ABSTRACT

After some six decades of circulation, development continues to be a contested term, referring both to the ideal of improvement in people’s wellbeing and to a far more dystopian reality on the ground. Because of our commitment to a noneconomistic development as an important way to ameliorate poverty, we start from the premise that the post-1940s development project has clearly “failed the Third World” (Bhavnani, Foran, and Kurian, 2003b, 2). In the contemporary neocolonial age, the nexus of big business, fi nancial institutions, and capitalist regimes have wreaked havoc on the Third World in the name of development, usually making the word a euphemism for the exploitation of the world’s natural resources to benefi t minuscule transnational elites located in all sections of the world.