Construction of the Third World: A Southern Perspective on the Politics of Development

Abstract

Development started as a policy intervention to help poor states follow in the footsteps of developed states. Development carries the baggage of enlightenment
ideas of time, human, nature, and society. This scientific interpretation of human society forms a linear stage understanding of evolution of every sociability along European lines. Epistemically and thematically, modernisation and globalisation aspirations attached with development have its root in colonial aspirations of civilisation. From linear stage growth model to structural adjustment and then sustainable development, the development discourse has widely misrepresented the sociabilities it pledges to transform because it starts with the marginalisation of every non-modern perspective. Post-development is a set of post-modernist, post-colonial, and post-abyssal critiques of development, which is focused at traditional and non-modern knowledge to excavate alternatives to development for the so called third world. The development discourse and the policies it has brought about has created urban apartheids, globalisation-localisation paradox, worsening climate question and a massive silencing of indigenous and local communities and their systems of classifications. According to post-development lens, there is a need to form ecologies of knowledge among diverse social spaces of Pakistan where scientific episteme is to be engaged with traditional epistemologies or the epistemologies of the south.