Development Against Democracy

This 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

Development Against Democracy

This 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

Torture:from Algiers to Abu Ghraib

The treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq focused worldwide media attention on the US practice of torture. Underlying such a practice was not only a self-serving debate in US political circles, academia and entertainment media on how a liberal democracy could justify such methods but also a history of counter-insurgency techniques which owed much to French warfare in Algeria. Yet while the lessons of the torturer have been assiduously learnt, what has been ignored is the recent open debate in France on the profound damage done by such institutionalised barbarity both to the victims and to the individuals and regimes that deploy it