Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples

by Mark Duffield

Overview

According to politicians, we now live in a radically interconnected world. Unless there is international stability – even in the most distant places – the West's way of life is threatened. In meeting this global danger, reducing poverty and developing the unstable regions of the world are now imperative. In what has become a truism of the post-Cold War period, security without development is questionable, while development without security is impossible.

In this accessible and path-breaking book, Mark Duffield questions this conventional wisdom and lays bare development not as a way of bettering other people but of governing them. He offers a profound critique of the new wave of Western humanitarian and peace interventionism, arguing that rather than bridging the lifechance divide between development and underdevelopment, it maintains and polices it. As part of the defence of an insatiable mass consumer society, those living beyond its borders must be content with self-reliance.

With case studies drawn from Mozambique, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, the book provides a critical and historically informed analysis of the NGO movement, humanitarian intervention, sustainable development, human security, coherence, fragile states, migration and the place of racism within development. It is a must-read for all students and scholars of development, humanitarian intervention and security studies as well as anyone concerned with our present predicament.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745657936
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	08/23/2013
Sold by:	JOHN WILEY & SONS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	381 KB

About the Author

Mark Duffield is Professor of Development Politics at the University of Bristol.

Table of Contents

Preface     viii
List of abbreviations     xi
Introduction: Development and Surplus Life     1
Foregrounding the liberal problematic of security     2
Linking biopolitics, liberalism and development     4
Surplus population and accumulation by dispossession     9
Slavery and excess freedom     12
Separating development and underdevelopment biopolitically     16
The divergence of insured and non-insured life     19
From internal war to global instability     24
Occupation and contingent sovereignty     27
Disturbing the boundaries of time and space     29
NGOs, Permanent Emergency and Decolonization     32
Total war and the paradox of biopolitics     34
NGOs and total war     36
The colonial inheritance     39
Expansion without imperial reconciliation     42
Emergency and the dilemma of development     46
Cold War liminality and non-state sovereignty     51
Sustainable development: knowledge makes free     55
The question of agency: being the right type     59
Postscript     64
The Emergence of Contingent Sovereignty     66
From modernization tosustainable development     67
Emergency and contingent sovereignty     70
Negotiated access and the humanitarian boom     75
Contingent sovereignty and the external frontier     78
Mozambique, Governmentalization and Non-material Development     82
The background to a 'complex emergency'     83
The changing relationship with NGOs     87
War and the destruction of culture     92
The re-emergence of social cohesion     96
Opposing economic differentiation     98
Non-material development     101
Gender, natural economy and land     105
Concluding remarks     109
Human Security and Global Danger     111
Human security as a technology of governance     112
Internal war and the crisis of containment     115
Globalizing versus containing tendencies     119
Reinstating the state     121
Containing underdevelopment     123
Unending war, human security and NGOs     126
Concluding remarks     131
Afghanistan, Coherence and Taliban Rule     133
From negotiation to coercion     133
The strategic framework for Afghanistan     137
Development and security in practice     142
Aid and peace-building in a failed state     144
The limits of principled engagement     146
The problematization of state-based politics     151
UNSMA and the critique of aid     154
Concluding remarks     157
Fragile States and Native Administration     159
Fragility and global instability     160
Contingent sovereignty and non-material development     163
The governance state     165
The fragile state and liberal imperialism     170
Technologies of post-interventionary governance     180
Concluding remarks     182
Racism, Circulation and Security     184
The collapse of the national-international dichotomy     185
From race war to racism     188
Liberalism, imperialism and culture     191
Decolonization and the new racism     197
Racism and anti-racism     200
Conjoining the internal and external frontiers     203
Migration and the European state of exception     206
The changing regime of internal development     209
Concluding remarks     213
Conclusion: From Containment to Solidarity     215
The biopolitics of insured and non-insured life     216
Development and emergency     218
Governmentalizing petty sovereignty     220
The biopolitics of unending war     223
Is there an alternative development?     227
The solidarity of the governed     232
References     235
Index     256

Editorial Reviews

This book should certainly appear on reading lists as an important counterpoint to more optimistic liberal internationalist and cosmopolitan approaches.”
Times Higher Education

“Duffield’s book turns the liberal vision of the world upside down.”
Survival

“Mark Duffield has written a brilliant book which draws together the strings of the end of the Cold War, the securitization of politics, the development of a neo-liberal discourse of humanitarian intervention, and the fusion of the national and the international. Particularly compelling is his contrarian view of the consequences of the liberation of the UN from the shackles of the Cold War.”
Janice Stein, University of Toronto

“Once again, Mark Duffield has gone beyond the platitudes of 'development speak', 'security speak' and 'humanitarian speak'. The book is crammed with insights and with challenges to received wisdom.”
David Keen, London School of Economics and Political Science

“Humanitarian and development aid and actors as counterinsurgency: in this carefully documented but devastating analysis of the people-centred technology of security for the West since the mid-1990s and its historical context, Duffield provides both practitioners and scholars with an interpretive framework for the new North–South division and consequences of liberal internationalism that is original and challenging and which demands serious debate.”
Susan L. Woodward, City University of New York

From the Publisher