ABSTRACT
In the 1970s, with dependency theory denouncing modernization theory as cryptoimperialist and modernization theorists hitting back by accusing dependency authors of being populist pseudo-scientists, development studies found fertile ground and grew into an increasingly accepted new discipline of the social sciences. Universities – often under pressure from leftist professors and students – created Third World Centres. Debates about the nature and impact of development assistance became popular, and the existence of many dictatorial regimes in the South led to numerous solidarity committees in the North. In the 1980s, things started to change for development studies. A number of occurrences in that decade, which will be dealt with in the following paragraphs, led to an increasingly uneasy feeling within the discipline that old certainties were fading away. It was felt that development theories in the sense of a related set of propositions of the ‘if . . . then’ kind, could ever less adequately explain experiences of development and underdevelopment. Whether it concerned modernization theories or neo-Marxist dependency theories, both sets of development theories were losing out in terms of their explanatory power. From the mid-1980s onwards, the so-called ‘impasse in development studies’ was talked about. The contours of this impasse were sketched for the first time in a seminal article by David Booth in 1985. In the years that followed, other authors continued the discussion, which took on new dimensions with the end of the cold war and the debate on globalization.
