Politics of Power and Knowledge in Global Development: Retrieving the Absent through an Engagement with the Present.

The roles of ‘knowledge and power’ and ‘knowledge as power’ in development have been increasingly gaining the attention of critical scholars as well as policy practitioners. While the former seek to articulate the way in which (global) development is constituted through power struggles which also entail struggles over knowledge in development, the latter tend to misapprehend both. That is, the discourses of development they construct render invisible that development has been historically a continuously contested practice. This is evident for example, in the continued deployment of the comparative method in the theory and practice of mainstream development analysis. Methodologically, such approaches reify spatial boundaries and operate with a temporal logic that necessarily subordinates alternative conceptions of development to that of ‘past time’ in terms of a temporalisation as ‘past, prior or primordial’. A consequence of this is the foreclosure of the possibility of articulating social struggles in challenge of the politics underpinnings this spatio-temporal fix. This paper argues that a critical engagement of this dynamic with reference to the dialectic between ‘knowledge and power’ and ‘knowledge as power’ in struggles over development can render visible the analytical and practical tensions that ensue under a continued legacy of colonial /postcolonial thinking within a reconfigured ‘international’ political economy of global development. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]