What are the key features of post colonialism?
- Focus on culture, identity and discourse (How discourses around colonialism are structured; Why is it that articles that champion colonialism it is ok, but if someone ridicules the holocaust it is a problem?)
- Critiques Western-centric IR theory and development
- Provides a critical account of history
- Stresses the study of areas and individual experiences
What is Decolonization?
- Quest for self-determination, especially after WWII
- Proceeded at varying speeds
- Relied on differing strategies
- Myriad outcomes – from protracted civil wars and ‘failed states’ to successful economic powers
What is absolute poverty?
A standard of poverty that is based on an income level or access to resources, especially food, clothing, and shelter, which are insufficient to ‘keep body and soul together’ (need for water, food, shelter)
What is relative poverty?
A standard of poverty in which people are deprived of the living conditions and amenities which are customary in the society to which they belong (medium incomes in every country)
What is positive freedom?
Freedom defined in terms of self-realization and the development of human capacities; freedom to be or do something
- Opportunities to get resources to get out of poverty → resources are often there, just not accessible to everyone
What is the Orthodox view of development?
- Milbank Memorial Fund (1948) = duty of developed to help.
- Economic Development – stage theory of modernisation (Rostow) (consumption society). This is however not how the developed countries had developed themselves.
- British Commonwealth, trusteeship and ‘cumination’ of empire.
- Based on Gross National Product -> building economy macro-economically, free market principle.
- Comprehensive and integrated.
What are Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs)?
- From 1970s, IMF & World Bank – conditional loans
- Political and economic reform + austerity + ‘labour flexibility’
> ‘Labour flexibility’ → no minimum wage; cheap labour and no labour unions → opens up these countries to the global economy - 1990s; IMF and World Bank admit failure of SAPs
- Since 2002, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs)
What are critiques on Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs)?
- Resulted in greater poverty + exposed countries to enhanced competition
- Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) focused on generating consumer goods and not on social infrastructure
- SAPs focused on interests of donor states
- A lack of empirical evidence in favour of SAPs
What are the Millennial Development Goals (MDGs) and what were its main goals?
- Long term development agenda
- 8 core goals to be met by 2015
- Approved by UN General Assembly in Dec. 2000
- Replaced by the SDGs
Aims:
- Inject new momentum into tackling development with clear targets
- Establish an open trading and financial system that is rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory
What are critiques on the Millennial Development Goals (MDGs)?
- MDGs paint a partial and misleading picture of development; e.g. halving global poverty due to China and India’s growth
- Data on MDGs is unreliable
- Aid levels per developed country remain too low → puts long-term development at risk
What is the dependency/world systems theory?
- Dependency: relation between core and periphery: need to develop within themselves to break free from core countries
- World systems theory: countries that help development between core and periphery
> Questions what is development and who get to define development.
Failure of economic strategies, e.g. debt trap.
Inequality between core and periphery.
Capitalism does not promote development but dependency.
What is the Marshall Plan?
Development aid for Europe to build up economy was way less than US aid to Third World.
What are two strands of alternative development thinking?
- Radical: anti-western, anti-corporate, emphasis on self-management and environmentalism
- Reformist: modifying orthodox development
What is the development strategy of UN agencies, NGOs, civil society & resistance groups?
Key principles: bottom-up
- Human-centred view of poverty
- Self-reliance rather than dependency
- Ecological balance, sustainability and conservation
How does the 3rd world define its role in the Cold War according to Gaddis?
- Manipulating superpowers; play one side off against the other
- Misperception of interests of 3rd world
- Peripheral
How does the 3rd world define its role in the Cold War according to Saull?
- Central – key flashpoints → where big things happened (Cuban missile crisis)
- Resistance to US-led capitalist system is what it is driving interests of 3rd world states
What was the Bandung Conference of 1955?
- Celebrating the demise of formal colonialism
- Continued struggle against neoimperialism
- Sowed the seeds of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)
- Communist China embraces 3rd world
What are the main goals of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)?
Goals:
- Disarmament
- Anti-alliances
- Elimination of colonialism
- Self-determination, e.g. Palestine
- Democratizing UN
How did the NAM split up?
1983 7th NAM meeting
- Undermining core goals, e.g. China’s nuclear arsenal
- NAM split into pro-neoliberal and pro-communist factions
- Both superpowers endeavoured to exacerbate these splits – politically, economically and militarily
- Success of Japan and the ‘Asian tigers’
- Communist china opening up and reform under Deng Xiaoping
What is a failed state and what are its characteristics?
- A nominally sovereign state that is no longer able to maintain itself as a viable political and economic unit.
- State that has become ungovernable and lacks legitimacy.
- Can be regional or international, not just a domestic problem.
Characteristics:
- Cannot provide basic needs or essential services.
- Have no functioning infrastructure.
- Without credible system of law and order.
- Involves great suffering of civilians.
Causes of state failure: decolonisation, democratisation, mismanagement, corruption, global capitalist system (debt).
