Counter-revolutionary

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-revolutionary

The War in the Vendée was a royalist uprising against revolutionary France in 1793–1796.

A counter-revolutionary or an anti-revolutionary is anyone who opposes or resists a revolution, particularly one who acts after a revolution in order to try to overturn it or reverse its course, in full or in part. The adjective "counter-revolutionary" pertains to movements that would restore the state of affairs, or the principles, that prevailed during a prerevolutionary era.

Definition

A counter-revolution is opposition or resistance to a revolutionary movement. It can refer to attempts to defeat a revolutionary movement before it takes power, as well as attempts to restore the old regime after a successful revolution.

Europe

France

The word "counter-revolutionary" originally referred to thinkers who opposed themselves to the 1789 French Revolution, such as Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald or, later, Charles Maurras, the founder of the Action Française monarchist movement. More recently, it has been used in France to describe political movements that reject the legacy of the 1789 Revolution, which historian René Rémond has referred to as légitimistes. Thus, monarchist supporters of the Ancien Régime following the French Revolution were counter-revolutionaries, as were supporters of the War in the Vendée and of the monarchies that put down the various Revolutions of 1848. The royalist legitimist counter-revolutionary French movement survives to this day, albeit marginally. It was active during the Révolution nationale of Vichy France, though, which has been considered by René Rémond not as a fascist regime but as a counter-revolutionary regime, whose motto was Travail, Famille, Patrie ("Work, Family, Fatherland"), which replaced the Republican motto Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

After the French Revolution, anti-clerical policies and the execution of King Louis XVI led to the War in the Vendée. This counter-revolution produced what is considered by some historians to be the first modern genocide. Monarchists and Catholics took up arms against the revolutionary French Republic in 1793 after the government asked that 300,000 men be conscripted into the Republican military in the levée en masse. The Vendeans also rose up against Napoleon's attempt to conscript them in 1815.

Germany

The German Empire, and its predecessors the Holy Roman Empire and German Confederation, operated under counterrevolutionary principles, with these monarchical federations crushing attempted uprisings in, for example, 1848. After the 1867–71 creation of a new German realm by Prussia, chancellor Otto von Bismarck used policies favored by Socialists (such as state-sponsored healthcare) to undercut the opponents of the monarchy and protect it against revolution.

Not long after the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and signing of the Treaty of Versailles, a failed coup d'état known as the Kapp Putsch was instigated by various elements opposed to the Weimar Republic. It was led principally by Wolfgang Kapp and Walther von Lüttwitz.

During the Weimar era, the German Realm became an ideological battlefield between "red" and "white" factions, with the state eventually becoming bifurcated between the conservative Junker nobility which dominated the army and other high offices, including the presidency with Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, and the leftist revolutionaries who attempted several coups in the 1920s and later gained a base in parliament via the Communist Party of Germany, which, being internationalist in nature, opposed the extremist nationalism of the new Nazi Party. The Nazis, by making common cause with the counterrevolutionaries against the Communists, effected a takeover of the German state, at first under the adopted imagery of the monarchical era and only later (after the death of Hindenburg) under purely Nazi imagery.

The Nazis did not publicly characterise themselves as counterrevolutionaries; they condemned the traditional German forces of conservatism (e.g., Prussian monarchists, Junkers, and Roman Catholic clergy), for example in the Nazi Party march Die Fahne hoch which labeled them as reactionaries (Reaktion) and counted them together with the Red Front as enemies of the Nazis. Nevertheless, in practice the Nazis supported many of the same ideas as the counterrevolutionary factions and virulently opposed revolutionary Marxism (e.g., using the conservative Freikorps to crush Communist uprisings), ostensibly idealising German tradition, folklore, and heroes, such as Frederick the Great. The fact that the Nazis called their 1933 rise to power the national revolution showed that they understood the popular hunger for some type of radical change; nonetheless, they understood the equally powerful popular impulse toward stability and continuity, and rejected the parliamentarianism of the Weimar Constitution as merely a first step towards Bolshevism. Thus, for instance, they catered to reactionary tendencies among the German people by propagandistic demonstrations linking the Nazi state to the traditional Reich ("realm" or "empire") by referring to it informally as the "Drittes Reich" ("Third Realm"), implying a specious continuity between it and the historic German entities appealing to German reactionaries: the Holy Roman Empire (the "First Realm") and the German Empire (the "Second Realm"). (See also reactionary modernism.)

Great Britain

Many historians have held that the rise and spread of Methodism in Great Britain prevented the development of a revolution there. In addition to preaching the Christian Gospel, John Wesley and his Methodist followers visited those imprisoned, as well as the poor and aged, building hospitals and dispensaries which provided free healthcare for the masses. The sociologist William H. Swatos stated that "Methodist enthusiasm transformed men, summoning them to assert rational control over their own lives, while providing in its system of mutual discipline the psychological security necessary for autonomous conscience and liberal ideals to become internalized, an integrated part of the 'new men'… regenerated by Wesleyan preaching." The practice of temperance among Methodists, as well as their rejection of gambling, allowed them to eliminate secondary poverty and accumulate capital. Individuals who attended Methodist chapels and Sunday schools "took into industrial and political life the qualities and talents they had developed within Methodism and used them on behalf of the working classes in non-revolutionary ways." The spread of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, author and professor Michael Hill states, "filled both a social and an ideological vacuum" in English society, thus "opening up the channels of social and ideological mobility… which worked against the polarization of English society into rigid social classes." The historian Bernard Semmel argues that "Methodism was an antirevolutionary movement that succeeded (to the extent that it did) because it was a revolution of a radically different kind" that was capable of effecting social change on a large scale.

Italy

In Italy, after being conquered by Napoleon's army in the late 18th century, there was a counter-revolution in all the French client republics. The most well-known was the Sanfedismo, a reactionary movement led by the cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, which overthrew the Parthenopean Republic and allowed the Bourbon dynasty to return to the throne of the Kingdom of Naples. A resurgence of the phenomenon happened during the Napoleon's second Italian campaign in the early 19th century. Another example of counter-revolution was the peasants' rebellion in Southern Italy after the national unification, fomented by the Bourbon government in exile and the Papal States. The revolt, labelled pejoratively by opponents as brigandage, resulted in a bloody civil war that lasted almost ten years.

Austria

In the Austrian Empire, a revolt took place against Napoleon called the Tyrolean Rebellion in 1809. Led by a Tyrolean innkeeper by the name of Andreas Hofer, 20,000 Tyrolean rebels fought successfully against Napoleon's troops. However, Hofer was ultimately betrayed by the Treaty of Schönbrunn, which led to the disbandment of his troops and was captured and executed in 1810.

