The Dictionary of Human Geography (9 page)

anti-development
A body of work and practice that is fundamentally opposed to mainstream conceptions of dEVELOPMENt. Standard accounts of development assume that people's lives will be improved to the extent that they are linked to others by efficient systems of economic production and exchange, and by capable systems of govern ment. Development presumes an extension of scale in social life. With this comes a surrender of power to experts and more abstract social forces such as the financial system or the state. Anti developmentalists have opposed these notions for several reasons. As early as 1908, Mohandas Gandhi raged against the introduction of manufacturing into India in his essay Hind Swaraj (Gandhi, 1997 [1908]). It was dehumanizing, he said, and removed the possibility of living a virtuous life, which revolved around self provisioning and religious contemplation in a village setting. There are echoes of this complaint in Tolstoy and Ruskin and other parts of the Western pastoral tradition. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Modern anti developmentalism continues to draw on Gandhi, but it also draws on more contemporary critiques by Schumacher, Illich, Berry and others. For the Indian public intellectual Ashis Nandy (2003), develop mentalism is a violent set of social practices that denies space to other accounts of being human. The violence that Nandy refers to is an originary violence that resides in the will to power that development must embody. By this yardstick, efforts to promote human develop ment or sustainaBLe deveLopment are oxy moronic. Development is opposed to humanity and to forms of life lived in harmony with other beings, and hence the call for its negation. Other versions of anti development strike a more populist note. Development is condemned less for its intrinsic violence for creating what Esteva and Prakash (1998) call the ?cold calling card mentality of the modern West? than for its self satisfied service on behalf of the global rich. In the words of Gus tavo Esteva, ?If you live in Rio or Mexico City, you need to be very rich or very stupid not to notice that development stinks.' (NEW PARAGRAPH) Critics of anti development believe that it is all but impossible to opt out of some version of development, and/or that some versions of development have empowered poorer people in countries as diverse as Costa Rica, Botswana and Taiwan (Kiely, 1999). Life expectancies in India and China increased by more than twenty five years over the period from 1950 to 2000, the so called ?Age of Development'. If there is room for criticism of ?the? development discourse, it needs to be promoted within the framework of post deveLopment, or as a series of (NEW PARAGRAPH) alternatives to mainstream conceptions of development. sco (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Nandy (2003); Power (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
anti-globalization
A set of political positions that articulate resistance and alternatives to neo liberal or capitalist gLoBaLization. A range of international initiatives have cohered since the 1970s, such as the international anti corporate boycott of Nestle between 1977 and 1984, the riots against internationaL monet ary fuNd (imf) structural adjustment programmes throughout the global South during the 1980s and the formation of Via Campesina an international farmers? network (Starr, 2005). A key moment was the emer gence in 1994 of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, which has demanded indigenous rights and the democratization of Mexican civil and political society, as well as articulating both a critique of the globally dom inant economic process of neo LiBeraLism, and a vision of an alternative politics (Routledge, 1998). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The emergence of neo liberal globalization as the globally hegemonic economic model has prompted the upscaling of previously local struggles between citizens and governments, international institutions and transnational corporations to the international level, as marginalized groups and sociaL movements have begun to forge global networks of action and solidarity. ?Anti globalization? is a mis nomer, since such groups struggle for inclusive, democratic forms of globalization, using the communicative tools of the global system such as the internet. What they are expressly against is the neo liberal form of globalization. Hence a more accurate term is ?grassroots glob alization? (Appadurai, 2000), although other popular names have included ?globalization from below? (Brecher, Costello and Smith, (NEW PARAGRAPH) , ?movement of movements? (Mertes, (NEW PARAGRAPH) and the global justice movement (see www.globaljusticemovement.net). (NEW PARAGRAPH) By taking part in grassroots globalization networks, activists from participant move ments and organizations embody their par ticular places of political, cultural, economic and ecological experience with common con cerns, which lead to expanded spatiotemporal horizons of action (Reid and Taylor, 2000). Such coalitions of different interests are neces sarily contingent and context dependent, forms of solidarity being diverse, multiple, productive and contested (Braun and Disch, 2002; Featherstone, 2003; Mertes, 2004). They are dynamic, negotiated ?convergence spaces? of multiplicity and difference, con structed out of a complexity of interrelations and interactions across all spatial scales (Routledge, 1998). