ABSTRACT
This chapter examines discourses about common but differentiated responsibilities related to environmental equity and capacity as instantiations of temporality in international politics. Internalization is a process crucial to becoming a legitimate interlocutor in a given community and a source of contestation of that community's working narratives. This might suggest that the temporal discourse of development is a tactical tool and is never internalized with any sincerity. Steele's Defacing Power engages the aesthetic bases of power and how such bases can be insecuritized. The environmental equity and capacity debates of the 1990s and 2000s demonstrate the use of the Self's temporal discourse as a mechanism of internal critique by an assimilating Other. Dissident invocations of primitivity and childhood turn the temporal vision of modernity and its developmental metaphor back upon Western progenitors by calling such visions into question.