Spain

The Spanish Civil War was a counter-revolution. Supporters of Carlism, monarchy, and nationalism (see Falange) joined forces against the (Second) Spanish Republic in 1936. The counter-revolutionaries saw the Spanish Constitution of 1931 as a revolutionary document that defied Spanish culture, tradition and religion. On the Republican side, the acts of the Communist Party of Spain against the rural collectives are also sometimes considered counter-revolutionary. The Carlist cause began with the First Carlist War in 1833 and continues to the present.

Russia

Red Army troops attack Kronstadt sailors in March 1921.

The White Army and its supporters who tried to defeat the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution, as well as the German politicians, police, soldiers and Freikorps who crushed the German Revolution of 1918–1919, were also counter-revolutionaries. The Bolshevik government tried to build an anti-revolutionary image for the Green armies composed of peasant rebels. The largest peasant rebellion against Bolshevik rule occurred in 1920–21 in Tambov.

Hispanic America

General Victoriano Huerta, and later the Felicistas, attempted to thwart the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s. In the late 1920s, Mexican Catholics took up arms against the Mexican Federal Government in what became known as the Cristero War. The President of Mexico, Plutarco Elias Calles, was elected in 1924. Calles began carrying out anti-Catholic policies which caused peaceful resistance from Catholics in 1926. The counter-revolution began as a movement of peaceful resistance against the anti-clerical laws. In the summer of 1926, fighting broke out. The fighters known as Cristeros fought the government due to its suppression of the Church, jailing and execution of priests, formation of a nationalist schismatic church, state atheism, Socialism, Freemasonry and other harsh anti-Catholic policies.

The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion into Cuba was conducted by counter-revolutionaries who hoped to overthrow the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. In the 1980s, the Contra-Revolución rebels fighting to overthrow the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua. In fact, the Contras received their name precisely because they were counter-revolutionaries.

The Black Eagles, the AUC, and other paramilitary movements of Colombia can also be seen as counter-revolutionary. These right-wing groups are opposition to the FARC, and other left-wing guerrilla movements.

Some counter-revolutionaries are former revolutionaries who supported the initial overthrow of the previous regime, but came to differ with those who ultimately came to power after the revolution. For example, some of the Contras originally fought with the Sandinistas to overthrow Anastasio Somoza, and some of those who oppose Castro also opposed Batista.

Asia

Japan

During the mid-19th century Bakumatsu, especially during the Japanese civil war of 1868–1869, the pro-bakufu forces and especially the samurai (and after the period ex-samurai) were left without money since their skills are obsolete, so they banded up with the eastern shogunate led by the Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu who wished to drive foreign and especially Western European and American influence against the revolutionaries of Emperor Meiji who sought to modernize Japan with the states of Western Europe as Japan's example. The war ended with a small number of casualties, most of whom were the samurai. Years later though, western samurai and imperial modernists then engaged in the deadlier Satsuma Rebellion.

China

In 1917, during the Warlord Era general Zhang Xun attempted to reverse the 1911 Revolution that brought an end to the Qing dynasty by seizing Beijing in the Manchu Restoration.

The anti-communist (and thus counter-revolutionary) Kuomintang party in China used the term "counter-revolutionary" to disparage the communists and other opponents of its regime. Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang party leader, was the chief user of this term.

The reason that the nominally conservative Kuomintang used this terminology was that the party had several leftist revolutionary influences in its ideology left over from the party's beginnings. The Kuomintang, and Chiang Kai-shek used the words "feudal" and "counter-revolutionary" as synonyms for evil, and backwardness, and proudly proclaimed themselves to be revolutionary. Chiang called the warlords feudalists, and called for feudalism and counter-revolutionaries to be stamped out by the Kuomintang. Chiang showed extreme rage when he was called a warlord, because of its negative, feudal connotations.

Chiang also crushed and dominated the merchants of Shanghai in 1927, seizing loans from them, with the threats of death or exile. Rich merchants, industrialists, and entrepreneurs were arrested by Chiang, who accused them of being "counter-revolutionary", and Chiang held them until they gave money to the Kuomintang. Chiang's arrests targeted rich millionaires, accusing them of communism and counter-revolutionary activities. Chiang also enforced an anti-Japanese boycott, sending his agents to sack the shops of those who sold Japanese made items and fining them. He also disregarded the internationally protected International Settlement, putting cages on its borders in which he threatened to place the merchants. The Kuomintang's alliance with the Green Gang allowed it to ignore the borders of the foreign concessions.

A similar term also existed in the People's Republic of China, which includes charges such collaborating with foreign forces and inciting revolts against the government and ruling CCP. According to Article 28 of the Chinese constitution, The state maintains public order and suppresses treasonable and other counter-revolutionary activities; It penalizes actions that endanger public security and disrupt the socialist economy and other criminal activities, and punishes and reforms criminals.

The term was widely used during the Cultural Revolution, in which thousands of intellectuals and government officials were denounced as "counter-revolutionaries" by the Red Guards. Following the end of the Cultural Revolution, the term was also used against Lin Biao and the Gang of Four.

Africa

Egypt

After the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s government as a result of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, counter revolutionary techniques included: power outages by remnants of his regime, police allegedly refused to serve citizens and oil was thrown into the desert to halt gas station services.

On 1 February 2012, the biggest tragedy in Egyptian football resulted in the deaths of 72 Al Ahly fans. It happened after exactly a year when Mubarak announced in a speech that there would be chaos if he stepped down, the very same day when armed thugs attacked protestors of the 2011 revolution. Many photographic and footage evidence also show that police and security forces in the stadium were unwilling to respond to the riot. Many argue that the riot was planned as a revenge against Ultras Ahlawy taking part in the 2011 revolution against Hosni Mubarak and their constant anti-governmental chants in matches.

Finally on 3 July 2013, Defense Minister Abdel-Fattah Al Sisi overthrew the democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi, who was the first president to be elected by the Egyptian people since the proclamation of the republic in 1953. The counter-revolution ended when Al Sisi was sworn as Egypt’s 6th president in June 2014.

Philosophical perspectives

In the Laws, Plato relates a dialogue between Cleinias of Crete and an unnamed Athenian interlocutor. Part of their discourse touches on counter-revolution. Cleinias posits that a state can be considered morally superior when the virtuous citizens triumph over the unruly masses and the less virtuous classes. He asserts, "the state in which the better citizens win a victory over the mob and over the inferior classes may be truly said to be better than itself, and may be justly praised."

However, the Athenian presents a hypothetical scenario wherein someone must pass judgment on a group of brothers, some of whom are behaving justly while others are acting unjustly. When questioned about the optimal resolution, Cleinias suggests that the most effective judge would not necessarily be one who imposes the just to govern over the unjust, whether by force or consent. Instead, he advocates for a judge who facilitates reconciliation by establishing a mutually agreed-upon set of laws designed to maintain harmony among them. This implies Cleinias' belief that a counter-revolutionary victory by the 'better citizens' over 'the mob' need not involve violence but can be attained through the enactment of just legislation.

Reactionary

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary 

In political science, a reactionary or a reactionist is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante—the previous political state of society—which the person believes possessed positive characteristics that are absent from contemporary society. As a descriptor term, reactionary derives from the ideological context of the left–right political spectrum. As an adjective, the word reactionary describes points of view and policies meant to restore a status quo ante.

As an ideology, reactionism is a tradition in right-wing politics; the reactionary stance opposes policies for the social transformation of society, whereas conservatives seek to preserve the socio-economic structure and order that exists in the present. In popular usage, reactionary refers to a strong traditionalist conservative political perspective of a person opposed to social, political, and economic change.

Reactionary ideologies can be radical in the sense of political extremism in service to re-establishing past conditions. To some writers, the term reactionary carries negative connotations—Peter King observed that it is "an unsought-for label, used as a torment rather than a badge of honor." Despite this, the descriptor "political reactionary" has been adopted by writers such as the Austrian monarchist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the Scottish journalist Gerald Warner of Craigenmaddie, the Colombian political theologian Nicolás Gómez Dávila, and the American historian John Lukacs.

History and usage

See also: Glossary of the French Revolution and List of people associated with the French Revolution

The French Revolution gave the English language three politically descriptive words denoting anti-progressive politics: (i) "reactionary", (ii) "conservative", and (iii) "right". "Reactionary" derives from the French word réactionnaire (a late 18th-century coinage based on the word réaction, "reaction") and "conservative" from conservateur, identifying monarchist parliamentarians opposed to the revolution. In this French usage, reactionary denotes "a movement towards the reversal of an existing tendency or state" and a "return to a previous condition of affairs". The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first English language usage in 1799 in a translation of Lazare Carnot's letter on the Coup of 18 Fructidor.

Several revolutions occurred in 1848 and early 1849, before reactionary forces regained control and the revolutions collapsed.

During the French Revolution, conservative forces (especially within the Catholic Church) organized opposition to the progressive sociopolitical and economic changes brought by the Revolution; and so Conservatives fought to restore the temporal authority of the Church and Crown. In 19th Century European politics, the reactionary class included the Catholic Church's hierarchy and the aristocracy, royal families, and royalists who believed that national government was the sole domain of the Church and the State. In France, supporters of traditional rule by direct heirs of the House of Bourbon dynasty were labeled the legitimist reaction. In the Third Republic, the monarchists were the reactionary faction, later renamed Conservative.

In the 19th century, reactionary denoted people who idealized feudalism and the pre-modern era—before the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution—when economies were mostly agrarian, a landed aristocracy dominated society, a hereditary king ruled, and the Catholic Church was society's moral center. Those labeled "reactionary" favored the aristocracy instead of the middle and working classes. Reactionaries opposed democracy and parliamentarism.

Thermidorian Reaction

Main article: Thermidorian Reaction

The Thermidorian Reaction was a movement within the French Revolution against the perceived excesses of the Jacobins. Maximilien Robespierre's Reign of Terror ended on 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor year II in the French Republican Calendar). The overthrow of Robespierre signaled the reassertion of the French National Convention over the Committee of Public Safety. The Jacobins were suppressed, the prisons were emptied, and the committee was shorn of its powers. After the execution of some 104 Robespierre supporters, the Thermidorian Reaction stopped using the guillotine against alleged counter-revolutionaries, set a middle course between the monarchists and the radicals, and ushered in a time of relative exuberance and its accompanying corruption.

Restoration of the French monarchy

See also: Bourbon Restoration in France

Caricature of Louis XVIII preparing for the French intervention in Spain to help the Spanish Royalists, by George Cruikshank

With the Congress of Vienna, inspired by Tsar Alexander I of Russia, the monarchs of Russia, Prussia and Austria formed the Holy Alliance, a form of collective security against revolution and Bonapartism. This instance of reaction was surpassed by a movement that developed in France when, after the second fall of Napoleon, the Bourbon Restoration, or reinstatement of the Bourbon dynasty, ensued. This time it was to be a constitutional monarchy, with an elected lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies. The Franchise was restricted to men over the age of forty, which indicated that for the first fifteen years of their lives, they had lived under the ancien régime. Nevertheless, King Louis XVIII worried he would still suffer an intractable parliament. He was delighted with the ultra-royalists, or Ultras, whom the election returned, declaring that he had found a chambre introuvable, literally, an "unfindable house".

It was the Declaration of Saint-Ouen that prepared the way for the Restoration. Before the French Revolution, which radically and bloodily overthrew most aspects of French society's organization, the only way constitutional change could be instituted was by extracting it from old legal documents that could be interpreted as agreeing with the proposal. Everything new had to be expressed as a righteous revival of something old that had lapsed and had been forgotten. This was also the means used by diminished aristocrats to get themselves a bigger piece of the pie. In the 18th century, those gentry whose fortunes and prestige had diminished to the level of peasants would search diligently for every ancient feudal statute that might give them something. For example, the "ban" meant that all peasants had to grind their grain in their lord's mill. Therefore, these gentry came to the French States-General of 1789 fully prepared to press for expanding such practices in all provinces to the legal limit. They were horrified when, for example, the French Revolution permitted common citizens to go hunting, one of the few perquisites they had always enjoyed.

Thus with the Bourbons Restoration, the Chambre Introuvable set about reverting every law to return society to conditions prior to the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV, when the power of the Second Estate was at its zenith. This clearly distinguishes a "reactionary" from a "conservative." The use of the word "reactionary" in later days as a political slur is thus often rhetorical since there is nothing directly comparable with the Chambre Introuvable in the history of other countries.

Clerical philosophers

Main article: Clerical philosophers

In the French Revolution's aftermath, France was continually wracked by quarrels between right-wing legitimists and left-wing revolutionaries. Herein arose the clerical philosophers—Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, François-René de Chateaubriand—whose answer was restoring the House of Bourbon and reinstalling the Catholic Church as the established church. Since then, France's political spectrum has featured similar divisions (see Action Française). The teachings of the 19th-century popes buttressed the ideas of the clerical philosophers.

Metternich and containment

See also: Age of Metternich

From 1815 to 1848, Prince Metternich, the foreign minister of the Austrian Empire, stepped in to organize the containment of revolutionary forces through international alliances to prevent revolutionary fervor. At the Congress of Vienna, he was very influential in establishing the new order, the Concert of Europe, after the defeat of Napoleon.

After the Congress, Prince Metternich worked hard to bolster and stabilize the conservative regime of the Restoration period. He worked furiously to prevent Russia's Tsar Alexander I (who aided the liberal forces in Germany, Italy, and France) from gaining influence in Europe. The Church was his principal ally. He promoted it as a conservative principle of order while opposing nationalist and liberal tendencies within the Church. His basic philosophy was based on Edmund Burke, who championed the need for old roots and the orderly development of society. He opposed democratic and parliamentary institutions but favored modernizing existing structures through gradual reform. Despite Metternich's efforts, a series of revolutions rocked Europe in 1848.

20th century

See also: Reactionary modernism

1932 poster of the French Radical Party (PRRRS) against the attempt by the Laval government to replace the two-round system, which favored the Radicals, with plurality ("The two-round suffrage will overcome the reaction.")

In the 20th century, proponents of socialism and communism used the term reactionary polemically to label their enemies, such as the White Armies, who fought in the Russian Civil War against the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. In Marxist terminology, reactionary is a pejorative adjective denoting people whose ideas might appear to be socialist but, in their opinion, contain elements of feudalism, capitalism, nationalism, fascism, or other characteristics of the ruling class, including usage between conflicting factions of Marxist movements. Non-socialists also used the label reactionary, with British diplomat Sir John Jordan nicknaming the Chinese Royalist Party the "reactionary party" for supporting the Qing dynasty and opposing republicanism during the Xinhai Revolution in 1912.

Reactionary is also used to denote supporters of authoritarian anti-communist régimes such as Vichy France, Spain under Franco, and Portugal under Salazar. One example occurred after Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On 26 October 1958, the day following the Nobel Committee's announcement, Moscow's Literary Gazette ran a polemical article by David Zaslavski entitled, Reactionary Propaganda Uproar over a Literary Weed.

The Italian Fascists desired a new social order based on the ancient feudal principle of delegation (though without serfdom) in their enthusiasm for the corporate state. Benito Mussolini said that "fascism is reaction" and that "fascism, which did not fear to call itself reactionary... has not today any impediment against declaring itself illiberal and anti-liberal." Giovanni Gentile and Mussolini also attacked certain reactionary policies, particularly monarchism, and veiled some aspects of Italian conservative Catholicism. They wrote, "History doesn't travel backwards. The fascist doctrine has not taken Joseph de Maistre as its prophet. Monarchical absolutism is of the past, and so is ecclesiolatry." They further elaborated in their political doctrine that fascism "is not reactionary [in the old way] but revolutionary."

Conversely, they explained that fascism was of the right, not the left. Fascism was certainly not simply a return to tradition, as it carried the centralized state beyond even what had been seen in absolute monarchies. Fascist one-party states were as centralized as most communist states, and fascism's intense nationalism was not found in the period prior to the French Revolution.Although the German Nazis did not consider themselves fascists or reactionaries and condemned the traditional German forces of reaction (Prussian monarchists, Junker nobility, and Roman Catholic clergy) as being among their enemies, next to their Red Front enemies in the Nazi Party march Die Fahne hoch, they virulently opposed revolutionary leftism. The fact that the Nazis called their 1933 rise to power the Volksgemeinschaft (national revolution) showed that, like the Italian Fascists, they supported some form of revolution; however, the Germans and Italian fascists both idealized tradition, folklore, and the tenets of classical thought and leadership, as exemplified in Nazi-era Germany by the idolization of Frederick the Great. They also rejected the Weimar Republic parliamentary era under the Weimar Constitution, which had succeeded the monarchy in 1918, despite it also being capitalist and classical. Although claiming to be separate from reactionism, the Nazis' rejection of Weimar was based on ostensibly reactionary principles, as the Nazis claimed that the parliamentary system was simply the first step towards Bolshevism and instead idealized more reactionary parts of Germany's past. They referred to Nazi Germany as the German Realm and informally as the Drittes Reich (Third Realm), a reference to past reactionary German entities: the Holy Roman Empire (First Realm) and the German Empire (Second Realm).

Clericalist movements, sometimes labeled as clerical fascist by their critics, can be considered reactionaries in terms of the 19th century since they share some elements of fascism while at the same time promoting a return to the pre-revolutionary model of social relations, with a strong role for the Church. Their utmost philosopher was Nicolás Gómez Dávila.

Political scientist Corey Robin argues that modern conservatism in the United States is fundamentally reactionary in his book The Reactionary Mind.

21st century

Main articles: Dark Enlightenment and Nippon Kaigi

Warning against visiting reactionary websites in a Vietnamese internet café

Japan's right-wing nationalist and populist movements and related organizations, which emerged rapidly from the late 20th century, are considered "reactionary" because they revised the post-war peace constitution and have an advocating attitude toward the Japanese Empire.

"Neo-reactionary" is a term that is sometimes a self-description of an informal group of online political theorists who have been active since the 2000s. The phrase "neo-reactionary" was coined by "Mencius Moldbug" (the pseudonym of Curtis Yarvin, a computer programmer) in 2008. Arnold Kling used it in 2010 to describe "Moldbug", and the subculture quickly adopted it. Proponents of the "Neo-reactionary" movement (also called the "Dark Enlightenment" movement) include philosopher Nick Land, among others.

Impact of microcredit

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_microcredit 

The impact of microcredit is a subject of much controversy. Proponents state that it reduces poverty through higher employment and higher incomes. This is expected to lead to improved nutrition and improved education of the borrowers' children. Some argue that microcredit empowers women. In the US and Canada, it is argued that microcredit helps recipients to graduate from welfare programs. Critics say that microcredit has not increased incomes, but has driven poor households into a debt trap, in some cases even leading to suicide. They add that the money from loans is often used for durable consumer goods or consumption instead of being used for productive investments, that it fails to empower women, and that it has not improved health or education.

The available evidence indicates that in many cases microcredit has facilitated the creation and the growth of businesses. It has often generated self-employment, but it has not necessarily increased incomes after interest payments. In some cases it has driven borrowers into debt traps. In addition, it can produce unintended rent-seeking entrepreneurship. There is no evidence that microcredit has empowered women. In short, microcredit has achieved much less than what its proponents said it would achieve, but its negative impacts have not been as drastic as some critics have argued. Microcredit is just one factor influencing the success of a small businesses, whose success is influenced to a much larger extent by how much an economy or a particular market grows. A critical review of 58 papers covering experiences in 18 countries concluded "there is no good evidence for the beneficent impact of microfinance on the well-being of poor people" and that "the greatest impacts are reported by studies with the weakest designs".

The attempt to objectively evaluate the impact of microcredit on a global or a local scale is marred by numerous methodological challenges. There are only few rigorous evaluations of microcredit, and much of the literature on the impact of microcredit is based in anecdotal reports or case studies that are not representative. Even among the rigorous evaluations many "suffer from weak methodologies and inadequate data", according to a systematic literature review of the impact of microcredit conducted in 2011 by a group of researchers on behalf of UKAid. A 2008 review of over 100 articles on microcredit found that only 6 used enough quantitative data to be representative, and none employed rigorous methods such as randomized control trials. Rigorous impact evaluations using control and treatment groups are difficult to undertake today, because microcredit is so common in developing countries today that few locations remain where such a research setting can still be applied. Further complicating impact studies is the often highly politicized context of poverty alleviation initiatives.

Income and poverty

Microlending aims at increasing income through productive activities such as goat herding, as shown here in Rwanda on a cooperative funded through microlending.

Among 6 representative studies selected from a sample of more than 100 studies as being methodologically most sound, five found no evidence that microcredit reduced poverty, although they found other positive impacts.

The first randomized evaluation of the impact of introducing microcredit in a new market has been undertaken by Abhijit Banerjee of the M.I.T. Poverty Action Lab in slums in Hyderabad, India, in 2008. It compared two groups of randomly selected slums. In the treatment group banks opened branches that provided microcredits, while in the control group this was not the case. The study showed that fifteen to 18 months after lending began, there was no effect on average monthly expenditure per capita, but expenditure on durable goods increased. Consumption thus shifted from consumables to durable goods. Also, the number of new businesses increased by one third, but they were not very profitable. Pulitzer prize winner Nicholas Kristof quotes another rigorous study by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo covering loans by Spandana in India. In this case, loans were also used to buy durable goods, but in addition they were used to expand existing businesses.

Tazul Islam argues that the Grameen Bank does not reach the poorest, since the clients of the bank tend to be clustered around the poverty line of predominantly moderately poor or vulnerable non-poor. Of the poor who join Grameen bank’s microcredit program, a high percentage often drop out after only a few loan cycles, while many others eventually drop out in later loan cycles as loan amounts begin to exceed their repayment capacity. Nevertheless, he concludes that microcredit in Bangladesh had a "positive impact on enterprise and household income and asset accumulation". Microloans in Canada have allowed small business owners to make their businesses their primary source of income with 67% of the borrowers showing a significant increase in their income as a result of their participation in certain micro-loan programs.

A film by the Danish journalist Tom Heinemann, The Micro Debt, alleges that microcredit in Bangladesh had little impact on poverty. The film highlighted the purported continued poverty of Sufiya Begum, the original loan recipient of Grameen, in Jobra Village. After a thorough investigation in December 2010 by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, the alleged problems have been proven to be false. Documentary maker Gayle Ferraro found the woman alive and well, confirming the original Grameen story.

Milford Bateman, the author of Why Doesn't Microfinance Work?, argues that microcredit offers only an "illusion of poverty reduction". "As in any lottery or game of chance, a few in poverty do manage to establish microenterprises that produce a decent living," he argues, but "these isolated and often temporary positives are swamped by the largely overlooked negatives." Bateman concludes that "The international development community is now faced with the reality that, overall, microfinance has been a development policy blunder of quite historic proportions."

Professor Anu Muhammad of Jahangirnagar University in Bangladesh, a Marxist and critic of microcredit, claims that "according to different studies" which he does not name, "you cannot find more than 5-10 per cent people who could change their economic conditions through micro-credit."

German journalist Kathrin Hartmann relates tales of women who she met in 2012 while visiting Kurigram District in Bangladesh trapped in debt. She was told by rural women of brutal methods to enforce debt repayments, including the forced sale of goats, cows, house utensils and land. She also describes intense peer pressure under group lending schemes. Heavily indebted men and women even sold their kidneys to organized groups in order to be able to repay loans, as discovered by the police in summer 2011. Hartmann writes, without quoting a source, that one third of microcredits are taken in order to pay for food or health care, especially during the times of the year called Monga when food and work opportunities are scarcest. Children drop out of school to earn money and families cut down on food expenses in order to repay loans. When natural disasters strike, such as Cyclone Sidr in 2007, weekly instalments to repay loans continue, although the ability of borrowers to earn income has been destroyed by the disasters.

A study in the Philippines by Dean Karlan of Yale University and of Innovations for Poverty Action compared a treatment group, financed through microcredit, and a control group that did not receive microcredit, in Manila. In this case many microcredits were loaned to people with existing businesses. The businesses became more profitable, but laid off unproductive employees including friends and relatives that they previously had felt obliged to employ. Male-owned businesses increased profits, but female-owned businesses did not.

Debt traps, suicides and group pressure

In 2008, economist Jonathan Morduch of New York University noted there were still major gaps in research on microcredit, such as on debt traps and the use of microcredits for consumption.

There has been much criticism of the high interest rates charged to borrowers. The real average portfolio yield cited by the sample of 704 microfinance institutions that voluntarily submitted reports to the MicroBanking Bulletin in 2006 was 22.3% annually. However, annual rates charged to clients are higher, as they also include local inflation and the bad debt expenses of the microfinance institution. Interest rates charged by the Mexican Banco Compartamos on their micro-loans reached 86% per year while it sold stocks in the stock market in 2007.

In India microfinance institutions have been criticized for creating small-debt traps for the poor in Andhra Pradesh with high interest rates and coercive methods of recovery. Villagers often did not know the interest that they were being charged and were not aware of the consequences of taking multiple loans as they take the second loan to clear the first loan. In 2010 aggressive lending by microcredit institutions has been blamed for over 80 suicides in Andhra Pradesh. Bangladesh's former Finance and Planning Minister M. Saifur Rahman charged in 2005 that some microfinance institutions use excessive interest rates. A 2008 study in Bangladesh showed that some loan recipients sink into a cycle of debt, using a microloan from one organization to meet interest obligations from another. Field officers who are in a position of power locally and are remunerated based on repayment rates sometimes use coercive and even violent tactics to collect instalments on the microloans.

Private banks and large MNCs have become involved in microfinance. With large corporations investing, local MFIs are under pressure to deliver high returns each quarter; this comes at the expense of borrowers. Foreign and corporate capital investment take advantage of emerging and developing economies across Asia and Africa, introducing new forms of collateral requirements; individuals borrowers sometimes end up in even more debilitating debt and poverty than when they started.

The Cambodian market offers a key example of such problematic and debilitating debt traps. Throughout the early 1990s, Cambodia began as a success story for microfinance in the developing world. By the early 2000s, however, the situation deteriorated until “the typical loan amount [to] now exceed the average annual household income and require land-based collateral”. The introduction of land-based collateral has driven thousands of borrowers to sell their property at depreciating rates compared to actual property value in order to pay off their accumulating debts. Companies and stakeholders, on the other hand, benefit from borrower losses. In 2020, as the pandemic ravaged Cambodia’s economy, “six of the country’s eight biggest microfinance companies posted record earnings,” while loanees were driven into devastating amounts of debt due to skyrocketing interest rates. As the market has evolved, companies have deviated from the initial goal of providing loans to fund and develop income-generating opportunities to offering credit for daily living costs and prior loan repayments.

Some microfinance institutions lend only to groups of women. This practice puts loan recipients under pressure, because all women are liable for the loans of the other women in the group and each member can only obtain a new loan if each member has repaid the previous loan.

Muhammad Yunus argues that microfinance institutions that charge more than 15% above their long-term operating costs should face penalties.

Empowerment of women

Meeting of clients of the Indian microlender ESAF in the state of Kerala.

Microcredit has been directed at women because it was believed that, compared to men, they are better clients of microfinance institutions and that women's access to microcredit has more desirable development outcomes, since women tend to spend more money on basic needs compared to men. Microcredit has also been promoted as a tool to empower women. Early studies tended to confirm this positive picture. For example, a 1996 study in Bangladesh claims that the "success" of reaching women with microcredit was "highly impressive", but also notes that loans are often given over to male relatives or husbands. Only in a minority of cases there was an increase in domestic violence for women who did not get the loan or had to wait a long time to get the loan. The study also showed that women are more likely to retain control over their loans in traditional women’s work like livestock rearing that are considered "women's work". The President of Grameen Foundation USA suggested in 2005, based on a review of various studies, that "there is strong evidence that female clients are empowered". It also found that "even in cases when women take but do not use the loan themselves, they and their families benefit more than if the loan had gone directly to their husbands".

However, a 2008 study of microcredit programs in Bangladesh found that women often act merely as collection agents for their husbands and sons, such that the men spend the money themselves while women are saddled with the credit risk. The bigger the size of the loan, the more women lose control. For example, a study in Bangladesh showed that women have 100% control over loans that are smaller than 1000 Taka but only 46% of control if the loan is bigger than 4,000 Taka. A study in India showed that women may be put under pressure by their male relatives to join a credit group and indebt themselves. A study in Bangladesh showed that microcredit increases dowries, with women forced at times to take microcredit loans as the only means to pay these increased dowries for their daughters. The first randomized evaluation of the introduction of microcredit, carried out in Hyderabad in India, found no impact on women's decision-making.

One scientist argues that empowerment cannot be given to women by (mostly male) development practitioners in the form of loans, since empowerment is a self-directed process. More female employees should be hired by microfinance institutions, and male staff should be trained in gender awareness.

Based on the evidence of the two rigorous evaluations in India and in Manila, Nicolas Kristof concludes that "there is no evidence that microcredit has any effect on (...) women’s empowerment."

Other impacts

Tazul Islam asserts a positive influence of microcredit on the level of education, health and nutrition. In the US, microcredit has created jobs directly and indirectly, as 60% of borrowers were able to hire others. Business owners in Canada were able to improve their housing situation after their income improved due to business expansion facilitated by microloans, 70% indicating their housing has improved. Ultimately, many of the small business owners that use social funding are able to graduate from government funding.  According to reports every domestic microcredit loan creates 2.4 jobs. These entrepreneurs provide wages that are, on average, 25% higher than minimum wage.

A 2005 review published by the Grameen Foundation summarize scores of studies, concluding that "society-wide benefits that go beyond clients’ families are apparently significant".

Based on the evidence of two rigorous evaluations in India and in Manila, Nicolas Kristof concludes that "there is no evidence that microcredit has any effect on health or education."

Unintended consequences of microfinance can include informal intermediaton: That is, some entrepreneurial borrowers become informal intermediaries between microfinance initiatives and poorer micro-entrepreneurs. Those who more easily qualify for microfinance split loans into smaller credit to even poorer borrowers. Informal intermediation ranges from casual intermediaries at the good or benign end of the spectrum to 'loan sharks' at the professional and sometimes criminal end of the spectrum.

Anthropology of development

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropology_of_development 

 

The anthropology of development is a term applied to a body of anthropological work which views development from a critical perspective. The kind of issues addressed, and implications for the approach typically adopted can be gleaned from a list questions posed by Gow (1996). These questions involve anthropologists asking why, if a key development goal is to alleviate poverty, is poverty increasing? Why is there such a gap between plans and outcomes? Why are those working in development so willing to disregard history and the lessons it might offer? Why is development so externally driven rather than having an internal basis? In short, why is there such a lack of planned development?

This anthropology of development has been distinguished from development anthropology. Development anthropology refers to the application of anthropological perspectives to the multidisciplinary branch of development studies. It takes international development and international aid as primary objects. In this branch of anthropology, the term development refers to the social action made by different agents (institutions, business, enterprise, states, independent volunteers) who are trying to modify the economic, technical, political or/and social life of a given place in the world, especially in impoverished, formerly colonized regions.

Development anthropologists share a commitment to simultaneously critique and contribute to projects and institutions that create and administer Western projects that seek to improve the economic well-being of the most marginalized, and to eliminate poverty. While some theorists distinguish between the 'anthropology of development' (in which development is the object of study) and development anthropology (as an applied practice), this distinction is increasingly thought of as obsolete.

Early approaches to development

Some describe the anthropological critique of development as one that pits modernization and an eradication of the indigenous culture, but this is too reductive and not the case with the majority of scholarly work. In fact, most anthropologists who work in impoverished areas desire the same economic relief for the people they study as policymakers, however they are wary about the assumptions and models on which development interventions are based. Anthropologists and others who critique development projects instead view Western development itself as a product of Western culture that must be refined in order to better help those it claims to aid. The problem therefore is not that of markets driving out culture, but of the fundamental blind-spots of Western developmental culture itself. Criticism often focuses therefore on the cultural bias and blind-spots of Western development institutions, or modernization models that: systematically represent non-Western societies as more deficient than the West; erroneously assume that Western modes of production and historical processes are repeatable in all contexts; or that do not take into account hundreds of years of colonial exploitation by the West that has tended to destroy the resources of former colonial society. Most critically, anthropologists argue that sustainable development requires at the very least more inclusion of the people who the project aims to target to be involved in the creation, management and decision-making process in the project creation in order to improve development.

Pre-WWII: Rhodes-Livingstone Institute

The British government established the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in 1937 to conduct social science research in British Central Africa. It was part of the colonial establishment, although its head, anthropologist Max Gluckman, was a critic of colonial rule. Gluckman refused to describe colonialism as a simple case of "culture contact" since it was not a case of cultures mutually influencing each other, but of the forced incorporation of Africans into a foreign social, political and economic system. The anthropologists of the Institute were core members of what came to be known as the "Manchester school" of anthropology noted for looking at issues of social justice such as apartheid and class conflict.

Culture of poverty

Main article: Culture of poverty

The term "subculture of poverty" (later shortened to "culture of poverty") made its first prominent appearance in the ethnography Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959) by anthropologist Oscar Lewis. Lewis struggled to render "the poor" as legitimate subjects whose lives were transformed by poverty. He argued that although the burdens of poverty were systemic and therefore imposed upon these members of society, they led to the formation of an autonomous subculture as children were socialized into behaviors and attitudes that perpetuated their inability to escape the underclass. In sociology and anthropology, the concept created a backlash, pushing scholars to abandon cultural justifications and negative descriptions of poverty, fearing such analysis may be read as "blaming-the-victim."

Modernization Theory and its critics

The most influential modernization theorist in development was Walt Rostow, whose The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960) concentrates on the economic side of the modernization, and especially the factors needed for a country to reach "take-off" to self-sustaining growth. He argued that today's underdeveloped areas are in a similar situation to that of today's developed areas at some time in the past, and that therefore the task in helping the underdeveloped areas out of poverty is to accelerate them along this supposed common path of development, by various means such as investment, technology transfers, and closer integration into the world market. Rostow's unilineal evolutionist model hypothesized all societies would progress through the same stages to a modernity defined by the West. The model postulates that economic growth occurs in five basic stages, of varying length:

1. Traditional society
2. Preconditions for take-off
3. Take-off
4. Drive to maturity
5. Age of High mass consumption

As should be clear from the subtitle of his book, Rostow sought to provide a capitalist rebuttal to the unilinear Marxist growth models being pursued in the newly independent communist regimes in the second and third world; an effort that would lead to the "Green revolution" to combat the "Red revolution".

George Dalton and the substantivists

George Dalton applied the substantivist economic ideas of Karl Polanyi to economic anthropology, and to development issues. The substantivist approach demonstrated the ways in which economic activities in non-market societies were embedded in other, non-economic social institutions such as kinship, religion and political relations. He therefore critiqued the formalist economic modelling of Rostow. He was the author of "Growth without development: An economic survey of Liberia" (1966, with Robert W. Clower) and "Economic Anthropology and Development: Essays on Tribal and Peasant Economies" (1971).

Dependency theory

Main articles: World-systems theory and Dependency theory

Dependency theory arose as a theory in Latin America in reaction to modernization theory. It argues that resources flow from a "periphery" of poor and underdeveloped states to a "core" of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. It is a central contention of dependency theory that poor states are impoverished and rich ones enriched by the way poor states are integrated into the "World-system" and hence poor countries will not follow Rostow's predicted path of modernization. Dependency theory rejected Rostow's view, arguing that underdeveloped countries are not merely primitive versions of developed countries, but have unique features and structures of their own; and, importantly, are in the situation of being the weaker members in a world market economy and hence unable to change the system.

Immanuel Wallerstein's "world-systems theory" was the version of Dependency theory that most North American anthropologists engaged with. His theories are similar to Dependency theory, although he placed more emphasis on the system as system, and focused on the developments of the core rather than periphery. Wallerstein also provided an historical account of the development of capitalism which had been missing from Dependency theory.

'Women in development' (WID)

Main articles: Women in development and Gender and development

Women in development (WID) is an approach to development projects that emerged in the 1970s, calling for treatment of women's issues in development projects. Later, the Gender and development (GAD) approach proposed more emphasis on gender relations rather than seeing women's issues in isolation. The WID school grew out of the pioneering work of Esther Boserup. Boserup's most notable book is The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure. This book presents a "dynamic analysis embracing all types of primitive agriculture." Drawing on Boserup, the WID theorists pointed out that the division of labour in agriculture is frequently gendered, and that in societies practicing shifting cultivation, it is women who conduct most of the agricultural work. Development projects, however, were skewed towards men on the assumption they were "heads of households."

Development discourse and the creation of the 'underdeveloped' world

A major critique of development from anthropologists came from Arturo Escobar's seminal book Encountering Development, which argued that Western development largely exploited non-Western peoples. Arturo Escobar views international development as a means for the Occident to keep control over the resources of its former colonies. Escobar shows that between 1945 and 1960, while the former colonies were going through decolonization, development plans helped to maintain the third world's dependency on the old metropole. Development projects themselves flourished in the wake of WWII, and during the cold war, when they were developed to

1. stop the spread of Communism with the spread of capitalist markets; and

2. create more prosperity for the West and its products by creating a global consumer demand for finished Western products abroad.

Some scholars blame the different agents for having only considered a small aspect of the local people's lives without analyzing broader consequences, while others like dependency theory or Escobar argue that development projects are doomed to failure for the fundamental ways they privilege Western industry and corporations. Escobar's argument echos the earlier work of dependency theory and follows a larger critique more recently posed by Foucault and other poststructuralists.

The World Bank and the development regime

The World Bank Group consists of multiple institutions including the International Development Association (IDA), the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA).  IDA credits as well as IBRD loans support both development projects, and structural adjustment programs alike.  

The IDA of the World Bank Group was created in 1960, per urgent request of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower.  The IDA gave the Bank the resources and mandate it required to address the issues of the poorest countries and their citizens.  This institution served as a channel for the more economically stable nations of the world to assist those with less financial stability by providing long-term loans at no interest to the most economically challenged among developing countries.  The IDA's concessional financing by 138 countries is mainly exclusive to countries that have a per capita income of $400 or less (no more than about $900) and lack the financial means to borrow from the IBRD, the main lending institution of the World Bank.  Loans issued by the IDA carry maturity dates of 35 or 40 years from the date of issue, with a 10-year grace period on the principal repayment.  In the fiscal year of 1989, total lending for the World Bank was approximately $23.06 billion.

Per present day, more than 2.5 billion people, more than half of the developing world representing 79 countries, have the eligibility to borrow from the IDA.  Since its creation in 1960, the IDA remains the single largest source of donor funding for social services at a basic level; including health, clean water, sanitation, education, and infrastructure to the world's impoverished nations.

In the 1950s, many of these nations were newly independent from colonial rule, therefore suffering from economic and political instability and an inability to afford development loans on the typical terms offered by the World Bank.  Utilizing the same criteria to evaluate loans as the IBRD facility of the World Bank, the IDA's development regime pursues funding projects that protect the environment and build needed infrastructure.  They also aid the betterment of conditions supporting the development of private industries, and support reforms that function to liberalize countries' economies.  Since its establishment in 1960, the IDA has lent $106 billion to 106 countries to fund the basic needs of billions of poverty-stricken peoples.

IDA lending for Fiscal Year 1989 (FY89) totaled at $4.9 billion in credits and broken down by region: 48% to Africa, 44% to Asia, and 8% to Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.

IDA lending for FY89 by sector approximates as follows: 29% agriculture; 24% structural and sector adjustment lending; 16% transportation and telecommunications; 10% energy; 9% education; 5% population, health, and nutrition; 4% water supply and sewage.

Success of the IDA

On a major scale, the global development community has been impacted by the IDA, with success rates that compare favorably with both public and private sector investments around the world.  Thirty-two countries that borrowed from the IDA have resulting growth and development beyond the point where they have lost their eligibility to use IDA funds, granting them "graduate" status from the IDA.

The Concerns of the IDA

Members of the IDA community, including the IDA's most avid supporters, have raised criticisms concerning IDA policies, effectiveness, and resources.  There is much room for improvement in the IDA's track record, namely for its support in Africa.  A number of policy reforms instituted by a number of African countries had failed to obtain desired results.  The specific failures lay in the decline in export prices coupled with the emerging restrictions on the import of African goods, done by some of the industrialized countries.  The World Bank providing service to Africa by enhancing its pursuit in its current development strategy proved insufficient in placing its nations on a secure path of development.

The development of underdevelopment

Governmentality: Development as 'anti-politics machine'

Main article: The Anti-Politics Machine

Location of Lesotho in South Africa

At a critical juncture in the early nineteenth century the state began to connect itself to a series of groups "that in different ways had long tried to shape and administer the lives of individuals in pursuit of various goals" rather than simply extend the absolutist state's repressive machinery of social control. Michel Foucault's work on the prison, the clinic, and the asylum – on the development of "bio-power" – analyzed the plurality of governing agencies and authorities who developed programs, strategies, and technologies that were deployed to optimize the health, welfare and life of populations. He referred to this process with the neologism, "governmentality" (governmental rationality). One of the last of these new applied sciences was the "development apparatus", the post-world war extension of colonial rule after the independence of third world states. James Ferguson utilized the governmentality framework in "The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho" (1990), the first in many similar explorations. Ferguson sought to explore how "development discourse" works. That is, how do the language and practices used by development specialists influence the ways in which development is delivered, and what unintended consequences does it foster. He found that development projects which failed in their own terms could be redefined as "successes" on which new projects were to be modelled. The net effect of development, he found, was to "de-politicize" questions of resource allocation, and to strengthen bureaucratic power. In his analysis of a development project in Lesotho (South Africa) between 1978 and 1982, he examined the following discursive maneuvers.

Ferguson points out that a critical part of the development process is the way in which the object of development is defined. In defining this object, it is severed from its historical and geographic context, and isolated as a "Less-Developed Country." In the case of Lesotho, its history as a grain exporting region was ignored, as was its current role as a labour reserve for the South African mines. Not wanting to deal with the apartheid South African regime, development agencies isolated the "independent" Lesotho from the regional economy in which it was entrapped in their project rationales and reports. Artificially taken out of this larger capitalist context, Lesotho's economy was described as "isolated," "non-market" and "traditional" and thus a proper target for aid intervention.

Ferguson underscores that these discourses are produced within institutional settings where they must provide a charter for governmental intervention. Any analysis which suggests the roots of poverty lie in areas outside the scope of government are quickly dismissed and discarded since they cannot provide a rationale for state action. And since the capitalist economy is one such area which has been ideologically set outside the scope of governmental action, the discursive creation of a deformed 'native economy' creates the required opening for that intervention.

Ferguson writes that it is not enough to note development's failures; even the project managers initially recognized it as a failure. If that was all Ferguson had done, his book would not have had the influence it did. Asking if development is a failure is asking the wrong question; it ignores the "instrument effects" of what the projects DO do. In other words, we should ask what NON-economic functions does development serve? His answer:

1. It's an "anti-politics machine"; it makes blatantly political decisions about the allocation of resources appear to be "technical solutions to technical problems". Important questions such as the reallocation of land to a limited number (leaving them relatively wealthy, and others in poverty) are rephrased as a "necessity for the sustainable commercial management of livestock." A large proportion of men are deprived of their retirement savings.
2. "Integrated development" served to strengthen the presence of a repressive government in an isolated and resistant area. Development projects are dependent upon local governments for implementation, and rarely challenge the nature of that government. The resources they supply frequently serve state needs more than local needs.
3. It perpetuates the migrant labour system. The project neglected to look at Lesotho in the regional economy with South Africa. Lesotho was a labour reserve for Apartheid-era South African mines. The men of Lesotho were not farmers, but unemployed workers and retirees. Real commercial farming was never a possibility without large subsidies. The project thus served to preserve a pool of cheap labour for South Africa in a time when international sanctions against Apartheid were hitting its economy.

The Limits of Governmentality

Ecogovernmentality

Main article: Ecogovernmentality

Ecogovernmentality, (or Eco-governmentality), is the application of Foucault's concepts of biopower and governmentality to the analysis of the regulation of social interactions with the natural world. The concept of Ecogovernmentality expands on Foucault's genealogical examination of the state to include ecological rationalities and technologies of government. Following Michel Foucault, writing on ecogovernmentality focuses on how government agencies, in combination with producers of expert knowledge, construct "The Environment." This construction is viewed both in terms of the creation of an object of knowledge and a sphere within which certain types of intervention and management are created and deployed to further the government's larger aim of managing the lives of its constituents. This governmental management is dependent on the dissemination and internalization of knowledge/power among individual actors. This creates a decentered network of self-regulating elements whose interests become integrated with those of the State.

Work done by Arun Agrawal on local forest governance in India, is an example of this method of analysis. He illustrates how the production of specific types of expert knowledge (the economic productivity of forests) coupled with specific technologies of government (local Forest Stewardship Councils) can bring individual interest in line with those of the state. This, not through the imposition of specific outcomes, but by creating frameworks that rationalizes behavior in particular ways and involve individuals in the process of problem definition and intervention.

Agricultural development: the "Green Revolution"

The term "Green Revolution" was first used in 1968 by former United States Agency for International Development (USAID) director William Gaud, who noted the spread of the new technologies:

"These and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution."