THE GEOPOLITICAL IMAGINATION AND THE ENFRAMING OF DEVELOPMENT THEORY

It is argued that all the major conceptualizations of development in the post-war period contain and express a geopolitical imagination which has had a conditioning effect on the enframing of the meanings and relations of development. The Occidental deployment of modernization theory for the developing countries reflected a will to geopolitical power. It provided a discursive legitimation for a whole series of practical interventions and penetrations that sought to subordinate and assimilate the Third World Other. In a connected but far from identical manner, neo-liberal readings of development in the 1980s have accompanied and been inspired by rapidly changing geopolitical conditions. Similarly, it is argued that on the other side of the North-South divide the radical dependencia perspective of the 1960s and early 1970s cannot be separated from a series of geopolitical events such as the Cuban Revolution, nor from the perceived need on the part of critical Latin American intellectuals to confront and challenge the relevance of modernization theory for the periphery. Finally, it is suggested that in any attempt to rethink development for global times the nature of our geopolitical imagination must be a key element, just as the theorization of the geopolitical is equally relevant for development theorists and political geographers.