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Grassroots globalization networks have been manifested in ?global days of action?, which have consisted of demonstrations and direct actions against targets that symbolize neo liberal power, such as the G8 (e.g. pro tests in Genoa, Italy, in 2001 and Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005), the worLd trade organ ization (protests in Seattle, USA, in 1999, Cancun, Mexico, in 2003 and Hong Kong in (NEW PARAGRAPH) and the World Bank and the IMF (e.g. protests in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2000 and Washington, USA, in 2002 and 2005). Such protests have been characterized by a convergence of interests and concerns in the particular place of protest, and solidarity protests that have occurred in cities across the globe at the same time. The symbolic force generated by protests in such places has contributed to further mobilizations and the creation of common ground amongst activists. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Another important manifestation has been the establishment in 2001 of the world social forum (wsfm) an annual convergence of (NEW PARAGRAPH) NGOs, trades unions, social movements and other resistance networks in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2001 3), and subsequently in Mumbai, India (2004). The WSF attempts to engender a process of dialogue and reflection, and the transnational exchange of experiences, ideas, strategies and information concerning grassroots globalization. The WSF (which attracted tens of thousands of participants in (NEW PARAGRAPH) has decentralized into regional and the matic forums that are being held in various parts of the world, such as the European Social Forum in Florence, Italy (2002), the Asian Social Forum in Hyderabad, India (2003), and the Thematic Forum on Drugs, Human Rights and Democracy in Cartagena, Colombia (2003) (Sen, Anand, Escobar and Waterman, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Mary Kaldor (2003) posits that such devel opments represent the emergence of a ?global civiL society? that includes at least six differ ent types of political actor that are ?anti globalization? in outlook: more traditional social movements such as trades unions; more contemporary social movements such as women?s and environmental movements; NGOs such as Amnesty International; trans national civic networks such as the Inter national Rivers Network; ?new? nationalist and fundamentalist movements such as Al Qaeda; and the anti capitalist movement. Meanwhile, Amory Starr (2000) identifies at least three different strategic foci within the ?anti globalization movement?: (i) Contestation and Reform, which involves social movements and organizations that seek to impose regula tory limitations on corporations and or gov ernments, or force them to self regulate, mobilizing existing formal democratic chan nels of protest (e.g. Human Rights Watch and the Fair Trade network); (ii) Globalization from Below, whereby various social movements and organizations form global alliances around such issues as environmental degrad ation, the abuse of human rights and labour standards, to make corporations and govern ments accountable to people instead of elites (e.g. the Zapatistas, labour unions or the WSF); and (iii) De linking, Relocalization and Sover eignty, whereby varied initiatives articulate the pleasures, productivities and rights of localities and attempt to de link local economies from corporate controlled national and international economies (e.g. permaculture initiatives, com munity currency, community credit organiza tions, sovereignty movements especially those of indigenous peoples and various religious nationalisms; see also Hines, 2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Despite such diversity, certain key areas of agreement have emerged, such as demands for (i) the cancellation of foreign debt in the developing world (which amounted to US $3,000 billion in 1999); (ii) the introduction of a tax on international currency transactions, and controls on capital flows; (iii) the reduction in people?s working hours and an end to child labour; (iv) the defence of public services; (v) progressive taxation to finance public services and redistribute wealth and income; (vi) the international adoption of enforceable targets for greenhouse emissions and large scale in vestment in renewable energy; (vii) policies that ensure land, water and food sovereignty for peasant and indigenous people; and (viii) the defence of civil liberties (Callinicos, 2003; Fisher and Ponniah, 2003). At the root of such demands is the perceived necessity to reclaim and protect common resources and rights seen as directly under threat of erasure or ap propriation by the processes and agents of neo liberal globalization. pr (NEW PARAGRAPH)
anti-humanism
