden Rule (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Right Turn (Hill and Wang, 1986). He contributed the foreword to Irene L. Gendzier's Development Against Democracy (Pluto, 2017).