Development studies have sometimes been presented as a set of social practices which are concerned with helping or changing peoples and places in the Third World—a noble ambition, it used to be thought, but one now widely condemned as elitist, ethnocentric, and dirigiste. Modernisation theories have not been alone in attracting such criticism, Marxist development studies have also reached an impasse, and confidence in their supposed metanarratives has not been improved by the collapse of many socialist economies. In place of these modernist discourses we are now being presented with (amongst other things) a seemingly atheoretical populism—which triumphs a localist activism—and a cacophony of voices from the diverse traditions of postmodernism and postcolonialism. The project of ‘development’ is being rendered problematical in a way that it rarely was previously in the postcolonial period. In this paper, I explore the impasse in Marxist development studies and welcome the impetus behind many of these new voices (including new voices from the periphery). At the same time, I am concerned to promote a radically modernist post-Marxism in which the deepening logics of time-space compression that bind together the modern world economy are recognised and in which the obligations that some peoples and institutions should hold to distant (and not so distant) strangers are voiced. In this manner, I resist the nihilistic relativism which underpins some aspects of the new ‘antidevelopmentalism’. I also place geography at the centre of an argument for a minimally universalist account of human needs and our responsibilities to them.
Poor people confront the state on an everyday basis all over the world. But how do they see the state, and how are these engagements conducted? This book considers the Indian case where people's accounts, in particular in the countryside, are shaped by a series of encounters that are staged at the local level, and which are also informed by ideas that are circulated by the government and the broader development community. Drawing extensively on fieldwork conducted in eastern India and their broad range of expertise, the authors review a series of key debates in development studies on participation, good governance, and the structuring of political society. They do so with particular reference to the Employment Assurance Scheme and primary education provision. Seeing the State engages with the work of James Scott, James Ferguson and Partha Chatterjee, and offers a new interpretation of the formation of citizenship in South Asia.
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