Development Against Democracy
Manipulating Political Change in the Third World
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).
Foreword by Thomas Ferguson
Introduction by Robert Vitalis
1. The 'New Look' in Development Studies
2. Making Connections
3. Discourse on Development
4. Transparent Boundaries: From Policies to Studies of Political Development
5. Defining the Parameters of Discourse
6. The Academic Translation: Liberal Democratic Theory and Interpretations of Political Development
7. The Impossible Task of Theories of Political Development
Epilogue
Notes
Index
150mm x 230mm