Alternative Development Flashcards
Brenner et al. (2010)
Neoliberalism is “promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested”
Neoliberalism is not a uniform ideology that has a uniform outcome. Instead, it should be understood as a process that needs analyzing in a specific context.
We need to move beyond the generalized, homogenized definitions of neoliberalism.
Ainger (2001)
“Over the past decade a transformation has been taking place as the threads of local movements are woven into a new global fabric of struggle. They [social movements] are beginning to understand that unless they can organize transnationally, they’re dead”
Since the 1990s, we have seen a growing number of protests against the rise of capitalism. Particularly against agencies like the World Bank and IMF.
Occupy
The Occupy movement protests against global social and economic inequality. This follows on from Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011.
Protesting against capitalism induced inequality: it aims to make the economic and political relations in societies less vertically hierarchical & more flatly distributed
The main focus is the draw attention to how large corporations and the global financial system control the world in a way that benefits a minority. Local groups often have different focuses.
The Occupy movement, an international progressive, socio-political movement, expressed opposition to social and economic inequality and to the lack of “real democracy” around the world. It aimed primarily to advance social and economic justice and new forms of democracy
Anti-Apartheid struggles
This is concerned with the grassroots, non-violent civil resistance movement in the coalition with international support and sanctions to end apartheid.
In the post-apartheid period, there have been ‘service delivery protests’. Lack of access to water, energy or other services
This name of the movement reduces the protesters as ‘consumers’. This reduces them to someone who simply needs to be plugged into a service grid.
However, the protesters demand that this is about MORE than simply requiring services; a recognition of citizenship and a demand for increased democracy.
Katz (2004)
Example: The World Social Forum
Emerged following the anti-globalization protests in 1999
It has its roots in Latin American activism
The forum contests the monopolization of knowledge about development by international institutions
Seeks democracy, abolition of debt, freedom from poverty and equal rights
Also seeks to increase meaningful participation in development
“It’s not about the First and Third World, North and South. There is a section of the population that is just as present in the US and in Britain – the homeless, unemployed people, on the streets of London – which is also there in the indigenous communities, villages and farms of India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mexico, Brazil. And all those who face the backlash of this kind of economics are coming together – to create a new, people-centred world order”
La Via Campensina
La Via Campensina is an international movement that brings together millions of peasants, farmers, landless people, women and indigenous people from around the world.
Defends small-scale sustainable agriculture as a way to promote social justice and dignity. Strongly opposes corporate agriculture and TNCs that are ‘destroying people and nature’. Has a clear south-south focus- build alliances across the global south.
Routledge (1998)
There is no pure space outside of capitalism to critique it; it is a lot more complicated than simply resisting capitalism
Social movements can be understood as geo-politics from the bottom up. They tell us a lot about larger, broader questions of geo-politics.
“In contrast to official political discourse about the global economy, these challenges articulate a ‘globalization from below’ that comprises a ‘geopolitics from below’ – an evolving international network of groups, organizations and social movements”
Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST)
A Landless Rural Workers movement in Brazil- set up in 1985.Comprises those overlooked in state-centred ‘development’: croppers, casual pickers, farm labourers and those dispossessed of their land by commercial agriculture or mechanisation.
Brazil’s largest commercial agricultural enterprises (1.6% of farms) hold 53.4% of agricultural land. MST targets vast estates that lie unused by private landowners. Using illegal land invasions to carry out their own land reform.
This movement seeks to mobilise the excluded. 250,000 families have won land-titles to over 15 million acres as a result of MST. However, 4.8 million farmers still have no access to land.
Ejercito Zapatista Liberación Nacional (EZLN)
Declared non-violent war against Mexican government in 1994. Resisted free trade agreements (particularly those imposed by NAFTA)
• Mainly indigenous (Mayan) people
• BUT has extensive international links
Based in Chiapas: among poorest states where resources were ruthlessly exploited. Neoliberal principles of NAFTA have had negative impacts on agricultural prices & markets.Also considered the ecological and cultural impacts of this exploitation
Organised protests to highlight the economic, ecological and cultural exploitation of Mayan peoples/peasants for the enrichment of national and international markets.
This is a great example of globalized resistance; it attracted national and international media attention. A war of word and images
Developed an alternative vision of development- based upon Mayan principles of reciprocity.
Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA)
The Save Narmada Movement (NBA) was formed in 1985 in India. The Narmada River Valley project was funded by US$450m loan from the World Bank.
The Project threatened massive ecological damage & displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them poor and indigenous. The construction of 30 major dams along sacred river and its tributaries
• Flooding of fertile lands
• Submergence of long established towns and villages
• Many evictions.
NBA has disrupted construction, blockaded roads and used mass demonstrations to halt construction & protect sacred lands.
