DISP: Rethinking Development's Archives

Introduction

The word “development” is associated with many different meanings – political, social, economic, environmental, and the list continues on forever. Its definition is ambiguous, complex, and often contested. Development has historically been used as a political and intellectual agenda for the purpose of achieving an “advanced” state on par with the United States and Western Europe. This “developed” state includes, a functional capitalist economy in place and consistently growing, political sovereignty from other nation states, advanced technological infrastructure, systems of governance that promote social rights, high education rates, literacy rates, and life expectancies. The paradox of this mainstream definition of development is that it is contingent upon a comparison to “underdevelopment”. The bifurcation between the “Global North” and “Global South” is fundamental to traditional understandings of development. Through this framework, development is obsolete; it has always simply been a fantasy that was constructed to posit the United States and Western Europe as superior to all other countries and to convince newly decolonial nations to aspire to attain the development ideal.[1] This project seeks to interrogate the idea of development through an alternative lens, specifically focusing on keywords and their relationship to a more critical understanding of development. Rather than conceptualizing development as primarily economic, I sought out sources that focused on more of a social understanding of development. My understanding of development centers people and relationships to each other, land, language, art, self, and culture in creating systems of care that provide for all people equitably[2].

The texts that I have chosen each correlate to one or more of four keywords: gender, dignity, modernization or progress, and sovereignty. In my attempts to categorize the expanse of material that I found relating to these terms, I had difficulty. These concepts do not exist in vacuums, and their linkages are often as important or even more fruitful than the concept independently. For example, you will see that many of the texts intersect with gender in the dignity, modernization, and sovereignty categories. Most of the authors that I ended up selecting for this collection were women; this was intentional as I tend to gravitate to theory that is informed by feminist thinking. I also did this to challenge preconceived notions regarding scholarship by women in the Middle East. I believe each of these sources in some way either challenges or expands upon the understandings of development established by the Western canon.

All of these texts are geographically focused on the region known as “the Middle East”. I use this term intentionally for communicative purposes, acknowledging that its use may reproduce the dominance of this contested label. Understandings of which countries constitute the Middle East are variable and malleable due to its colonial construction. For the purposes of this collection, the “Middle East” refers to Western Asia and North Africa. This choice to include parts of North Africa that may not have always been considered part of the Middle East relates to the temporal demarcations I have decided on. Most of these sources are quite contemporary, many of them post-2011 when the Arab Spring occurred. The revolutions of the Arab Spring began in Tunisia and spread throughout the region, so North African countries play an important role. For a deeper critical analysis of the construction of this geographic region, I suggest geographer Karen Culcasi’s text “Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-) Cartographies of an Imperialist Construction”.[3] In this text, she analyzes mapping done from within the states of the Western constructed “Middle East” to conclude that the term “Arab Homeland” is used more in their cartographic discourse. However Culcasi also notes, “Yet the Arab Homeland, like any imagined community, is a fluid spatial entity that is replete with generalizations and contradictions,” in reference to the many non-Arab peoples who live within the constructed Arab Homeland as well as the diversity within Arab populations themselves.

I specifically chose to focus my efforts on finding scholarship from the Middle East because as a South Asian Muslim woman living in the United States, the “terrorist” rhetoric that plagues Muslims and people perceived to be from the Middle East is tied to my own experience. Deconstructing that violent narrative is extremely important to me, and I felt that a beautiful way to do that would be to collect some of the rich scholarship on development coming from the region and diasporic populations. Many of the authors to these texts are women which, as I previously explained, was intentional in countering the Orientalist notion that Middle Eastern women are docile and unable to do anything in such a patriarchy. As these women show, they are many of the leaders of resistance movements both in the streets and in scholarship.
 
[1] Refer to Sachs, Wolfgang. The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books, 1992.
[2] For further reading on critical development theory, refer to Veltmeyer, H. (Ed.), Bowles, P. (Ed.). The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies. London: Routledge, 2018.
[3] Culcasi, Karen. “Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-) Cartographies of an Imperialist Construction”. Antipode 44, no. 4 (2012): 1099-1118. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00941.x C.

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