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Decolonising Development Studies

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Abstract

This article explores ways of decolonising Development Studies by: (1) examining the discipline’s tendencies towards what some have called ‘imperial amnesia’, that is, proclivities towards disavowing if not erasing European colonialism, most evident in 1950s–1960s Modernisation theory, but also more recently in the work of such analysts as Bruce Gilley and Nigel Biggar; (2) considering the opportunities and perils of ‘epistemic decolonisation’, that is, ways of decolonising knowledge production in the discipline, including the limits of ‘non-Eurocentric’ pedagogies; and (3) reflecting on forms of material decolonisation (e.g., the reduction of socioeconomic inequalities by improving better access to education or resisting the corporatisation of publicly funded research) that need to accompany any epistemic decolonisation for the latter to be meaningful.
Review of International Studies (2023), 49: 3, 346–355
doi:10.1017/S026021052300013X
FORUM ARTICLE
Decolonising Development Studies
Ilan Kapoor
Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Toronto, Canada
Corresponding author: Email: ikapoor@yorku.ca
(Received 16 June 2021; revised 30 March 2023; accepted 30 March 2023)
Abstract
is article explores ways of decolonising Development Studies by: (1) examining the discipline’s tenden-
cies towards what some have called ‘imperial amnesia’, that is, proclivities towards disavowing if not erasing
European colonialism, most evident in 1950s–1960s Modernisation theory, but also more recently in the
work of such analysts as Bruce Gilley and Nigel Biggar; (2) considering the opportunities and perils of
‘epistemic decolonisation’, that is, ways of decolonising knowledge production in the discipline, including
the limits of ‘non-Eurocentric’ pedagogies; and (3) reecting on forms of material decolonisation (e.g., the
reduction of socioeconomic inequalities by improving better access to education or resisting the corporati-
sation of publicly funded research) that need to accompany any epistemic decolonisation for the latter to
be meaningful.
Keywords: Corporate Publishing; Decoloniality; Decolonisation; Development Studies; Epistemic Decolonisation; Free
Public Databases; Imperial Amnesia; Material Decolonisation; Open Access; Perils of non-Eurocentric Pedagogies
Introduction
We live in globally unsettling times: the advance of capitalist globalisation has caused the unmoor-
ing of social and cultural values and institutions across the planet, while at the same facilitating
the rapid ow of information and communication. Although such instability is viewed as a dan-
ger in some quarters giving rise to a conservative cultural backlash that seeks stable identity and
the preservation of tradition and privilege, in others it is seen as an opportunity if not a boon
enabling, for example, the unravelling of deeply held prejudices and power inequalities. e lat-
ter position is one that many of us on the academic Le are likely to endorse for being modern
and ‘progressive’; yet, it is not one without its own perils, including the peril to which so many
movements for change have oen succumbed the replacement of old power inequalities with
new ones.
In what follows, I consider the presence of both these sets of predilections and perils in an
attempt to decolonise my own academic discipline: Development Studies. I begin by asking why it
is important to decolonise that discipline in these times, pointing to current (conservative) tenden-
cies towards what some have called ‘imperial amnesia, that is, proclivities towards disavowing if not
erasing European colonialism, most evident in 1950s–1960s Modernisation theory, but also more
recently in the work of such analysts as Bruce Gilley and Nigel Biggar. I then consider the opportu-
nities and perils of epistemic decolonisation, that is, ways of decolonising knowledge production
in the discipline, including the limits of non-Eurocentric’ pedagogies. I conclude by reecting on
forms of material decolonisation (e.g., the reduction of socioeconomic inequalities by improving
better access to education or resisting the corporatisation of publicly funded research) that need to
© e Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association. is is an Open
Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which
permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052300013X Published online by Cambridge University Press
Review of International Studies 347
accompany any epistemic decolonisation for the latter to be meaningful in these globally unsettling
times.
Why decolonise?
e need to decolonise Development Studies stems, in my view, from the recognition that it is a
discipline rooted in the signicant historical power inequalities between the West and the ird
World’, inequalities that some continue to deny even today. Several analysts1argue, in fact, that
Development Studies and its associated science/social science disciplines are (neo)colonial dis-
ciplines par excellence: they carry the baggage of imperial plunder (colonial resource extraction
in favour of Europe’s industrialisation process) and colonialisms civilising mission (making the
colonial subject in the image of white, European ‘man’). To be sure, teams of botanists, ecol-
ogists, engineers, anthropologists, sociologists, archaeologists, and economists were an integral
part of the institutional apparatus that helped colonise Latin America, Asia, and Africa. ese
experts’ helped in establishing the institutional mechanisms (‘modern educational systems, sci-
entic’ forestry, agro-industry, art and archaeological conservation and collection, railway and
shipping systems, etc.) required for surplus extraction. ey not only helped record, categorise, and
discipline colonial subjects according to European norms and frameworks (e.g., belief in ‘Western’
science, progress, private property, patriarchal inheritance laws), but in so doing also ensured the
neglect if not erasure of non-European, and especially Indigenous epistemes.
