Introduction

This chapter provides an analytical framework for this book by offering a radical perspective on development (of which foreign aid is a key instrument) and how it turned into a tool to place the world's populations into ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ categories. The framework builds on this categorisation to show that development practices became a justification to intervene in the lives of those underdeveloped and a tool to impose mechanisms of control. The chapter focuses on the key issues underlying the development problematic: the relationship between development and modernisation, how ‘development’ and ‘underdevelopment’ have emerged as social designs that are determined by economic growth and industrialisation as materialistic indicators and finally how development has become a tool for the creation and control of ‘surplus people’. Before these issues are discussed, the chapter explores how ‘development’ as a concept has emerged and how it has meanings, interpretations and procedures that have developed over time. The chapter will also explore how the different meanings and procedures have affected how development has been perceived by those who implement it as well as those who are supposed to benefit from it.

Through examining development as a new industry that has emerged since the Second World War, particularly through associating it with modernisation, the chapter argues that development is, as an issue, highly political in character. It has established a new form of division, a new world order that is based on scientific and economic advantages (Truman, 1949). Peoples and nations are looked at and judged in accordance with the living style they maintain and the economic powers they enjoy. The chapter will illustrate how this new world order, ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’, has deliberately ignored the colonial legacies that have contributed to shaping the current resources, institutions and political settings of the so-called underdeveloped societies. This divide between ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ has also contributed to forming new power relations that are based on superiority (Willis, 2011), the superiority of the ‘developer’ who enjoys power that exists in both money and knowledge. Furthermore, it will be argued in the chapter that ‘development’ has paved the way to the emergence of a modern rather than a traditional hegemony, one that is intellectual and ideological. An illustration of this is the creation of the ‘modern state idea’ (Shanin, 1997) and how development offers a bureaucratic rationality of managing and controlling people.