ABSTRACT
In the post-liberal statebuilding paradigm, individual autonomy or freedom is the central motif for understanding the problematic of development in the post-colonial context. Rather than a material view of development, human agency has been placed at the centre and is increasingly seen to be the measure of development, in terms of individual capabilities. In the words of Amartya Sen, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economic Science, freedom is seen to be both the primary end and principal means of development: ‘Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency’ (Sen 1999: xii). In this post-liberal discourse, of ‘human development’, freedom and autonomy are foregrounded but development lacks a transformative or modernizing material content. In this discourse, development is taken out of an economic context of GNP growth or industrialization, or a social and political context in which development policies are shaped by social and political pressures or state-led policies. The individualized understanding of development takes a rational choice perspective of the individual or ‘the agent-orientated view’ (Sen 1999: 11), in which development focuses upon ways of enabling individuals to make more effective choices by increasing their capabilities.
