Development Against Democracy - New Edition: Manipulating Political Change in the Third World - Softcover

Gendzier, Irene L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745337287 ISBN 13: 9780745337289

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2017

Synopsis

This new, updated edition of the influential Development Against Democracy is a critical guide to postwar studies of modernisation and development. In the mid-twentieth century, models of development studies were products of postwar American policy. They focused on newly independent states in the Global South, aiming to assure their pro-Western orientation by promoting economic growth, political reform and liberal democracy. However, this prevented real democracy and radical change. Today, projects of democracy have evolved in a radically different political environment that seems to have little in common with the postwar period. Development Against Democracy, however, testifies to a revealing continuity in foreign policy, including in justifications of ‘humanitarian intervention’ that echo those of counterinsurgency decades earlier in Latin America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Irene L. Gendzier argues that the fundamental ideas on which theories of modernisation and development rest have been resurrected in contemporary policy and its theories, representing the continuity of postwar US foreign policy in a world permanently altered by globalisation and its multiple discontents, the proliferation of ‘failed states,’ the unprecedented exodus of refugees, and Washington’s declaration of a permanent war against terrorism.

About this title

About the Author

Irene L. Gendzier is Professor Emerita in the Department of Political Science at Boston University, an Affiliate in Research at Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and a research affiliate of the MIT Center for International Studies. She is also the author of Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine, & The Foundations of US Policy in the Middle East (Columbia University Press 2015, 2016), Notes From the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945-1958 (Columbia University Press, 1997, 2006); and co-editor with Richard Falk and Robert Lifton, of Crimes of War: Iraq (Nation Books, 2006).

Edition details

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745337287
• ISBN 13: 9780745337289
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240