ABSTRACT
Parallel to the protracted Yugoslav crisis an important shift in the structure of international aid, or aid policy as an instrument, has taken place. This shift, which had already taken off in Africa in the 1980s and the features of which have become increasingly clear and general during the last decade, has been analysed as a logical response to the emergence of a number of regions marked by protracted political crises and institutional collapse coupled with internal wars and complex humanitarian emergencies.1 One aspect of this shift was the idea of linking relief to development combined with the reprioritization of aid budgets, leaving larger budgets for humanitarian assistance at the expense of various forms of development aid. In the process an established set of ideas concerning development has become discursively replaced by a concept of so-called reconstruction.2 The whole discourse of ‘development’ and ‘development aid’ was, as it were, embedded in the ideology and logic of bipolarism. In the same instance as the bipolar (Cold War) global power system has, at least for the time being, tended to be replaced by a unipolar (US), or in some aspects multi-polar, system a new basis for dealing with the so called ‘periphery’ in the global power system has emerged. But ideas of development are deeply rooted in social imagery.3 Just as elements of the more specific political development theory, following its decline in the 1960s, started to reoccur in the ‘liberal’ or ‘nonmarxist’ attempts to develop a new political economy of development,4 it would be fair to say that developmentalism as a project has re-invented itself in relation to conflict and ‘post-war reconstruction’. In a similar manner aspects of political development theory have found new ground in relation to the ‘transition’ view on post-communist societies.
