james ferguson

from The Anti-Politics Machine

Like "civilization" in the nineteenth century, "development" is the name not only for a value, but also for a dominant problematic or interpretive grid through which the impoverished regions of the world are known to us. Within this interpretive grid, a host of everyday observations are rendered intelligible and meaningful. Poor countries are by definition "less developed", and the poverty and powerlessness of the people who live in such countries are only the external signs of this underlying condition. The images of the ragged poor of Asia thus become legible as markers of a stage of development, while the bloated bellies of African children are the signs of social as well as nutritional deficiency. Within this problematic, it appears self-evident that debtor Third World nation-states and starving peasants share a common "problem", that both lack a single "thing": "development".