Empowering NGOs: The Microcredit Movement Through Foucault's Notion of Dispositif

This article develops a critical response to initiatives such as microcredit. The critical tools for understanding the shifts in the development project need to be extended beyond those approaches that center on economic relations. To begin to address this need, I develop one aspect of postdevelopment literature by drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of dispositif - a task that requires some adjustments to the ways in which this concept has been used so far. The dispositif is particularly useful for engaging with the fluidity and heterogeneity of the development project and for consideration of relations of knowledge, power, and subjectivity alongside the economic. To address the question of the rise of NGOs and associated notions of autonomy and empowerment specifically, I make use of Foucault's concept of governmentality. Considering recent shifts in the development project through this lens highlights ways in which phenomena such as the rise of NGOs are not necessarily emancipatory. To the contrary, it suggests a basis for the emergence of initiatives and practices that increase the penetration of power into the social body of the Third World through the development dispositif. To demonstrate these issues and my approach I examine the Grameen Bank and microcredit movement, arguing that it is through 'empowerment' that the developmentalist subjective modality is promoted in an operation of developmentalist discipline

Culture, 'Relationality', and Global Cooperation

What is the relationship between cultural difference and global cooperation, and what challenges and opportunities does this relationship pose for cooperation research? This paper examines how culture is a potential resource for global cooperation while grappling with its enigmas and ambiguities. It explores the paradoxes of culture to argue that the partly unknowable character of the concept ‘culture’ may be an advantage for cooperation research rather than a problem to be solved. The paper casts culture and cultures as examples of a wider class of ‘relational’ phenomena that arise through interaction and that rely upon this interaction for their standing. This proposition foregrounds relations over entities, becoming over being, and dynamism over fixity in line with a range of contemporary philosophical developments and the burgeoning of interest in relationality. Thinking of culture in relational terms offers a way of modulating culture; of simultaneously respecting cultural difference and allowing that difference is a shared human resource. Relationality can be deployed to help facilitate cooperation by re-opening interaction within political, social, economic, and institutional arrangements, including through processes for generating relational and cooperative effects have been developed in the field of conflict resolution. However, doing so requires that the fields most obviously related to global cooperation (political science, international relations, and global governance) engage relational approaches at the limits of the precise sciences and through philosophy, religion, and non-western cultural traditions

The Sad Predictability of Indigenous Affairs

The recycling of debates around welfare, violence and history in Settler-Indigenous Australian affairs involves the circulation of some well-worn perspectives. The authors assert that the entire relationship of black and white Australia needs to be reconsidered, and claim that this should include a critical examination of Australia's political and administrative rationality and (the history of) its intersection with Aboriginal culture. They call for a dialogue between European and Aboriginal political values and systems