Humanitarian NGOs like LSF emerged partly to discredit Third Worldist economic critique

Evidence

LSF played a central role in delegitimising Third Worldist accounts of economic exploitation. Its mission, Brauman explained at the time, was ‘to challenge a perception of the problem in which their poverty is a reflection of our wealth, and our liberties are based on the absence of theirs’. In his introduction to the published proceedings of the inaugural LSF colloquium, Brauman situated LSF within a new morality of urgency and an ideology of les droits de l’homme, which makes ‘man’ the highest value. Nonetheless, his speech overwhelmingly addressed economic matters, and challenged a series of Third Worldist theses: that Europe had trampled its own values in colonial plunder; that this plunder was the source of Europe’s opulence; that the world economic system was a neocolonial system that made the rich richer and the poor poorer; that the Third World was the victim of a blind and cynical West; and that its bread basket was held hostage to the economic powers of Western countries. Such structuralist theses, Brauman argued, were a ‘game of mirrors’ in which Europe only ever saw itself. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 394

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader human-rights vs. economic-inequality discourse the reader is tracking in the austerity/neoliberalism debate. — connects to: Neoliberal development economists joined humanitarian NGOs in 1980s France. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 377; Humanitarian NGOs helped shift blame for poverty onto Third World states. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 381; Anti-Third-Worldist NGOs redirected blame for poverty onto postcolonial states themselves — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 391 (+6 more)
• SEED: The ‘game of mirrors’ framing — that structural critiques of poverty merely mirror the West’s self-image — could anchor an essay on how human-rights discourse frames away economic exploitation.
• DEFINE: Names LSF (Libertés Sans Frontières) and its Third Worldist target explicitly, which is the organizing opposition for this chapter.

Broader Connections

• Humanitarian discourse relocated Third World poverty’s cause from colonialism to state leaders #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 437
• Perceived Third World radicalism mobilized support for counter-revolutionary economics #corroborates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1735
• Human rights NGOs absorbed the neoliberal civil-society-versus-coercive-state dichotomy #expands (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 60
• Human rights NGOs reinforced the neoliberal split between violent politics and peaceful markets #expands (0.75)
• Neoliberal reform shrank public-sector jobs and redirected educated Dalits into NGOs #expands (0.75) — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 562