Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.

by Arturo
Escobar
Review by: Joseph A. McKinney
The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Aug., 1995), pp. 817-819
Published by: Association for Asian Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2059455 .
Accessed: 01/09/2014 10:24
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
Association for Asian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Journal of Asian Studies.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 200.123.187.130 on Mon, 1 Sep 2014 10:24:00 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
BOOK REVIEWS-ASIA GENERAL 817
phobias or his following came from, and he begs analytical questions when he writes
that Stalinism "was far more rational and worked a lot better" than the politics of
Democratic Kampuchea (p. 227). Similarly, when he approvingly suggests that
Golding's Lord of the Flies is a better "key" to the Khmer Rouge "than any Marxist
texts," his tone is patronizing, and this reviewer doubts that such texts provide the
"key" to anything in the real world.
In a chapter entitled "Little Stalins?" Chirot compares North Korea with
Romania, a country which he has studied in depth, stressing what Liah Greenfeld has
called (in a Russian context) "resentful nationalism." This concept is helpful to his
discussion of despots elsewhere in the world, including a workmanlike chapter on
Burma (pp. 309-40). A few perceptive pages on the former Yugoslavia bring us into
the 1990s. The study closes with "Some Propositions, Lessons and Predictions about
Tyranny" (pp. 403-28) which, although sensible, seem poorly integrated with what
has gone before. Here or elsewhere I would have welcomed Chirot's thoughts about
the personalities of tyrants, the psychological dimensions of nationalism, and the
phenomenon of mass support.
His book ends less exuberantly than it began, almost as if studying so much
cruelty at close range has worn him out. He suggests in closing that as confidence in
Enlightenment liberalism fades, tyrannical abuses "may arise again at home and
certainly will elsewhere in the world." In other words, although we can turn the light
of scrutiny on tyrants as the author does so ably in this book, and while tyrants may
become less flamboyant, the affliction of tyranny, like the nationalism it feeds on, is
recurrent, incurable, and here to stay.
DAVID CHANDLER
Monash University
Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. By
ARTURO ESCOBAR. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1995. ix, 290 pp. $15.95 (paper).
This book was written to explain how the industrialized nations of North America
and Europe came to be the unquestioned role models in economic development for
societies in other parts of the world. The author's stated intention is to "contribute
to the development of a framework for the cultural critique of economics as a
foundational structure of modernity, including the formulation of a culture-based
political economy" (p. vii). His approach is anthropological and poststructuralist.
While the author never defines development, he obviously is referring to the
efforts of national and international development agencies to help economically less-
developed economies to raise their level of material prosperity and to get on the path
of sustained economic progress. The author considers these efforts to have been
arrogant, ethnocentric, and, for the most part, misguided failures.
The author is on target in criticizing development economics and the
development agencies for having sometimes taken naive and oversimplified views of
circumstances in the less-developed countries and for underestimating what would be
required for these countries to experience increased rates of material progress. This
point has been made often by mainstream economists, with particular criticism of the
emphasis in the development literature on planning.
However, the author's objection to development economics and the institutions
This content downloaded from 200.123.187.130 on Mon, 1 Sep 2014 10:24:00 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
818 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES
created to implement its prescriptions goes much deeper than this. He disagrees with
the worldview of economics that certain principles can be derived through rational
processes which have widespread validity even in lesser developed countries. In his
view, economists have "monopolized the power of speech," in that the categorization
and description of the peoples and conditions of less-developed countries have
somehow given economists and the development agencies hegemonic power over
them. The author sees ethnography as essential for developing new models which take
into account the self-understanding of the peoples living in the less-developed
countries.
The author gives an interesting, though cynical, description of the food and
nutrition programs of international development agencies. He views the motives of
professionals involved in these programs with skepticism. Their interest supposedly
was not alleviation of suffering, but rather the provision of low-cost food so that
multinational corporations could enjoy cheap labor and high profits. The question of
whether these food and nutrition programs were effective in improving the health
and extending the life expectancies of persons in less-developed countries is not
addressed here. Instead, the preoccupation is with the effects of the programs on power
relations in the society: "Regardless of the results in terms of increased income and
production, DRI [the Integrated Rural Development
Program]
introduced new
mechanisms of production and control" (p. 145).
The author is also highly critical of the Women in Development and the
Sustainable Development movements. In his view, the attempt to bring women's
issues into the forefront in development efforts led to an emphasis on traditional
gender roles which caused a further repression of women. The agenda of the Women
in Development movement is criticized as having been set by feminists and
development specialists in the developed countries rather than by women in the less-
developed countries who are the supposed beneficiaries of this agenda.