Silvey and Rankin (2010)
There is an increasing need to focus on…
A) Subaltern spaces of struggle
B) Imaginaries of development
C) Discourses and practices created by social movements
“Attention to the geographies and histories of these movements can contribute to ongoing efforts to decolonize the political geographic imaginaries of critical development studies”
Nilsen (2016)
Development is at the core of a form of discursive power that enables and undergirds western domination in and of the world-system. Hope is located in the resistance that is mounted by social movements that reject the normalizing power of development.
For Escobar (1995), a progressive future is not to be forged through the construction of ‘development alternatives, but in alternatives to development, that is, the rejection of the entire paradigm altogether. It is social movements that will craft these alternatives to development.
Popular social forces in the global South have contested the neoliberal development regime from its early origins until its present crisis-ridden impasse. Initial subaltern resistance to neoliberalism took the form of ‘IMF riots’ and ‘austerity protests’, which rallied the urban poor, the working classes and at times also segments of the middle classes in opposition to the distributional outcomes of SAPs
These movements mobilized a wide array of subaltern groups (peasants and landless workers, women, informal sector workers, unemployed workers, slum dwellers, indigenous peoples, and marginalized youth) around sets of radical claims and practices that challenged the anti-politics of the neoliberal development regime in significant ways.
Escobar (2004)
If the ‘end the Third World’ signals something new, there is little agreement about this newness and the theoretical and political needs that it demands. For some an entirely new paradigm is not only needed but already on the rise. Others speak of the need for a new horizon of meaning for political struggle after the ebbing of the dream of national sovereignty through popular revolution.
Many of today’s social movements not only build on practices of difference, they also enact a different logic of politics and collective mobilization. This logic has two related dimensions; first, these movements often entail the production of self-organizing, non- hierarchical networks.
Additionally, in many cases they enact a politics of place that contrasts with the grandiose politics of ‘the Revolution’ and with conceptions of anti-imperial politics that require that empire be confronted in its totality.
The goal of many (not all) of the anti-globalization struggles can be seen as the defense of particular, place-based historical conceptions of the world and practices of world-making. These struggles are place-based, yet transnational.
EXAMPLE: Social movements of black communities in the Colombian Pacific
This movement, which emerged in the early 1990s as a result of the deepening of the neoliberal model granted cultural and territorial rights to ethnic minorities such as the black communities of the Pacific. It was from the very outset conceived as a struggle for the defense of cultural difference and of territories.
The movement has since emphasized four rights: to their identity (hence, the right to be different), to their territory (as the space for exercising identity), to a measure of local autonomy, and to their own vision of development.
The movement has developed a unique political-ecology framework that articulates the life project of the river communities—embedded in place-based notions of territory, production systems, and the environment—with the political vision of the social movement, incarnated in a view of the Pacific as a ‘region-territory of ethnic groups’.
In this way the movement can legitimately be interpreted in terms of the defense of practices of cultural, economic and ecological difference.
Koopman (2015)
In the last 10 years there has been a broadening of what counts as “doing politics,” such that it includes social movements. What counts as a social movement, how to categorize such movements, and even what they should be called have been contested, both by academics and by activists.
In the last 15 years it has become more and more possible for groups to self‐organize, informally and transnationally. Information and communication technologies have played a key role in this new era of looser linked organizing
BUT space remains a key part of how social movements create change, whether the best way to think of that in the case of a given movement is some combination of scale, territory, network, place, or assemblage. Solidarity builds connections across difference and distance. The practices, emotions, and imaginaries involved in those connections work to change uneven relationships between here and there, us and them.
Paudel (2016)
Beginning in an attack in 1996, the Maoist revolution in Nepal had spread across the country. Armed warfare lasted for more than a decade and ended with a peace agreement in 2006. Since then the Maoists have become one of the mainstream political forces in the country.
The dominant argument has been that the emergence of the Maoist revolution was the consequence of a long-standing ‘crisis of underdevelopment’ in Nepal. BUT, this argument neglects more than two centuries of alienating politics, exploitation and agrarian transformations that produced a series of uprisings in Nepal.
Example: Thabang School- a locus of peasant consciousness
This was where the armed Maoist uprising started in the early 1990s. It has a long history of rebellion against the state and feudal landlords
Thabang School generated critical consciousness and rebellious politics in the region. Established in 1961, the school represented a successful transition of power and a new era among the Thabang villagers and was applauded by the state.
The government officials believed that the school would teach these trouble- making Thabang peasants about how to follow the government rule. But the school taught ‘a rebellious literacy, stronger than before.
The Thabang School operated as an important ideological apparatus of the village and became the locus of rebellions. The school transcended the Thabang boundary and emerged as a regional locus, connecting multiple villages and peasant groups into revolutionary networks.
