Colonialist justifications recur largely unchanged in post-war development discourse

Evidence

Nor is it that Europeans, including scientists, were vicious, evil-minded creatures who always intended the destructive consequences of their expansionist projects. Indeed, European expansion was justified through appeals to improving the quality of life for Europeans and bringing “civilization” to the savages, doing God’s work in the world, and in other “noble” ways not so very different from how Third World development policies have been justified since their inception in the 1950s. The development decades have produced humanitarian appeals to bring the so-called undeveloped societies up to the standard of living of the developed Western societies through the transfer to the undeveloped societies of Western scientific and technological expertise, rationality, and the democratic political forms that these purportedly encourage. Yet the policies responding to such appeals have, intentionally or not, largely continued to direct the flow of natural, human, and economic resources from the South to the North. Maldevelopment and dedevelopment for the majority of the world’s peoples have tended to characterize the introduction of scientifically rational agriculture, manufacturing, health care, and so forth into the already economically and politically disadvantaged societies of the Third World (Bass, 1990; Braidotti et al. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1590

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: expose the rhetorical continuity between ‘civilizing missions’ and modern humanitarian development NGOs as framing devices for resource extraction.
• XREF: connects to: The US reframed colonialism as differential development opportunity, a discourse later central to neoliberalism — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 84; Accepting progress narratives embedded a colonial civilising logic inside human-rights discourse — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 273; Nkrumah argued formal decolonization left colonial economic control intact — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 289 (+3 more)