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Cited by 26Decolonial Thought and EpistemologiesLatin American Cultural PoliticsDevelopment, Ethics, and Society

Was postdevelopment too much? Autonomous struggle, academic coloniality & the radical roots of the pluriverse

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Dunlap, Alexander, Tornel, Carlos·2025·Globalizations
DOI 10.1080/14747731.2024.2349317
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Abstract

Where did postdevelopment thought go?Was its anti-development message too much for academia?While acknowledging some overlap between postdevelopment and mainstream academic decolonial thought, we argue that postdevelopment, and its conceptualization of the pluriverse directly challenges extractivism, statism, and capitalism or, in a word, development.After discussing aspects of mainstream decolonial thought, seven main points of postdevelopment criticism are reviewed and debunked.We demonstrate that resistance and 'attack' are enduring feature of postdevelopment praxis from the Zapatistas to the countless other (socio)ecological struggles across the world.Responding to critique, this article presents three postdevelopment practices: the Organización Popular Francisco Villa de Izquierda Independiente (OPFVII) in the Acapatzingo community, Mexico City; the Zone-to-Defend (Zone à Défendre, ZAD) concept formalized in France; and the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA) initiative.The conclusion stresses the importance of postdevelopment and a pluriverse working towards anti-capitalism/statism/extractivism/patriarchal world to avoid (neo)colonial recuperations of anti-colonial/statist struggle.

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  • Wind extractivism involves weather- and climate-altering effects with high concentrations of wind turbines.

    “Wind extractivism, as recounted previously (Dunlap, 2021b, 2023b, 2024), involves weather- and climate- altering effects with high concentrations of wind turbines.”

    From The political ecologies of "green" extractivism(s): An introduction (2024) · cites this paper as Dunlap, 2024

    The section on territorial resistance mentions Zapotec struggles against wind turbines, but does not discuss turbines altering weather or climate. Searches for wind extractivism, high turbine concentrations, and weather or climate effects found no passage addressing that claim in our copy; no page number was supplied for the relevant passage. (LLM, conf=0.75)

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    “Franz Fanon (1968/2004), Maldonado Torres (2017), and Abdenur Prado (2018) have shown how colonialism is reproduced through colonial mentalities, imaginaries, and pedagogies, where (neo)colonial institutions and philanthropy’s ‘good intentions’ have been instrumental to sustaining these extractive…”

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  • The political ecologies of "green" extractivism(s): An introduction

    Dunlap, A., Verweijen, J., & Tornel, C. (2024) · Journal of Political Ecology · doi:10.2458/jpe.6131 · Cited by 126 · see citing works

    “…colonially shaped North-South relations or various forms of internal colonization 2 (Zografos & Robbins, 2020; Fjellheim, 2023; Vela-Almeida et al. , 2023; Dunlap & Tornel, 2024), advancing the intersecting processes of green and energy colonialism (Lang et al. , 2024; Lohmann, 2024; Müller, 2024).”
    BackgroundSelf-citation

Authors
Dunlap, A., & Tornel, C.
Affiliations
  • Boston University (US)
  • Secretaría de Ciencia, Humanidades, Tecnología e Innovación (MX)
Corresponding author
Dunlap, Alexander
ORCID
Venue
Globalizations
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Published
2024-05-16
Volume
22
Issue
2
Pages
221-244
ISSN
  • 1474-7731 (ISSN-L)
  • 1474-774X
DOI
10.1080/14747731.2024.2349317
OpenAlex
W4397020829
Cited by
26
References
1
Citations by year
2026: 14 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 1
FWCI
45.44
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
Globalizations (publishedVersion, cc-by)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Latin American Cultural Politics
  • Social Sciences › Development › Development, Ethics, and Society
Keywords
post-development, pluriverse, decoloniality, extractivism, statism, anti-capitalism, Zapatista movement, resistance

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