Empire, development and colonialism: the past in the present, edited by Mark Duffield and Vernon Hewitt, Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY, James Currey, 2009, 224 pp., £45.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781847010117
This edited collection emerged out of a series of workshops at Bristol University under the auspices of the two editors and the Department of Politics ‘International Development Research Group’. As with all edited collections, the volume has its peaks and troughs but overall, and given its interdisciplinary nature, it makes a welcome addition to a variety of subject areas. The central theme of the book which unites the focus of the various contributors is an examination of contemporary discourses regarding humanitarian interventions, aid and development in comparison with their predecessors that emerged as justifications for the expanding European empires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Thus the key question becomes one concerning continuity and change: to what extent can we locate the past in the present? Or does the attempt to read continuity in European imperialism misread the nature of this particular historical narrative? For example, do the activities of contemporary non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Africa bear any meaningful comparison to those of nineteenth-century missionaries?
Needless to say in a book of this kind there are mixed answers to these questions with some drawing striking connections between the two periods (Hewitt, Kothari, Keleman, Biccum) while others are decidedly more circumspect (Smirl, Duffield). The overall flavour of the theoretical approaches adopted are those of post-colonialism and post-structuralism with most writers critical of the liberal developmental colonial ambition to promote universal emancipation. Foucault and Foucauldian concepts constitute, perhaps, the dominant theoretical discourse of the book, though not exclusively so. Whilst the racial basis of colonialism is now strongly rejected by most international institutions and national governments, other aspects of the liberal humanitarian ideal remain powerful – most obviously the need to intervene to solve social problems and to render life secure. As Duffield notes, this has led to the emergence of such apparently benign discourses as ‘human security’ which initially seemed to offer a progressive alternative to the orthodox approaches to security that had dominated geopolitics during the period of the Cold War. In essence, for writers such as Duffield and Noxolo human security is representative of the way in which security-development has become the central liberal discourse of the post-Cold War era, and for Duffield it becomes the ‘human security state’ (pp. 119–121). The social ills of underdevelopment become security threats to the core capitalist states through the threat of mass migration, the spread of infectious diseases, and the break-up of failed, now fragile, states. Living in an age of permanent emergency has meant the expansion of interventions on the basis of new wars that are low-level conflicts without clear boundaries, connecting vast and changing networks of fundraisers, criminal networks, supporters and opponents in conflicts whose sites are often unclear and unstable, transcending state boundaries. Hence within this collection there is an emphasis upon issues of spatiality and its reconstruction in an era of complex global emergencies, such as the war on terror (see Smirl, Kothari, Johnson, Noxolo). Duffield and Hewitt's conclusions, as editors, are that ‘there is little or no direct continuity between the past and the present. The connection is more in terms of resonances and echoes, unresolved antagonism and, especially, recurrent designs of power and urges to govern. Rather than colonialism constituting some form of heritage or memory, it is more the case that the will to power that shaped it lives on through new institutions and actors’ (p. 14).
But is the book any good? It will certainly appeal to the expanding ranks of Foucauldian academics in disciplines such as International Relations and Development Studies. And, importantly, Foucault's work is subject to some useful critical interrogation by writers such as Noxolo. The stronger and more interesting chapters tend to be the ones that have more substantive empirical content as overall there is a tendency for theorising to dominate at the expense of historical analysis. This, I would suggest, is an inherent problem with edited collections, as authors tend to have insufficient space to develop their ideas and so, as in this case, the theoretical abstractions become somewhat repetitive and a little dull, unless, no doubt, you are particularly seduced by such language.
There is also a tendency, I would suggest, towards overstating the significance of liberalism as the ideological glue that cements the various colonial projects together. The fact that liberalism is difficult to pin down, is often contradictory and elusive in its meaning, is also true of all political ideologies. Its utility for colonialism past and present as a source of ideological legitimacy and worldview is undoubted, but in the end core capitalist states pursue power by any means possible, regardless of whether or not liberalism can be seen to support their actions. In that respect the Hobbesian worldview that Foucault presents us with when he says, in ‘Truth and power’, ‘one's point of reference should not be to the great model of language [langue] and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning’ (1980, p. 114) might have been one worth drawing upon here as much as his ideas of governmentality and biopolitics as means by which the liberal order is constructed. While Foucault may have rejected Hobbes' account of the Leviathan in Society must be defended, there is little doubt that at heart he shares Hobbes' world-view with regard to power and conflict; he simply shifts the focus on power from the ‘sovereign individual’ to, take your pick from: power/knowledge, circulating discourses, epistemic grilles. The extent to which Foucault's move is helpful in understanding the nature of power and domination in colonialism and development is another matter.