Rather than confronting and coming to terms with this colonial legacy, Development Studies
has tended to sanitise or ignore it. Indeed, the discipline can be said to have been founded on
such sanitisation, emerging as it did in the post-Second World War period, when aid to ‘under-
developed’ areas became vital to containing what the US and other Western powers saw as Soviet
expansionism. Modernisation eory which pioneered development as an academic eld, and
has anchored Western foreign policy and development institutions ever since bears the strong
imprint of such Cold War politics. As many scholars have argued,2Modernisation tends to take a
decidedly post-Second World War view of history, thus avoiding the history of Western colonial-
ism. For instance, Walt Rostow’s e Stages of Economic Growth so inuential in economic and
foreign policy circles fails to deal with colonial rule in any meaningful way. It’s not that he doesn’t
mention colonialism at all; he does, but its signicance is notably downplayed. In a short section on
‘Colonialism, he goes so far as to state that colonies were founded for ‘oblique reasons and colonial
subjects ‘looked kindly’ on the coloniser’s eorts to organise suitable political frameworks.3
But such disavowal continues in various guises even today. It is visible in World
Bank/International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programmes, which make no mention
of, or allowances for, the fact that the West’s colonial plunder might have something to do with the
recipients current socioeconomic conditions. And it is evident in World Trade Organization trade
deals, which so oen assume a global economic level playing eld in their pursuit of ‘free trade,
1Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1967);
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1979); Arturo Escobar, ‘Discourse and power in development:
Michel Foucault and the relevance of his work to the ird World’, Alternatives, 10 (1984), pp. 377–400; Arturo Escobar,
Encountering Development: e Making and Unmaking of the ird World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995);
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993); Aníbal Quijano, Coloniality
of power and Eurocentrism in Latin America, International Sociology, 15:2 (1 June 2000), pp. 215–32; Walter D. Mignolo, Local
Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border inking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2012); Maria Lugones, ‘e coloniality of gender, in Wendy Harcourt (ed.), e Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development
(London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 13–33.
2Samuel J. Valenzuela and Arturo Valenzuela, Modernization and dependency: Alternative perspectives in the study of
Latin American underdevelopment, in M. A. Seligsa and J. T. Passé-Smith (eds), Dependency and Underdevelopment (Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998); Andre Gunder Frank, ‘e development of underdevelopment’, Monthly Review, 41:2
(1 June 1989), pp. 37–52; Escobar, Encountering Development, pp. 14–15.
3Walt W. Rostow, e Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1960), p. 110.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052300013X Published online by Cambridge University Press
348 Ilan Kapoor
essentially amounting to trade freed’ of any past colonial entanglements. Robert Fletcher4calls
such persistent sanitisation of colonialism, ‘imperialist amnesia. He analyses the work of several
development/globalisation pundits to drive home the point: New York Times columnist omas
Freidman, former World Bank economist Paul Collier, and economist and UN advisor Jerey
Sachs, all of whom treat wealth accumulation in the Global North or poverty in the Global South
by omitting consideration of the imperialist extraction of resources from the ‘ird World’.
More recently, in the wake of the rise of right-wing, neopopulist, and anti-immigrant jingo-
ism across the globe (espoused by the likes of Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Duterte, Erdo gan, Orbán,
Farage, Golden Dawn, Vox, etc.), we are witnessing more of the same: reminiscent of the 1980s
culture wars in the US, there has been a noteworthy growing cultural backlash (especially in
Europe and North America) on university campuses against the multiculturalisation of teaching
pedagogies and the emergence of Indigenous, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Studies. is back-
lash translates not so much as amnesia about colonialism, but a highly selective reading of it
awhitewashing if you will. For example, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has defended British
colonial rule as a positive force,5as has his English compatriot, Andrew Roberts, who has gone so
far as to claim that concentration camps set up during the South African Anglo-Boer War were
‘run as eciently and humanely as possible.6In Holland, similarly, historian Pieter Emmer has
rebued criticisms of Dutch colonialism, championing its many civilising’ benets (e.g., telephone
lines, railroads, and modernised health care, education and agriculture), and trivialising the Dutch
role in the slave trade.7And at Oxford University, theology professor Nigel Biggar has launched a
project on ‘Ethics and Empire’ whose aim is to rehabilitate the British Empire as a progressive force
by constructing a ‘balance sheet’ of the rights and wrongs of colonialism.8
Let me dwell a little though on the work of one of the latest revisionists of colonial history,
US-based academic Bruce Gilley, whose infamous journal article, ‘e Case for Colonialism,9has
caused notable uproar in development circles and beyond. Like several of his predecessors, Gilley
carries out a putatively‘objective cost-benet analysis of colonialism, nding that the overall bene-
ts outweigh the costs, so much so as to venture an argument for re-colonisation: Colonialism can
4Robert Fletcher, ‘e art of forgetting: Imperialist amnesia and public secrecy’, ird World Quarterly, 33:3(1April 2012),
pp. 423–39.
5Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, UK: Penguin, 2003).
6Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia, A History of theEnglish-Speaking Peoples since 1900 (London, UK: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson,) 2006, p. 31.
7Pieter Emmer, e Dutch Slave Trade, 1500–1850 (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2006); Paul Doolan, ‘Pride, Shame,
and White Fragility in Dutch Colonial History’, Imperial & Global Forum (blog) (14 May 2019), available at: {https://
imperialglobalexeter.com/2019/05/14/pride-shame-and-white-fragility-in-dutch-colonial-history/} accessed 1 June 2021.
8McDonald Centre, ‘Ethics and Empire: Project Description’, available at: {https://www.mcdonaldcentre.org.uk/ethics-and-
empire} accessed 9 June 9 2021; Nigel Biggar, ‘Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history’, e Times (30 November 2017),
available at: {https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/don-t-feel-guilty-about-our-colonial-history-ghvstdhmj} accessed 12 May
2021; see also John Reynolds, ‘Colonial apologism and the politics of academic freedom, in David Landy, Ronit Lentin, and
Conor McCarthy (eds), Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel (London, UK: Zed, 2020),
pp. 155–82.
9Bruce Gilley, ‘e case for colonialism, Academic Questions (June 2018), available at: {https://www.nas.org/academic-
questions/31/2/the_case_for_colonialism} accessed 23 January 2019. Note that this article was rst published in ird World
Quarterly in 2017, but was subsequently removed in the face of sti opposition and controversy. See Vimal Patel, A revolt
at a journal puts peer review under the microscope’, e Chronicle of Higher Education (26 September 2017), available
at: {https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-revolt-at-a-journal-puts-peer-review-under-the-microscope/} accessed 12 January
2021; Shree Paradkar, ‘How an article defending colonialism was ever published is a mystery roiling academia: Paradkar’,
e TorontoStar (21 S eptember2017), available at: {https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/09/21/how-an-article-defending-
colonialism-was-ever-published-is-a-mystery-roiling-academia-paradkar.html} accessed 12 May 2018; L isa Ann Richey et al.,
Academic Neocolonialism: Clickbait and the Perils of Commercial Publishing’, Aidnography (blog) (27 March 2019), available
at: {https://aidnography.blogspot.com/2019/03/academic-neocolonialism-clickbait-perils-publishing-third-world-quarterly-
richey-simon-kapoor-ponte.html} accessed 13 February 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052300013X Published online by Cambridge University Press
Review of International Studies 349
be recovered by weak and fragile states today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of gov-
ernance; by recolonizing some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from scratch.10 e
big methodological problem though is that there is nothing objective about his approach. Even
leaving aside the belief that you can assign weights’ to historical phenomena, much depends on
how you do so, and which events you include or exclude from your tally. How does one quantify
the violence, racism, and anti-democratic rule of colonialism (e.g., the human costs of 13 million
African slaves shipped mainly to the Americas between 1526 and 1867; the deindustrialisation of
much of the periphery in favour of British and European manufactured exports, leaving hundreds
of millions unemployed and impoverished across the colonies; or the four million deaths in the
great Bengal Famine of 1943 aer Winston Churchill diverted food away from Bengal in favour
of British soldiers)?11 In assessing the benets of ‘modern agricultural production in the colonies,
how does one account for colonial rule’s heavy reliance on coerced labour (slavery, debt bondage,
indentured labour)?12 Gilley and his ilk willfully ignore such signicant methodological and fac-
tual details. As with all positivist approaches like theirs, the mistaken belief is that historical events
can be abstracted from their contexts, or that the systemic violence of colonialism can be compared
to the building of railways and schools, or worse still, omitted altogether. Nathan Robinson puts it
this way: ‘Gilley has deliberately excluded mention of every single atrocity committed by a colonial
power. Instead of evaluating the colonial record empirically, he has distorted that record, conceal-
ing evidence of gross crimes against humanity. e result is not only unscholarly, but is morally
tantamount to Holocaust denial.13
It seems plain that impoverished historical revisionism such as Gilley’s is galvanised not so
much by scholarly insights or the search for historical accuracy as by neopopulist ideological
inclinations a clinging to tradition, a defence of patriarchy and privilege, a resistance to the
socioeconomic changes wrought by globalisation. It is hardly accidental that Gilley and his fel-
low revisionists are all white men, their polemical defence of empire predictably displaying the
hallmarks of right-wing nationalism in the form of postcolonial guilt and ‘white fragility’.14 eir
conservative cultural backlash is, in this sense, symptomatic of our times, underlining once again
why Development Studies needs to continue to be decolonised: to gain further insight into our
global colonial past; to better understand the patterns of colonial domination that stretch into the
present; and perhaps most importantly, to struggle against continuing structures of socioeconomic
and cultural inequality and injustice.
