Postscript

Abstract

For a very long time the ‘Third World’ has appeared to Western observers as a bundle of problems, with violence and suffering being fixed signs of its naturalized state. Images of gun-toting religious fundamentalists in the Middle East, bloody civil wars in Africa, and drug-traffickers in Latin America regularly fill the television screens, as do images of Mother Teresa’s orphans in hapless slums, disaster-prone Ethiopians or nameless victims of natural and human disaster in mysterious places, usually with strange names. In this tired and predictable representation, the Third World is a world to be analysed, controlled, managed, even salvaged; a laboratory for endless social engineering. Imbued with what Ashis Nandy calls a ‘secular theory of salvation’, development has offered the splendid prospects of ‘modernization’: from poverty alleviation to democratization, from building new institutions of capitalism to helping save the environment. The list of solutions is unending, subject to multiplication with the changing times. Underpinning policy prescriptions is the proposition that the Third World cannot cope with its problems. Its own solutions are reckless, its understanding of society defective, and its sensibility irrational.