Reflecting the (Post-)Development Gaze – Struggles for a Decent Life in Germany

1. Reflecting the (Post-)Development Gaze – Struggles for a Decent Life in Germany Daniel Bendix glokal e.V. & University of Kassel

2. Outline * post-doc project * possible contribution to our project * open questions

3. post-doc project * comparison of struggles over land/living in Bocas del Toro (Panama) and Berlin (Germany) * case selection: most different system design

4. Contributions to PD project * ‘development’ in Germany * unpacking ‘the West’ * theorising Post-Development

5. PD as critique of development? * processes of capitalist economic and social change * interventions/trusteeship * visions of a decent life  ongoing struggle in all three dimensions in Germany

6. Unpacking the ‘West’ What we mean: * politics/polity  liberal democracy * economy  capitalism * knowledge  instrumental rationality * improvement of livelihoods  authoritarian trusteeship

7. Unpacking the ‘West’ What we don‘t mean: * politics/polity  consensus-based democracy * economy  commons, subsistence * knowledge  alternative health/medicine * improvement of livelihoods  social movements based on solidarity  “alternative, counter-hegemonic models”

8. Task of case study * Empirical investigation of alternative concepts and practices in Germany from the perspective of Post-Development * focus on struggles for the right to the city ** Kotti & Co ** Tempelhofer Feld ** Refugee Movement

9. Theory building “devise a theory of how to fight global inequality and achieve a ‘good life’ for all in a non-Eurocentric and non-authoritarian manner” * PD rearticulates the colonial separation of the world in North and South  postcolonial critique

10. Theory building * Build on critical scholarship on the history and present of ‘the West’ “The [witch] is gone now... [but] Her fears, and the forces she struggled against in her lifetime, live on. We can open our newspapers, and read the same charges against the idle poor... The expropriators move into the Third World, destroying cultures .. plundering the resources of land and people... If we turn on the radio, we can hear the crackle of flames... But the struggle also lives on.” (Starhawk 1997)

11. Theory building “radical universal decolonial anti-capitalist diversality”: “respecting the multiple local, particularities in the struggles against patriarchy, capitalism, coloniality and eurocentered [and xyz, DB] modernity from a diversity of [decolonial] epistemic/ethical historical projects” (Grosfoguel 2008)

12. Contribution reflecting the (Post-)Development gaze

13. Open questions * no prominent coherent alternative concept * regional focus * thematic focus

14. Literature Federici, Silvia (2004): Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia. Grosfoguel, Ramón (2008): „Transmodernity, border thinking, and global coloniality - Rámon Grosfoguel Decolonizing political economy and postcolonial studies“. In: Eurozine, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-07-04-grosfoguel-en.html. Linebaugh, Peter; Rediker, Marcus (2008): Die vielköpfige Hydra: die verborgene Geschichte des revolutionären Atlantiks. Berlin; Hamburg: Assoz. A. Thomas, Alan (2000): „Development as practice in a liberal capitalist world“. In: Journal of International Development 12 (6), S. 773–787.