How to decolonise
My colleague (and friend), Olivia Rutazibwa, whose arguments I otherwise readily endorse, sug-
gests that one way to decolonise Development Studies is to ditch it: ‘we need to nd ways to go
beyond critiquing and deconstructing it, and seriously considering getting rid of it we need to
10Gilley, ‘e case for colonialism’.
11See Eric Eustace Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (3rd edn, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021);
Shashi aroor, ‘Viewpoint: Britain must pay reparations to India’, BBC News (22 July 2015), sec. India, available at: {https://
www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-33618621} accessed 3 May 2020; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
(Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2018); Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Colonialism and Indian Economy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2011); Ra ul Prebisch, e Economic Development ofLatin America and Its PrincipalProblems (Lake Success, NY:United Nations
Dept. of Economic Aairs, 1950).
12Pepijn Brandon and Aditya Sarkar,‘Labour history and the case against colonialism’, International Review of Social History,
64:1 (April 2019), pp. 73–109.
13Nathan Robinson, A quick reminder of why colonialism was bad’, Current Aairs (14 September 2017), available at:
{https://www.currentaairs.org/2017/09/a-quick-reminder-of-why-colonialism-was-bad} accessed 12 May 2018; See also
Vijay Prashad, ‘ird World quarterly row: Why some Western intellectuals are trying to debrutalise colonialism’, Scroll
(21 September 2017), available at: {https://scroll.in/article/851305/third-world-quarterly-row-why-some-western-
intellectuals-are-trying-to-debrutalise-colonialism} accessed 20 May 2018.
14Robin J. DiAngelo and Alex Tatusian, White Fragility (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018).
https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052300013X Published online by Cambridge University Press
350 Ilan Kapoor
ght the desire to hold on to Development Studies, cut the umbilical cord with this discipline .15
I think this is a mistake: her claim appears to be anchored in the belief that if only we could elimi-
nate the old discipline, we will nally be able to construct some new eld of study ‘in which many
worlds are possible.16 To the contrary, I would argue that until and unless we meaningfully face
and come to terms with the failures and crimes of development, we will not learn from them, with
the result that any new’ discipline will reproduce them in novel ways. Is not the rise of right-wing
revisionist colonial history precisely the consequence of inadequately confronting past inequali-
ties and injustices? It is because such inequalities continue in the present that the privileged (and
revisionists) want to perpetuate them. In this sense, cutting the umbilical cord with developments
past is what ensures the return of the repressed.
I would like to suggest instead two closely linked approaches for decolonising Development
Studies: epistemic and material, each with its own strengths and pitfalls, and each attempting to
face and come to terms with development’s colonial past and neocolonial present.
Epistemic decolonisation and its perils
Epistemic or discursive decolonisation is about addressing the Western domination of knowl-
edge systems: this concerns not just the Eurocentrism of our curriculum, but also coming to
terms with the fact that colonialism has ignored or erased many non-Western and Indigenous
knowledge systems (languages, ways of knowing and learning, storytelling, art and architecture,
health and medicinal knowledge banks, farming and shing practices, etc.). e idea here is to
expand and democratise the Development Studies canon by retrieving non-Western and sub-
altern/Indigenous texts, writers, and practices. is has been a signicant part of the work of
Postcolonial Studies, and more recently of Decolonial, Indigenous, and Black Studies. e renewed
interest in, and validation of, such writers and thinkers as Fanon, Mahasweta Devi, Achebe, El
Saadawi, Iqbal, Rumi, Mudimbe, Wynter, Bomm, and Martí, or of such ‘traditional’ subaltern
practices as community shing and forestry, Indigenous medicine, and Ayllus and Markas of
Tawantinsuyu self-governance, are cases in point. e objective is not simply to diversify the
curriculum or sanction non-Western and subaltern knowledge, which can sometimes amount to
tokenism and assimilation, but in so doing to also broaden what and whose voices count as knowl-
edge by making Development Studies which has tended towards too narrowly focusing on the
Western and the economic more meaningfully inclusive and interdisciplinary.17
Radical Black and Indigenous scholars18 have elaborated decolonising methodologies in knowl-
edge production, bringing attention to ‘white normativity’, that privileges a (most oen bourgeois,
15Olivia Rutazibwa, ‘On babies and bathwater: Decolonizing International Development studies’, in Sara de Jong,
Rosalba Icaza, and Olivia Rutazibwa (eds), Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning (Abingdon, UK:
Routledge, 2019), p. 162.
16Ibid., p. 162.
17See de Jong, Icaza, and Rutazibwa (eds), Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning. See also the
contributions of Kristina Hinds, Ajay Parasram, and Somdeep Sen in this forum.
18Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living ought in Trying Times (London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge,
2015), pp. 85–6 (p. 59); Lewis R. Gordon, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge,
2020); Sylvia Wynter, ‘Is “development” a purely empirical concept or also teleological? A perspective from “we the under-
developed”’, in Aguibou Y. Yansané (ed.), Prospects for Recovery and Sustainable Development in Africa (Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1996), pp. 299–316; Sylvia Wynter, ‘Towards the sociogenic principle: Fanon, identity, the puzzle of con-
scious experience, and what it is like to be “black”’, in Mercedes Durán-Cogan and Antonio G omez-Moriana (eds),
National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America (New York, NY: Routledge, n.d.), pp. 30–66; Robbie Shilliam,
‘Black/academia, in Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nisancioglu (eds), Decolonising the University
(London, UK: Pluto Press, 2018), pp. 53–63; Robbie Shilliam, Decolonizing Politics: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2021); Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, ‘Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation’,
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3:3 (21 November 2014), pp. 1–25; Deborah McGregor, Jean-Paul Restoule,
and Rochelle Johnston (eds), Indigenous Research: eories, Practices, and Relationships (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press,
2018).
https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052300013X Published online by Cambridge University Press
Review of International Studies 351
male-centred, and secular) Western perspective as the standard of development, while exoticis-
ing, inferiorising, and marginalising non-white and Indigenous worldviews and practices. ey
suggest alternative, decolonising methodologies that situate academic research within the wider
context of (neo)colonial histories and take into account the power dynamics involved in knowl-
edge production, including eldwork’. For example, Linda Tuhiwai Smith19 prioritises the project
of Indigenous self-determination, requiring the academic researcher to be held accountable to the
Indigenous communities under study, rather than drawing on the latter as yet another cultural
resource for the benet of the academy. And Kerry Pimblott20 highlights the signicance of mak-
ing visible the historical role of the university itself in racism and (neo)colonialism: exposing, for
instance, the role of Victorian scientists in the development of race-based science and eugenics.
e point here is to see our institutions of higher learning as laboratories themselves for learning
about the power and the colonial dynamics of knowledge production.
Such a decolonisation of pedagogy and curriculum can (and needs to) oen be accompanied
by broader discursive/institutional struggles on university campuses to overhaul teaching and hir-
ing practices. e goal here is to rethink, for example, the privileging of theory and what counts
as theory21 as well as valorise alternative modes of knowledge production and learning (visual,
oral, and experiential learning, storytelling, critical thinking, etc.) to account for the multiple ways
in which knowledge is constructed, learned, and communicated in both the Global North and
South. Integral to such diversication of knowledge are changes in faculty hiring practices that
have tended, at least in the West, to privilege white (and mostly male) applicants towards one
that not only prioritises but specically targets applicants along class, gender, sexual, disability,
Indigenous, and racialised lines. A socially diverse teaching faculty, to be sure, is one that is better
able to produce and teach knowledge that critically reects the global and social diversity intrinsic
to Development Studies.
Of noteworthy concern in Development Studies is that the knowledge of Global South scholars
still largely remains marginalised and racialised. One recent study22 indicates, for example, a sharp
decline in the number of publications by Africa-based scholars over the last twenty years in such
top African journals as African Aairs and the Journal of Modern African Studies, with researchers
in Africa typically publishing and being cited at a far lower rate than researchers based in other
continents. e onus thus falls on the likes of us Northern scholars to seek out, read, use, and
cite the important research of our Global South colleagues, and for journal and book publishing
editorial boards to diversify, as well as encourage the publication of Global South research.
But the challenge here remains about not only recognising and including Global South and
subaltern knowledge, but also meaningfully coming to terms with it: taking account of the latters
struggles and what these reveal about the global capitalist system and production of knowledge,
their patterns of exclusion and oppression. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak23 would say, it’s the dif-
ference between the subaltern speaking and the subaltern being heard: it’s not enough to simply
valorise subaltern ways of being and knowing; one has to also discern and challenge the material
19Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd edn, London, UK: Zed Books,
2012). See also Ilan Kapoor, ‘Hyper-self-reexive development? Spivak on representing the ird World “Other”, ird World
Quarterly, 25:4 (2004), pp. 627–47; and the contr ibutions of Dana El Kurd, and Lisa Ann Richey and Consolata Raphael Sulley,
in this forum.
20Kerry Pimblott, ‘Decolonising the university: e origins and meaning ofa movement’, e Political Quarterly,91:1 (2020),
p. 213.
21Harney and Moten go so far as to refuse to recognise universities as centres of critical theory, advocating instead for
the undercommons as sites where insurgent/oppressed people engage not in intellectual pursuits dictated by market and state
logics and depend on people’s oppression but self-organised spaces of learning aimed at creating new societies that avoid
being founded on others’ oppression. See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, e Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black
Study (Ivanhoe: MinorCompositions, 2013).
22Ryan C. Briggs and Scott Weathers, ‘Gender and location in African politics scholarship: e other white man’s burden?’,
African Aairs, 117: 466 (1 January 2018), pp. 168–9. See also the contribution by El Kurd in this forum.
23Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and Interpretation
of Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052300013X Published online by Cambridge University Press
352 Ilan Kapoor
and epistemic structures that subalternise in the rst place (including in the academy). us, the
proof of the decolonised pudding is when subaltern struggles such as those of the Dalit, Indigenous
poor, or Black Lives Matter actually change how we work and live how and what we study and
teach, whose voices we listen to, who we form political and institutional alliances with, when
(and if) we confront the corporatisation of the university, how eectively we dismantle socioe-
conomic, caste, and racial barriers within and outside our campuses, the extent to which we give
back the Indigenous land on which several of our universities are built (rather than merely giving
‘land acknowledgements’), and so forth. Change in the form of meaningful decolonisation will not
happen without challenge, struggle, and loss of material privilege (in favour of the subaltern).
ere is also the real danger that in retrieving subaltern voices, we as privileged Western(ised)
academics end up objectifying them as universalist gures of oppression or agency. is is visible in
certain strands of both Postdevelopment and Decolonial Studies, which sometimes resort to mak-
ing the subaltern speak by sentimentalising it. For example, Arturo Escobar and Walter Mignolo
have been taken to task for romanticising if not heroising Latin American social movements and
Indigenous groups, refraining from the slightest critique of them or admitting their challenges
and failures.24 e danger here is that we lapse into the very problem we are criticising by simply
inverting the modernity-tradition or elite-subaltern binary, that is, by ascribing our own political
agendas to the subaltern, thereby continuing to silence it.
e related danger is a certain refusal to engage with the Western canon, as if decolonisa-
tion can happen by ignoring the likes of Hegel, Weber, or Marx. Mignolo is again emblematic
of such a tendency, for example explicitly refraining from drawing on Marxist or postcolonial
theory because, according to him, each is too closely associated with metropolitan (and hence
colonial) intellectual traditions.25 e problem is not just that this type of anti-Eurocentrism is a
knee-jerk reaction to Eurocentrism, but also that we cannot ignore that postcolonial’ and ‘decolo-
nial’ critiques are, in the very intellectual background and the critical tools they depend upon,
quintessentially ‘Eurocentric’ pursuits (Mignolo appears to forget his own positioning, and that
of several other decolonial theorists, in the US/Western academy). Given the history of Western
(neo)colonialism and contemporary world dominance (despite the recent challenge of the BRICS),
we cannot escape Eurocentrism, and we should not pretend to do so. So rather than mourning
the loss of mythical precolonial roots, engaging in ressentiment (against European philosophers),
or searching for some Global South authenticity, it seems to me that one of the key tasks for
Development Studies is to fully immerse itself in the Euro-North American canon, by master-
ing the Master’s language better (or more creatively) than him. Such an argument echoes Spivak’s
about colonialism’s enabling violation and the persistent transformation of conditions of impos-
sibility into possibility’.26 Part of the challenge is to appropriate and reconstruct key elements of the
24Ray Kiely, ‘e last refuge of the noble savage? A critical assessment of post-development theory’, e European Journal
of Development Research, 11:1 (1 June 1999), pp. 30–55; Andy Storey, ‘Post-development theory: Romanticism and Pontius
Pilate politics’, Development, 43:4(1 December 2000), pp. 40–6; Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Aer post-development, ird World
Quarterly, 21:2 (1 April 2000), pp. 175–91; Ilan Kapoor, e Postcolonial Politics of Development (London, UK: Routledge,
2008), pp. 52–3; Kiran Asher, ‘Latin American decolonial thought, or making the subaltern speak’, Geography Compass, 7:12
(2013), pp. 832–42; Ilan Kapoor and Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics (Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press,
2022), pp. 94–104. One of the latest manifestations of such an uncritical decolonial politics of authenticity and romanticisation
is Walter Mignolos endorsement of a 2021 right-wing Hindu supremacist book embracing a return to Hindu epistemology,
causing Mignolo to eventually withdraw his endorsement aer a public outcry (see: {https://twitter.com/dibyeshanand/status/
1431169087023947776} accessed 21 November 2022).
25Walter D. Mignolo, e Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2011), pp. xviii, xxviii, 137; Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Delinking: e rhetoric of modernity, the logic of colo-
niality and the grammar of de-coloniality’, in Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (eds), Globalization and the Decolonial
Option (London, UK: Routledge, 2010), p. 306; Asher, Latin American decolonial thought’, pp. 838–9.
26Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York, NY: Methuen, 1987), pp. 198–201;
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, e Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds Donna Landry and
Gerald MacLean (London, UK: Routledge, 1996), p. 19.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052300013X Published online by Cambridge University Press
Review of International Studies 353
‘Western’ egalitarian and emancipatory legacy (freedom, equality, social justice), thereby reinvent-
ing that very legacy,27 opening it up so that emancipation applies not just to white Europeans, but
to all (and especially the subaltern), thereby depriving Europeans of any exclusive knowledge or
interpretation of the European canon (i.e., postcolonialising and democratising the canon, which
is to say, decolonising it).
My claim, therefore, is that if decolonising Development Studies is to happen discursively, it
would require hearing the subaltern without speaking for it, while also critically engaging with,
and thereby reinventing, the ‘Western’ canon.
