Development and Change最新文献

India's struggle for independence held the promise of an end to poverty and redemption from the communal-cum-class-based inequality which had kept the peasant economy backward. But the planned substitution of the agrarian-rural fabric for an industrial-urban way of life failed to materialize. Casualization and contractualization of waged work indicated that labour had become thoroughly commodified in a state of ongoing footlooseness. It was a proletarianization which did not allow for the collective action precondition to raise and settle the social question. The onslaught of neoliberal capitalism in the last quarter of the 20th century ended the brokerage of the nation state to secure the interests of labour next to those of capital. Less than 10 per cent of the workforce has continued to enjoy formalized occupational engagement, mainly in the downgraded public economy. Corporate capital in collusion with statist autocracy has not only effectuated the deregulation of employment but also abandoned the legal code of formality. The outcome is a state of lawlessness for the people at the bottom of the pile. Besides big business, politics and governance are identified in this reconfiguration as stakeholders in a brutal regime of informality, erosive of equality, democracy, welfare and civil rights.

Development is an important, yet contentious word, in the history of post-colonial Sri Lanka. Typically, it is linked with economic progress and societal change, intricately woven into political processes and frequently utilized as a platform to promote Sinhala-Buddhist ethnonationalist agendas. This article looks at post-colonial Sri Lanka's ‘core development project’ — the Mahaweli Development Programme — and its post-war revival with the military as a key actor. Through a detailed ethnographic study, it traces the way in which the military assumed extraordinary powers and became vital to the post-colonial project of development and the militarized practices that enabled this. The author argues that this project of militarized development unfolds in a fourfold manner: by normalizing the presence of the military; by ensuring the military is seen as charitable; by blurring the boundaries between the military and civilians; and lastly by portraying the work carried out by the military as transformative. The article concludes by demonstrating that this militarized project of development is the latest iteration of the long-standing post-colonial project of Sinhala-Buddhist state expansion, enabled through development.

This article considers the challenge of ensuring that international reparations payments are effective in benefiting the recipient countries of such reparations. To guarantee that these financial flows provide long-term benefits to the recipient economies, the article recommends the adoption of a developmental state approach to the use of the funds. It also considers in detail the advantages of establishing a Bank of International Reparations that serves as a trustee for the receipt and distribution of reparations, facilitates coordination of the use of reparations across countries to avoid disadvantageous forms of competition, provides investment banking services to support the use of the reparations to fund a domestically focused ‘sovereign wealth fund’, and provides ‘public option’ commercial banking services to recipient country firms in order to foster the growth of recipient country economies. Finally, the article finds that the most effective means of funding the reparations would be to use Special Drawing Rights (or SDRs).

In 2015 the German government acknowledged that the Empire committed genocide in its colony South West Africa, known since its independence as Namibia. This acknowledgement marked a new reference point in how to engage with colonial crimes. Since then, Germany has fallen short of bearing full and unconditional responsibility for and recognition of the crime in terms of restorative justice. While Germany deserves credit for its commemoration and remorse over the Holocaust during World War II, victims of other forms of extermination with the intent to destroy still crave adequate recognition, commemoration and compensation in the form of reparations. This article presents the Namibian case to illustrate the contradictions and limitations that emerge when general notions are tested and undermined by asymmetric power relations of Realpolitik.

This article uses Mercado Libre, the leading digital platform company in Latin America, as an illustrative case to analyse the effect of regional platforms on development, by considering their interplay with both global leaders and local actors. Building on dependency theory, the article identifies the company's structural dependence on algorithms and computing power provided by the largest information technology (Big Tech) companies in the United States. Nonetheless, it also finds that Mercado Libre is at the frontier in applied data analysis solutions tailored for its businesses. Together with a privileged access to personalized and cross-fertilized market and financial datasets, the company's internal and purchassed technologies are the source of asymmetric relationships with its platforms’ users. The article conceptualizes Mercado Libre's place in digital capitalism as extractivist with local actors and, just like local elites when dependency theory was first formulated, it is complicit with global powers. But, unlike those elite firms, it is not technologically laggard, and its value capture is underpinned by its technological advantage. Thus, this article conceptualizes (digital) dependency as multiple layers of economic power in which leading firms from the peripheries occupy intermediate and interconnecting positions. It shows that, while these regional leaders operate at the technological frontier, economic power relations based on technological asymmetries remain crucial for studying underdevelopment.

The World Bank-funded Bisri Dam in Lebanon represents an emblematic case of a high-modernist project that has foundered on a mix of hydrogeological recalcitrance, popular opposition and compounding crises. Examining the popular contestation surrounding the Bisri Dam, this article offers a socio-ecological material lens on post-colonial state building and the political economy of infrastructural failure. Avoiding the analytical impasse of crisis epistemes and heuristics of failure within the long tradition of development studies on the Global South in general, and Lebanon in particular, the article poses a number of questions. How are ‘crises’ and ‘failures’ constitutive of capitalist development, and for whom are they generative? How can the ubiquitous failures of the promises of infrastructure become an opportunity for the re-animation, re-appropriation and re-politicization of hydrogeologies and political imaginaries? Rather than perceiving them as aberrations, the author argues that failures are constitutive of high-modernist infrastructural development, its liberal prescriptive techno-political models, and the speculative logics of endless ruination. Yet, failures can also become generative, instigating new political imaginaries and historical subjectivities. The article pays special attention to competing modalities of power, focusing on the collective power of oppositional groups, coupled with the material recalcitrant power of local hydrogeology, in resisting unviable, speculative infrastructure.