Imagining a Post-Development Era? Critical Thought, Development and Social Movements

Abstract

For some time now, it has been difficult at times even impossible to talk about protest or revolution with the same confidence and encompassing scope with which intellectuals and activists spoke about these vital matters in our most recent past. It is as if the elegant discourses of the 1960s the high decade of both Development and Revolution had been suspended, caught in mid air as they strove toward their zenith, and, like fragile bubbles, exploded, leaving a scrambled trace of their glorious path behind. Hesitantly perhaps, but with a persistance that has to be taken seriously, a discourse has set in. Where one spoke of Development or its flip side, Revolution one is now allowed to speak a very different language: that of the crisis of on the one hand, and new social actors and new social movements, on the other. In fact, many scholars seem to be proposing a radical reinterpretation of social and political reality based on a set of categories such as alternative development, identities, radical pluralism, historicity and hegemony. In the previous period, from the early post-War years to the end of the 1970s, the relation between truth and reality that characterized political discourse was relatively clear and direct. Development was chiefly a matter of capital, technology, and education and the appropriate policy and planning mechanisms to successfully combine these elements. Resistance, on the other hand, was primarily a class issue and a question of imperialism. Nowadays, this transparency has been muddled, and even imperialism and class are thought to be the object of innumerable mediations. But while research and inquiry into the nature of resistance and political practice have been quite alive and growing, the same is not true for the area of development. A problematization of the nature of popular resistance and mobilization, and of intellectuals' understanding of them, has resulted in ways of thinking these issues, especially in relation to social movements. The theory of social movements has become, particularly in Western Europe and Latin America, but also increasingly in other parts of the Third World, one of the key arenas for social