Material decolonisation (and its limits)
For its part, material decolonisation involves a range of strategies at the level of the university. Such
strategies are inevitably limited since we academics are most oen conned to what happens on
our campuses, with more or less restricted control over the broader processes of political economy
that determine socioeconomic and ecological (in)equality and (in)justice. In this sense, there will
be no meaningful and sustainable decolonisation on campus without meaningful and sustainable
equality outside campus.
One worthy strategy nonetheless is the ght for better access, indeed universal access, to
higher education, particularly for marginalised populations in both the Global North and South.
Decolonisation, aer all, is not simply a ‘topic’ to be covered in classrooms but a politics aimed
at promoting access to critical learning and knowledge production by all and by the subaltern
rst. To be equitable and just, this would need to take the form of free fees or entrance scholarships
(on the basis of both merit and need), rather than loans which indebt students and bind them to
the very capitalist market that creates global inequalities and unevenness.28 Free or nominally low
tuition used to be the norm in several countries before the onset of the neoliberal university, and
still is in a few (e.g., Germany, Taiwan, Argentina, France, most Nordic countries), so this is not
an unrealistic proposition. But where free tuition is not (or is no more) the norm, it will likely
require the collective mobilisation of universities, unions, and the public to pressure the state to
make it so.
Going hand-in-hand is the ght against the neoliberalisation and corporatisation of the uni-
versity: the latter take many forms, ranging from the positioning of students as customers’ and
prioritising funding of the sciences and business at the expense of the humanities and social
sciences to quality assurance (e.g., research and grant metrics, performance-based funding, the
employment of administrators to supervise neoliberal performance)29 and subjecting research to
corporate or state security interests.30 Yet, running campuses like businesses reduces knowledge to
a commodity, valuing it for exchange rather than use/edication. It encourages private and com-
petitive behaviour, producing a disregard for the public. It constructs students as consumers and
faculty as job trainers specialists and experts’ required for solving concrete social problems. What
disappears as a result is the task of citizenship and critical thinking that undergirds the decoloni-
sation of Development Studies and beyond: not just to oer solutions to the problems given to us
by the status quo (the market and state), but to question the very construction of these problems,
the interests they defend, and the gaps and exclusions they hide and imply.
27Slavoj Ži
zek, ‘I plead guilty but where is the judgment?’, Nepantla: Views from South, 3:3 (19 December 2002), p. 580;
Slavoj Ži
zek, First as Tragedy, en as Farce (London, UK: Verso, 2009), p. 580. See also Shilliam, Decolonizing Politics, p. 17.
What is considered ‘Western’ or ‘European is itself the result of hegemonic European notions of sovereignty, which privilege
questions of space and territory, thereby neglecting the many ‘European ideas, institutions, foods, etc. (e.g., algebra, astronomy,
community forestry, the concept of zero, tomatoes, potatoes, spices) that are themselves the result of cross-border exchange,
travel, and especially commodication and appropriation of the non-European.
28Harney and Moten, e Undercommons, pp. 58.
29Gordon refers to them as the ‘academic managerial class’, Disciplinary Decadence, p. 17.
30See Jonathan Langdon, ‘Decolonising Development Studies: Reections on critical pedagogies in action, Canadian Journal
of Development Studies, 34:3 (1 September 2013), pp. 384–99.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052300013X Published online by Cambridge University Press
354 Ilan Kapoor
Finally, it is important to note the growing battle against the privatisation of university-based
knowledge. Indeed, the majority of our scholarly research, much of it publicly funded through
grants and stipends, is privately owned by corporate publishing multinationals (Reed Elsevier,
Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell, etc.). As a result, access to our research is restricted
to only those who can pay for it, with journal subscriptions now consuming about 65 per cent
of university library budgets (some science journal annual subscriptions can cost up to $21,000),
thus reducing the number of books that can be purchased.31 George Monbiot calls such a set-up
‘pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it’.32
To be sure, multinational publishers are some of the most protable companies worldwide, several
of them fetching prot margins of between 35–40 per cent.33
e encouraging news though is the increasing trend towards free access to online databases
for publicly funded research. In Europe a consortium of funders and research agencies is moving
forward with ‘Plan S’, which requires that all scientic publications supported by public grants be
published in open access journals or platforms. is initiative has been backed by state research
bodies in Zambia and China. In the US, federal government agencies are now mandated to make
all non-sensitive government data available to the public under an open format, and the University
of California system requires that any state funded research be made open access. ere are also
a number of other state and university initiatives around the world for setting up open access
repositories for publicly funded research.34 Much still needs to be done to generalise this trend,
but it constitutes an important step in helping to decolonise knowledge by making it universally
accessible.
