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Development is a project of hope, guided by the aspiration for greater social justice and emancipation of the poor and disadvantaged in the world. Over the past decade postdevelopment critics have argued that this project of hope has failed, and, instead of creating a fairer world, development can only serve to perpetuate uneven power relationships. Emerging work by postdevelopment authors reinvigorates the positive promise of development as a project toward emancipation and social justice. Discursive practices of development professionals in northern Thailand illustrate how one might conceive of a postdevelopment practice in which aspirations toward social justice and emancipation can coexist alongside the messy realities of development work. Drawing on contemporary discourse theory, Ernesto Laclau's conceptualization of hegemonic struggle provides conceptual tools for thinking beyond the bind of development-as-power. Using hegemony to reimagine development as first and foremost a form of political engagement it becomes possible to imagine viable postdevelopment approaches and strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-colonial critiques of development reveal the neo-colonial potential of the development project, embedded in the imbalances of power in relations between West and East, First World and Third World. One of the core responses to the challenge of such a critique has been to turn to new participatory approaches that privilege local knowledges, locally defined needs and priorities, above the vagaries of aid agencies or the ‘expertise’ of development professionals. In this paper I argue that such a shift in development discourse and method has had a significant impact on the discursive practices of professionalism and professional responsibility. Drawing on ethnographic research with development professionals in northern Thailand, I argue that participation has emerged as a new orthodoxy among development professionals who seek to identify themselves as ethical and moral agents of an emancipatory development project. The rise of such orthodoxy has had clear impacts in terms of fostering the emergence of local organization and advocacy groups. At the same time, however, this paper considers how a ‘pro-local’ orthodoxy may also be having dis-enabling effects for the very project of emancipation that professionals wish to carry out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mountains of northern Thailand the constraints and restrictions placed upon 'hill tribe' people and their bodies are often counter-posed to a legendary past where people could move freely across borders, where refuge in the mountains represented freedom from oppressive state powers, and where highlanders could come down from the mountains and integrate. This paper explores how highland subjects have been transformed as the emergence of the Thai state has imposed concrete and regulated boundaries demarcating Thailand, and a Thai people. Building on historical narratives in which the freedoms of the past are counterpoised with the closely governed present, I present a more complex and contradictory picture of the national subjects in Thailand. I discuss the citizenship movement, in which activists have been fighting for citizenship status for highlanders through a strategy that seeks a place for highland people within hegemonic discourses of the nation-state and belonging. The citizenship movement establishes a new 'Thai hill tribe' subject position, formed in opposition to its constitutive outside--the 'non-Thai hill tribe'. And as highlanders find new ways to fit with the hegemony of the nation-state, both more fixed and more mobile subject positions open up as Thai-ness and its 'others' are redefined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]