The Dictionary of Human Geography

Comp. by: LElumalai Stage : Revises1 ChapterID: 9781405132879_4_A Date:31/3/09
Time:21:44:15 Filepath://ppdys1108/BlackwellCup/00_Blackwell/00_3B2/Gregory-
9781405132879/appln/3B2/revises/9781405132879_4_A.3d

that people’s lives will be improved to the

extent that they are linked to others by

efficient systems of economic production and

exchange, and by capable systems of govern-

ment. Development presumes an extension of

scale in social life. With this comes a surrender

ofpowerto experts and more abstract social

forces such as the financial system or the

state. Anti-developmentalists have opposed

these notions for several reasons. As early

as 1908, Mohandas Gandhi raged against

the introduction of manufacturing into India

in his essay Hind Swaraj (Gandhi, 1997

[1908]). It was dehumanizing, he said, and

removed the possibility of living a virtuous

life, which revolved around self-provisioning

and religious contemplation in a village

setting. There are echoes of this complaint

in Tolstoy and Ruskin and other parts of

the Western pastoral tradition.

Modern anti-developmentalism continues

to draw on Gandhi, but it also draws on

more contemporary critiques by Schumacher,

Illich, Berry and others. For the Indian public

intellectual Ashis Nandy (2003), develop-

mentalism is a violent set of social practices

that denies space to other accounts of being

human. The violence that Nandy refers to is

an originary violence that resides in the will to

power that development must embody. By this

yardstick, efforts to promote human develop-

ment orsustainable developmentare oxy-

moronic. Development is opposed to

humanity and to forms of life lived in harmony

with other beings, and hence the call for its

negation. Other versions of anti-development

strike a more populist note. Development is

condemned less for its intrinsic violence – for

creating what Esteva and Prakash (1998) call

the ‘cold calling-card mentality of the modern

West’ – than for its self-satisfied service on

behalf of the global rich. In the words of Gus-

tavo Esteva, ‘If you live in Rio or Mexico City,

you need to be very rich or very stupid not to

notice that development stinks.’

Critics of anti-development believe that it is

all but impossible to opt out of some version

of development, and/or that some versions

of development have empowered poorer

people in countries as diverse as Costa Rica,

Botswana and Taiwan (Kiely, 1999). Life

expectancies in India and China increased

by more than twenty-five years over the

period from 1950 to 2000, the so-called

‘Age of Development’. If there is room for

criticism of ‘the’ developmentdiscourse,it

needs to be promoted within the framework

of post-development, or as a series of

alternatives to mainstream conceptions of

development. sco

Suggested reading

Nandy (2003); Power (2003).

anti-globalization A set of political positions

that articulateresistanceand alternatives to

neo-liberal or capitalist globalization.A

range of international initiatives have cohered

since the 1970s, such as the international anti-

corporate boycott of Nestle ́between 1977 and

1984, the riots againstinternational monet-

ary fund (imf) structural adjustment

programmes throughout the global South

during the 1980s and the formation ofVia

Campesina– an international farmers’ network

(Starr, 2005). A key moment was the emer-

gence in 1994 of the Zapatista rebellion

in Chiapas, Mexico, which has demanded

indigenous rights and the democratization of

Mexican civil and political society, as well as

articulating both a critique of the globally dom-

inant economic process ofneo-liberalism,

and a vision of an alternative politics

(Routledge, 1998).

The emergence of neo-liberal globalization

as the globally hegemonic economic model has

prompted the upscaling of previously local

struggles – between citizens and governments,

international institutions and transnational

corporations – to the international level, as

marginalized groups andsocial movements

have begun to forge global networks of action

and solidarity. ‘Anti-globalization’ is a mis-

nomer, since such groups struggle for inclusive,

democratic forms of globalization, using the

communicative tools of the global system

such as theinternet. What they are expressly

against is the neo-liberal form of globalization.

Hence a more accurate term is ‘grassroots glob-

alization’ (Appadurai, 2000), although other

popular names have included ‘globalization-

from-below’ (Brecher, Costello and Smith,

2000), ‘movement of movements’ (Mertes,

2004) and the global justice movement (see

http://www.globaljusticemovement.net).

By taking part in grassroots globalization

networks, activists from participant move-

ments and organizations embody their par-

ticular places of political, cultural, economic

and ecological experience with common con-

cerns, which lead to expanded spatiotemporal

horizons of action (Reid and Taylor, 2000).

Such coalitions of different interests are neces-

sarily contingent and context-dependent,

forms of solidarity being diverse, multiple,

productive and contested (Braun and Disch,

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_A Final Proof page 31 31.3.2009 9:44pm

ANTI-GLOBALIZATION