Conclusion: Epistemic and material decolonisation
e decolonisation of Development Studies and for that matter any discipline thus involves
profound transformation, touching not only on the discipline, per se, but the personal and political,
the university and the broader political economy, the local and the global, and the Global South and
North. I have highlighted both the epistemic and the material dimensions of such transformation,
but here too, the one cannot be separated from the other: as we have seen, knowledge production
and dissemination is shaped by whether it is privatised or publicly accessible; and encountering
the subaltern depends on breaking down not just epistemic but also socioeconomic barriers.
What should not be neglected here again is that universities themselves remain deeply complicit
in the production of inequalities, not only in as far as knowledge production is concerned but also,
as Pimblott underlines, ‘in their increasingly expansive roles as employers, property developers and
asset managers.35 Rather than merely making this problem the object of criticism, it is an oppor-
tunity once again for faculty and students both to learn about, and struggle against, the political
economy that undergirds institutions of higher learning (exploitative and discriminatory employ-
ment practices, gentrication, nancialisation, corporatisation, state austerity measures, security
and surveillance, etc.), thereby linking theory and practice, ideology and materiality, academe and
31George Monbiot, Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist’, Guardian (29 August 2011), available at:
{http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist} accessed 22 June 2020.
32Ibid.
33Jason Schmitt, ‘Paywalls block scientic progress: Research should be open to everyone’, Guardian (28 March 2019), avail-
able at: {http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/28/paywalls-block-scientic-progress-research-should-be-open-
to-everyone} accessed 22 June 2020.
34See George Monbiot, ‘Scientic publishing is a rip-o: We fund the research it should be free, Guardian (13 September
2018), available at: {http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/13/scientic-publishing-rip-o-taxpayers-fund-
research} accessed 22 June 2020; Schmitt, ‘Paywalls block scientic progress.
35Pimblott, ‘Decolonising the university’, p. 215.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052300013X Published online by Cambridge University Press
Review of International Studies 355
capitalism. In this regard, as intimated earlier, Indigenous scholars36 are weary of the now per-
vasive current North American practice of giving land acknowledgements at ocial university
(and corporate) events, which, when not backed up by actual land repatriation, becomes an empty,
‘feel-good’ gesture an act aimed less at learning about and dismantling than covering up, indeed
disavowing, systems of dispossession.
us, struggling for epistemic decolonisation without struggling for material decolonisation
compromises both. In fact, to return to where we began, the current campus culture wars
(i.e., the defence of empire, the rise of neopopulist nationalism and white supremacy) are further
proof of this, demonstrating how those in positions of power seek to defend their privileges in
the face of resistance to continuing forms of socioeconomic inequality, domination, and exclusion.
Such symbolic ghts are likely to continue (on the part of the Right as much as Le) as long as
material inequality and injustice persist. Which is to say that decolonising Development Studies is
an ongoing struggle.
Ilan Kapoor is Professor of Critical Development Studies at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University,
Toronto. His research focuses on psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory and politics, and ideology critique. He is the author
of e Postcolonial Politics of Development (Routledge, 2008); Celebrity Humanitarianism: e Ideology of Global Charity
(Routledge, 2013); and Confronting Desire: Psychoanalysis and International Development (Cornell University Press, 2020);
editor of the collected volume, Psychoanalysis and the GlObal (University of Nebraska Press, 2018); and co-author, with Zahi
Zalloua, of Universal Politics (Oxford University Press, 2022); with Gavin Fridell, Maureen Sioh, and Pieter de Vries, of Global
Libidinal Economy (SUNY Press, 2023); and with Gavin Fridell of Rethinking Development Politics (Edward Elgar, forthcoming
2024).
36Michael C. Lambert, Elisa J. Sobo, and Valerie L. L ambert, ‘Rethinking Land Acknow ledgments’,Anthropology News (blog)
(20 December 2021), available at: {https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/rethinking-land-acknowledgments/} accessed
18 May 2022; Graeme Wood, “‘Land acknowledgments” are just moral exhibitionism’, e Atlantic (28 November 2021),
available at: {https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/against-land-acknowledgements-native-american/620820/}
accessed 18 May 2022.
Cite this article: Kapoor, I. 2023. Decolonising Development Studies. Review of International Studies 49, 346–355. https://
doi.org/10.1017/S026021052300013X
https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052300013X Published online by Cambridge University Press
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Abstract Building on the author's previous arguments that beginnings and framing matter in pedagogy, this article calls for a continuation of the decolonisation project that accompanied the emergence of development studies. Both the material and the discursive sides of decolonisation need to be addressed. This means not only destabilising Eurocentric conceptual frameworks, but also actively contesting the continued colonisation and inequity in university programs and campuses. Among the pedagogic approaches suggested are the inclusion of marginalised and indigenous voices in course materials, questioning the Eurocentric norms educators and students may hold, and consciously blurring the line between activism and scholarship.
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The globalization of the world is, in the first place, the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and world capitalism as a Euro-centered colonial/modern world power. One of the foundations of that pattern of power was the social classification of the world population upon the base of the idea of race, a mental construct that expresses colonial experience and that pervades the most important dimensions of world power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. This article discusses some implications of that coloniality of power in Latin American history.