A critique of humanism that seeks to displace the human subject as the centre of philosophical and social enquiry. Knowledge and understanding, morality and ethics, and interpretation are all challenged by (NEW PARAGRAPH) a rethinking of notions of agency, rationality and subjectivity. While ?anti humanism' is a term that can encompass a range of different perspectives, it generally takes its philosoph ical basis from Friedrich Nietzsche's thinking through of the death of God. For Nietzsche, it was not enough to replace God at the centre with the human but, rather, the implications needed to be thought through more funda mentally. Martin Heidegger's 1947 ?Letter on Humanism? (see Heidegger, 1991[1947]) was a major influence on a generation of French writers such as Michel Foucault (1970 [1966]) and Jacques Derrida (1982b), collectively identified under the sign of post structuraLism, whose reformulations proved influential in the Anglophone academy. The white, male, heterosexual adult who is gener ally a cipher for the ?human' of classical hu manism has also been criticized from a range of perspectives. Not all of these take the strong anti humanist perspective that denies agency and responsibility, which is often seen as pol itically disabling, but the challenge to the uni versalizing tendencies of classical humanist reasoning has been pervasive. In Human geog rapHy, this critique has led to a broadly under stood postHumanist tradition. se (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Soper (1986). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
apartheid
A political and legal system of racial classification, spatial separation and discrimination against black South Africans. Associated with the white minority National Party that came to power in 1948, apartheid policies built on pre existing forms of racial segregation and dispossession, but took them in new directions. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Dismissing presumptions of South African exceptionalism, Mamdani (1996) maintains that apartheid was simply a variant of indirect rule through which colonial power operated in other parts of africa (see coLoniaLism). While acknowledging these continuities, Alex ander (2002, p. 140) insists that ?the fact of a large population of European descent [ . . . ] does make all the difference'. So, too, do the interconnections between institutionalized ra cism and forms of cLass exploitation that char acterized apartheid. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Apartheid officially died in 1994, when the African National Congress (ANC) received overwhelming support in South Africa's first non racial election, which marked the transi tion to liberal democracy. Yet apartheid re tains a powerful afterlife in terms of persistent racial, spatial and economic inequalities in South Africa, and as emblematic of ongoing forms of racialized oppression around the world. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gross violations of Human rigHts commit ted during the apartheid era were the focus of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which has become a model for coun tries all over the world seeking to come to terms with histories of violence. Between 1996 and 1998, the TRC received 20,000 statements from victims and nearly 8,000 applications for amnesty from perpetrators. In her compelling account of the TRC, Krog (2000) illuminates its accomplishments, limi tations and ambiguities, along with chilling testimonies of many who bore the brunt of state sanctioned violence. The final report of the TRC, submitted in 2003, recommended that the government pay some US $375 mil lion in reparations, and that businesses that had benefited from apartheid policies make reparations through a special wealth tax. Presi dent Thabo Mbeki authorized a one time pay ment of R30,000 (approximately US $5,000) to each of about 22,000 people defined as victims of apartheid, but refused to impose a tax on businesses. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The debate over apartheid reparations over laps with the ANC government?s controversial embrace of a conservative package of neo liberal macro economic policies in 1996 (Bond, 2000; see neo LiBeraLism). The post apartheid era has seen the rapid emergence of an African middle class and a small but extremely wealthy corporate black elite. Yet huge numbers of black South Africans remain in impoverished conditions in poorly serviced and densely populated townships, rural reserves and slum settlements. Persistent poverty and inequality have prompted some critics to argue that there has been a shift from race to cLass apartheid, while others contest this formulation. Since 2001 many oppositional movements have arisen demand ing access to resources, and fierce protests have erupted in many different parts of the country. Despite these challenges, the ANC continues to exercise considerable hegemonic power a testimony, perhaps, to the ongoing importance of nationaLism, grounded partly in histories and memories of the struggle against apartheid. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Global apartheid, some maintain, is a more adequate description of the current world order than apparently race neutral terms such as gLoBaLization or neo liberalism, and can also bolster efforts to transform global (NEW PARAGRAPH) minority rule. Experience in post apartheid South Africa has much to contribute to strug gles aimed at deepening democracy and chal lenging inequality. gha (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Beinart (2001); Hart (2003); Marais (2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH)