Category: Decolonization

USAID is being dismantled, what comes next? An Interview with Liz Grossman Kitoyi

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‘Most young Africans I meet are not mourning the loss of aid, but they’re questioning why it took so long to reckon with its fragility’

In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr Amber Murrey, a scholar of anti-imperial geographies and co-author of Learning Disobedience: Decolonizing Development Studies, speaks with Elizabeth (Liz) Grossman Kitoyi, founder of Baobab Consulting and a development practitioner with two decades of experience in Senegal, Malawi, New York, Washington DC, and elsewhere.

In this conversation, they explore the historical dismantling of USAID as a political and narrative project with profound implications for how Africa is positioned within US policy. This political project ultimately led to the dissolution of Liz’s own work with USAID. Drawing on Murrey’s longstanding critiques of the epistemic hierarchies embedded in the development industry, the discussion surfaces the structural dependencies hardwired into donor-driven systems and the contractor ecosystems that delimit the very meaning of ‘reform’. Yet, as Grossman Kitoyi reflects, there are also central spaces of African agency where young people, educators, and innovators are envisioning futures no longer tethered to aid’s fragile architectures. What unfolds is a shared call for narrative sovereignty, radical humility, and forms of development rooted in solidarity.

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The white saviour industrial complex and global AI governance

Shamira AhmedLeave a comment

In the realm of international development, the ‘white saviour’ trope has long been a subject of critique and controversy. This phenomenon, often rooted in colonialist attitudes, positions Western individuals or entities as benevolent rescuers of non-Western communities, usually without acknowledging or addressing systemic multidimensional inequalities, colonial/racial privilege, and local agency of indigenous communities. The white saviour complex has not only perpetuated harmful stereotypes but has also undermined the efforts and voices of those it claims to help.

As artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a global force to potentially achieve sustainable development goals, we see a new manifestation of the white saviour industrial complex within emerging global AI governance.

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On recentring women’s grassroots struggles to decolonise FinTech narratives

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Drawing realised by artist Pawel Kuczyński for Serena Natile’s book The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion: Mobile Money, Gendered Walls

I came to the study of fintech as a feminist socio-legal scholar researching the gender dynamics of South-South migration. While doing fieldwork in Kenya for my PhD in 2012, I came across M-Pesa, a mobile money service used by locals as an instrument for transferring money from urban to rural areas. From the start of my research in 2011 to the completion of my PhD in 2016, ongoing studies on M-Pesa were mainly celebratory. It was acclaimed as an innovative instrument for poverty reduction, development, and gender equality and was enthusiastically supported by donors and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as by tech entrepreneurs and corporate philanthropy. Its success story was so uncontested that I decided to change my research question to focus on the gender dynamics of digital financial inclusion, rather than on my initial interest, migration.

The key narrative of M-Pesa’s success in terms of gender equality was, and still is, that it facilitates women’s access to financial services, providing them with a variety of opportunities to improve their own livelihoods and those of their families, their communities, and ultimately their countries. In the specific case of M-Pesa, a basic-mobile-phone-enabled money transfer service is considered more accessible and available than transferring money via mainstream financial institutions such as banks, and more reliable and secure than informal finance channels such as moneylenders or the handling of cash via rotating credit and savings associations (ROSCAs). This claim is based on three assumptions: first, that women have less access to financial services than men have; second, that women would use their access to finance to support not only themselves but also their families and communities; and third, that digital financial services are better than informal financial channels because they overcome the limits of cash, ensuring traceability and security. These assumptions motivated advocacy and investment in digital financial inclusion projects and the creation of ad hoc programmes and institutions, all strongly focused on the question of how digital technology can be used to facilitate women’s access to financial services.

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Misreading Indigenous Politics: A Eulogy for the Eurocentric Left

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Response to Thomas Meaney, “Red Power” in LRB (Vol. 46, No. 14, 18 July 2024)

In the latest issue of the London Review of Books under the title of “Red Power: Indigenous Political Strategies,” Thomas Meaney has written a review of three recent award-winning books by historians of Native North America: Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent; Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America; and Nick Estes Our History is the Future. In some ways, the review is impressively learned. Meaney uses the occasion to canvass a generations-spanning array of scholarship on the history of Native North America and engages figures, events, and historiographic questions of which only a very small body of Native and non-native scholars on these topics are even aware.

Marks of erudition aside, Meaney is out to weave together a broader narrative that extends beyond the historical bona fides of these books. The key moment in setting up this narrative comes after Meaney has raised his readers’ hopes by opening with a quite historically literate summary of European settler expansionism and Indigenous peoples’ responses to it. In the paragraph that then really begins the substance of his review, Meaney pivots: “but recent roadmaps of the historiography either sidestep material questions or mistake a colonized mindset for progressivist one.” This is where Meaney divides the three books under review into three categories of political and historical errors: Hämäläinen’s revisionist history overstretches the notion of “empire” in his account of “Indigenous power” by labeling the Lakota (and in earlier work, the Comanche) as such. (I agree with this critique, so I leave it aside in this review). Blackhawk represents a trend of scholars of Native history and federal Indian law who “have so thoroughly internalized constitutional ideology that they seem not to notice how their cause has been instrumentalized by the most fanatically libertarian segment of American society.” And finally, “a nominally [!] left-wing Native scholarship” that romanticizes Indigenous experiences, engaging in a politics of authenticity. The latter is how Meaney represents the work of Lakota scholar Nick Estes.

After establishing these categories, Meaney argues that these various limitations are “all the more regrettable because the 20th century offered examples of Indigenous co-operation with the left, cases contemporary political theorists have examined with more care than their historian peers.” This is a strange thing to assert at the outset, given that there was no recognizable anticolonial “left” in the US settler colony that Native nations could possibly have “cooperated” with in the 19th century. The consensus on the necessity and inevitability of land dispossession and structural predation cut across almost all categories of white society, including almost all of those on the far left of the political spectrum. Moreover, this included, as many others have noted, some key figures in the history of African-American political thought such as Douglas and Du Bois. What these historians—particularly Blackhawk and Estes—ask us to do is to suspend some assumptions about what constitutes the commitments of “the left” at all, given the deep investments of American republicanism and many later iterations of US leftism (let alone the liberalism of the Democratic Party) in colonial dispossession or just racialized indifference.

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Condensing the Gaza crisis

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The Gaza crisis has underscored the deep fractures of domestic politics in Western Europe, the US and Australia. It is as much a domestic political crisis as a conflict in the Middle East.

What is the nature of this crisis? Well, it is not one but multiple crises that are condensed around the Gaza war. Now condensation is an interesting concept – first used by Freud to show how a single idea or dream stands for multiple associations and ideas. We can think of the Gaza crisis as a political condensation of several multiple and intersecting crises and their  different temporalities. It condenses a series of fracture points: the crisis of representation, an increasingly authoritarian response to the political conflict, the unravelling of the international liberal order and the politics of race and class. It reinforces a shift to what the Marxist political theorist Nicos Poulantzas termed authoritarian statism which is the intensification of authoritarian tendencies within ostensibly democratic institutions and processes.

First, it is now fashionable to apply the term decolonisation to global politics but this decolonization is always seen as ‘out there’ and distinct from the politics of class. Instead, I want to argue the Gaza crisis has brought decolonisation back home to the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney and New York. It is often forgotten that many of those on the streets are demanding not just a ceasefire in Gaza but a political voice that is marginalised.  And let’s not forget that this plays out in the register of both class and race.  Many – but by no means all – of those in the streets are the new migrant working class and Gaza is an expression of their political discontent. The social theorist – Stuart Hall – famously said that race is the medium through which class is lived and in the Gaza crisis we see an intersection of class and race. It is return of the political time of colonial politics but this time in the metropolis of the old colonies. This class and domestic dimension is often forgotten in the sanitised version of decolonisation that circulates within academia. Again, the Gaza crisis condenses existing political fractures.

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Why Palestine is a feminist and an anti-colonial issue

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I am writing this short commentary to bear witness of the ethnic cleansing that is going on since 7 October. As I write this short text, over 13000 including 5000 children have been killed by Israel in Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank), many thousand people are missing under the rubbles and as many have been displaced from their homes. Twelve-hundred people have been reported to have been killed in Israel by Hamas, and over 200 people have been abducted by Hamas.

It is important to historicise the current genocide which many observers and Palestinians themselves have called the second Nakba. The People of Palestine have survived and continuously resisted seven decades of occupation and violations of their basic rights. Their genocide has taken many forms: occupation, waves of land and sea grabs, dispossession, expropriation, displacement, assassinations, sexual violence. The genocide we are witnessing did not start today. This violence has been going on for 41 days…and 75 years. And it has continued because of the many green lights, or lack of reactions to the countless acts of violence that the Israeli apartheid state has inflicted for decades. But most importantly, the spree of violence started with hate speeches and with the slow and insidious dehumanisation of Palestinians through the routinisation of their deaths. A social death. Countless, faceless scores of fatalities, wounded, jailed, and displaced civilians have over the decades been buried under seconds-long reporting at the radio or on TV, paragraph-long accounting of loss of lives in newspapers.

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Degrowth and the Global South: remarks on the twin problem of structural interdependencies

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By Claudius Gräbner-Radkowitsch and Birte Strunk

The degrowth movement is a radical attempt to challenge our current economic system, arguing that its excessive focus on economic growth will ultimately harm people and planet. It has recently gained increasing attention, not only because it has found its way into mainstream political debates (see, for example, the Beyond Growth conference at the European Parliament), but also because related research projects have won prestigious international funding awards (see, for example, here). However, as you may have noticed, these events are mainly taking place in the Global North. The concept as such was also originally developed in the Global North. At the same time, the movement is strongly committed to the idea of global justice and a decolonization of relations between the Global North and South.

This begs the question: What is the role of the Global South in the contemporary degrowth discourse? To what extent does the discourse take into account Southern perspectives? Does it think that the South should also degrow, or is Northern degrowth mainly seen as a self-prescription? And to what extent does the degrowth community reflect on the implications of Northern degrowth for the Global South? To answer these questions, we have taken stock of how the academic degrowth discourse considers the Global South. But before we go into the details of what we found and what we make of it, let us briefly outline what degrowth is all about.

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Decolonising development with Frantz Fanon

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The great cultural theorist Stuart Hall called Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth ‘the bible of decolonisation’ as it encapsulated the urge for freedom across the colonial world (1). Fanon illuminates how racism represented an organising principle for capitalist classes by systematically devaluing the lives of the majority of the world’s population. ‘For centuries the capitalists have behaved like real war criminals in the underdeveloped world,’ he wrote. ‘Deportation, massacres, forced labour, and slavery were the primary methods used by capitalism to increase its gold and diamond reserves, and establish its wealth and power’ (2).

One of the reasons for Fanon’s popularity among those who want to decolonise development is that he argued that post-colonial countries should forge their own paths to development rather than attempting to follow already developed countries. ‘The Third World must not be content to define itself in relation to values which preceded it,’ he warned. ’On the contrary, the underdeveloped countries must endeavour to focus on their very own values as well as methods and style specific to them.’

Not only did Fanon explain the horrors inflicted by colonialism upon native populations; crucially, he also conceived of real human development as a process rooted in a collective labouring class (comprising workers and poor peasants) transcending capitalist brutality.

However these two elements of his thought — the critical identification of the violence of colonialism, and a real human developmental alternative to it — have often been disconnected by thinkers influential to the decolonial movement. This represents a dangerous misinterpretation of Fanon. It obscures his vision of a decolonised world and the social forces able to construct it.

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