Deconstructing Development
By Sumanasiri Liyanage -November 22, 2012
Sumanasiri Liyanage
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants. ~Albert Camus
The Minister for Economic Development in presenting Divineguma Bill to the Parliament tried to portray the government’s effort to economic development as a ‘second war’, the first was the one waged against ‘terrorism’ i.e. the LTTE insurgency. The phrase ‘the war for development’ or ‘the developmental war’ sounds paradoxical. ‘Development’ is generally depicted as something ‘good’ while ‘war’ is portrayed as something essentially bad. Immanuel Wallerstein once remarked: “There is perhaps no social objective that can find as nearly unanimous acceptance today as that of economic development. I doubt that there has been a single government anywhere in the last 30 years that has not asserted it was pursuing this objective, at least for its own country. Everywhere in the world today, what divides left and right, however defined, is not whether or not to develop, but which policies are presumed to offer most hope that this objective will be achieved. We are told that socialism is the road to development. We are told that laissez-faire is the road to development. We are told that a break with tradition is the road to development. We are told that a revitalized tradition is the road to development. We are told that industrialization is the road to development. We are told that increased agricultural productivity is the road to development. We are told that delinking is the road to development. We are told that an increased opening to the world market (export-oriented growth) is the road to development. Above all, we are told that development is possible, if only we do the right thing” (Capitalism and Development edited by Leslie Sklair, London: Routledge). On the other hand, according to A J P Taylor, “wars are much like road accidents’ so ‘they have a general and particular cause at the same time’. Hence, like road accidents, these conflagrations have resulted in tens of millions of deaths and destruction of wealth. In case of Sri Lanka, the first war killed around 100,000 people and made a similar number injured. I am sure the Minister may not have implied that the second war, the so-called war of development, would produce the same outcome even with different trajectories. Hence, in what sense, did he portray the current development effort as a ‘second war’? Do adding one positive and one negative generate something positive? How do we resolve this conundrum? How do we reveal the phrase’s inapproriable difference or repressed other as that which may yet to come to transform whatever we inherit from the conventional discourse? This article proposes to look at the notion of development from a different perspective through deconstructing the very notion of development.
