ABSTRACT
The orthodox approaches in academic and institutional literature implicitly naturalise the condition of rural poverty. In response it is necessary to emphasise that the impoverishment of Africa’s direct producers is a modern condition, a worldhistorical outcome of the global expansion and uneven development of capital effected through imperial relations. This requires an approach which acknowledges the specificity of particular contexts and conjunctures but nevertheless foregrounds the global structuring of the local, and the spatially and temporally extended conditions of possibility for social reproduction. In Development Studies the move away from the reductionism of dependency approaches to the critical focus on local agency, identity and difference has occurred often at the expense of attention to global structures. In critical IPE the rejection of positivism has also entailed a rejection of objectivity, an over-emphasis on ideology to the relative neglect of economic relations and coercive forms of domination, and an inadequate specification of social ontology in terms of inter-subjectivity and agency.
