ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the narratives about history that circulate in discourses of democracy promotion, focuses on three interlocking ways of thinking about history: civilisation, development and the slow but inexorable spread of democracy. It looks in detail at how these three narratives function, in all their diversity. The chapter shows that precisely how the narratives constitute othering practices in temporal teleological terms: the other is the savage or the barbarian, outside of civilisation but also before it. It explores in detail the political programmes that emerge from attempts to contain or domesticate the barbarian and the savage, respectively, looking at the ways in which they open up and foreclose different ways of acting. The chapter also explores the precise opportunity offered by the histories that animate our contemporary practices of thought for exploring a somewhat novel form of genealogy. It concludes with Foucault in order to ask how history might be re-fictioned to provide an alternative politics.