The Sustainable Development movement is also regarded with cynicism, its
proponents supposedly being concerned not so much with the ultimate fate of the
environment as with using the environment in ways which will maintain ever-
increasing levels of material production. A danger in this movement, according to the
author, is that it leaves the false impression that environmentally sound economic
development is possible with only minor adjustments in the market system instead
of essential fundamental changes.
In writing this book, the author pushes to the limits of language, using a
vocabulary that is off the reading level charts, and even creating new nouns out of old
ones (e.g., hybridity), verbs out of nouns (e.g., phagocytize), and verbs out of adjectives
(e.g., problematicize). Even so, his frustration is evident in the statement that: "If we
continue to speak of tradition and modernity, it is because we continually fall into
the trap of not saying anything new because the language does not permit it" (p.
219).
This book can serve a useful purpose in drawing attention to the fact that
development agencies often have been insensitive to local cultures and have failed to
take advantage of wisdom and insights inherent in those cultures. As suggested,
greater use of cultural anthropologists could help to remedy this deficiency. The author
does not support with evidence his thesis that the peoples of the less-developed
countries have on balance been made worse off by the development programs of the
past forty years. Furthermore, his denigration of past efforts and his call for a whole
This content downloaded from 200.123.187.130 on Mon, 1 Sep 2014 10:24:00 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
BOOK REVIEWS-ASIA GENERAL 819
new development paradigm would have been more convincing had he proposed an
alternative paradigm, which he does not.
JOSEPH A. McKINNEY
Baylor University
The Vulnerability of Empire. By CHARLES A. KUPCHAN. Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1994.
In this highly useful book, Charles Kupchan ponders why states at the height of
their relative power still feel "vulnerable" in security terms and sometimes act contrary
to their own interests. This is a provocative question. He apparently is influenced by
the American experience in Vietnam (not directly, but through implication) and by
his own assessments of the wisdom of U.S. policy there. He reflects directly on the
policies of Britain and France toward World War I and II Germany, on the stance of
Bismarckian and World War I Germany toward the rest of the system, and on the
dealings of World War II Japan with its opponents. He explicitly covers the 1945-
49 U.S. effort to restore Europe and Japan to economic health, and the more global
1949-50 U.S. effort to establish global containment of the Soviet Union. The richness
of these case studies alone makes the book worth reading.
Why do powerful governments feel vulnerable, and correspondingly often make
policy mistakes? Kupchan makes the very plausible claim that the "strategic culture"
developed by elites is different for a state that is on the rise, seeking to establish a
position of primacy, compared to a state that is in decline, whose objective is to protect
its position of primacy in the status quo. He also asserts that the strategic outlook of
the state differs toward opponents in the core in comparison to how it views opponents
and problems in the periphery, and in high vulnerability as opposed to low
vulnerability settings. Out of this matrix (see tables on pages 17 and 69), he constructs
his theory of strategic response on the part of empires, or great powers.
Two types of adjustment failure plague these great states and the formation of
their strategic cultures. First, overly cooperative behavior results in strategic exposure
when the declining state fails to take steps to balance against rising threats to primary
security interests. Second, overly competitive behavior results in either of two strategic
problems: self-encirclement when expansionist behavior of a rising state provokes
confrontation with a robust coalition in the core; or overextension when expansion in
the periphery by a rising or declining state weakens the metropole's military and
economic strength. In periods of perceived "high vulnerability" the strategic culture
of the great power is vulnerable to the most serious errors.
All of this makes a great deal of strategic sense. But how does the state know
when to lean against one mistaken tendency instead of another? Part of the answer
surely is, as Kupchan claims, whether the state is rising or is declining "relative to
other major powers" in terms of "broader trends over time" (p. 14n), and whether
the state is facing problems "in the core" or "in the periphery." But something is
missing here, something that is bound to affect the strategic vision of the state.
Obviously absent from the matrix, and accordingly from the strategic assessment, is
whether the state's rivals are also rising or declining. Kupchan's state is peculiar. It
knows where it is on its own power cycle (p. 1), but not where others are on theirs.
Wanting are the subtleties of power trajectory that a Ludwig Dehio or a Henry
Kissinger, both with their unerring sense of structural change, place at the foundation
This content downloaded from 200.123.187.130 on Mon, 1 Sep 2014 10:24:00 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions