Abstract
The financial global crisis of 2007–2008 revealed the need for a new vocabulary and analytic grammar that could be the basis for alternatives to capitalism. The editors of Beyond Colonialism, Development and Globalization embrace this task, offering us a collection of texts that resulted from a collective project based on individual grants from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The main focus of the book is to report local concrete social struggles and social movements that challenge and criticize the hegemonic institutional and organizational discourse and practices on development.
In the first introductory chapter Caouette and Kapoor show how what they call the development industry is based on liberal modernity and how it evolved to the notion of globalization, reproducing the logic of modernization, progress, productivity and scientific rationalism. They also clearly present the basic argument of the book, mainly that colonialism, development and globalization are reductionist and universalizing projects rooted in economic and cultural liberalism and fetishizing progress and growth. They proceed to analyse the critical views on development: constructivism and development; beyond development; postcolonial feminist perspectives; subaltern studies and indigenous perspectives. And, although the book editors state that all authors converge on the ideas and practices of local praxis, identity, collective action, learning and pedagogy and situated knowledge, there is no explicit assumption of the theoretical approach that guides all contributions in the book or the proposal of a new theoretical and integrated perspective.
The book is then divided in three parts: Indigenous and peasant movement perspectives; Acting across borders; and Reflections on critical knowledge, culture and pedagogy. The chapters that constitute the three parts are well articulated although the reader can sense, in some discussions, the need for more intertextuality and mutual knowledge of the findings and propositions put forward. Also, Part III, in the overall economy of the book and its main purpose, is the least achieved, sliding in some instances to esoteric analysis and propositions (e.g. the chapter by Brian Murphy).
Part I contains three chapters based on case studies in India, Ghana and Bolivia. The chapter authored by Dip Kapoor on subaltern social movements and development in India is one of the best in the book, sustained by solid empirical research on the Adivasi and Dalit social movements in South Orissa. The chapter successfully shows how local leaders and activists engage with dispossession of meaning as a core struggle, and summarizes very well the results as an ongoing political subaltern activism (p. 42). If Kapoor had stressed the theoretical and pragmatic differences of subaltern social movements, the chapter could have gained a deeper reflection on the bridges and implications of these findings for new social movements theory.
Chapter 3 by Jonathan Langdon analyses grounded social movements defending Songor lagoon in Ghana. Theoretically it resorts to James Ferguson’s notion of topographic power and Foucault’s local subjugated knowledges. Langdon nevertheless manages empirically to show the limits of Ferguson’s approach, emphasizing how local coalitions and the notion of access to natural resources embedded in local history can resist the dynamics of transnational corporate powers.
Chapter 4 by Stéphanie Rousseau on indigenous movements in Bolivia is less anchored on fieldwork and assumes a more descriptive and macro view. It is a good contribution for studies on the way social movements institutionalize themselves based on broad and conflicting coalitions and how they contribute to the rebuilding of the state.
Part II contains five chapters. These chapters present competent analysis on the main subjects, namely Via Campesina (Chapter 5), food sovereignty movements (Chapter 6), neoliberal immigration in Canada (Chapter 7), migrant women in South-East Asia (Chapter 8) and the case of the World Social Forum (Chapter 9), but do not bring challenging new findings, theoretical breakthroughs or grounded analysis of counterhegemonic narratives or practices. The chapters’ main contribution is to highlight how difficult it is to establish successful transnational social movements that go beyond local, regional and national constraints. The exception seems to be Via Campesina, as it created unity within diversity contributing decisively to the debate on food sovereignty and sustainable and alternative economic systems.
Part III has five chapters, including the conclusion by Dominique Caouette (Chapter 14). These chapters are uneven in their contribution, from a reflection on liberating development from the rule of episteme (Chapter 10) to globalization and culture in Africa (Chapter 12). The innovative contribution comes from Sandy Grande and Naadli (Todd Ormiston) with their proposal to indigenize David Harvey’s theory of accumulation by dispossession, showing that it goes way back to settler colonialism. As an alternative they propose a Kaupapa Maori praxis (p. 216) and a Red Pedagogy of self-determination and decolonization (p. 218). These set the bases, recurring to the past to imagine common features, for alternative grammars and narratives, counter-hegemonic thinking and practices and effective ways to resist predatory activities by global capitalism.