Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples
December 2007, Polity
In this accessible and path-breaking book, Mark Duffield
questions this conventional wisdom and lays bare development not as
a way of bettering other people but of governing them. He offers a
profound critique of the new wave of Western humanitarian and peace
interventionism, arguing that rather than bridging the lifechance
divide between development and underdevelopment, it maintains and
polices it. As part of the defence of an insatiable mass consumer
society, those living beyond its borders must be content with
With case studies drawn from Mozambique, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, the book provides a critical and historically informed analysis of the NGO movement, humanitarian intervention, sustainable development, human security, coherence, fragile states, migration and the place of racism within development. It is a must-read for all students and scholars of development, humanitarian intervention and security studies as well as anyone concerned with our present predicament.
Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION: DEVELOPMENT AND SURPLUS LIFE .
The liberal problematic of security.
Biopolitics, liberalism and development.
Surplus population and accumulation by dispossession.
Slavery and excess freedom.
The biopolitics of development and underdevelopment.
Dividing insured and non-insured peoples.
From internal war to global instability.
Occupation and contingent sovereignty.
Disturbing the boundaries of time and space.
Chapter 2: PERMANENT EMERGENCY AND DECOLONISATION .
Total war and the paradox of biopolitics.
NGOs and total war.
The colonial inheritance.
Expansion without imperial reconciliation.
Emergency and the dilemma of development.
Cold War liminality and non-state sovereignty.
Sustainable development: knowledge makes free.
The question of agency: being the right type.
Chapter 3: THE EMERGENCE OF CONTINGENT SOVEREIGNTY.
From modernisation to sustainable development.
Emergency and contingent sovereignty.
Negotiated access and the humanitarian boom.
Emergency and the external sovereign frontier.
Chapter 4: MOZAMBIQUE, GOVERNMENTALISATION AND NON-MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT.
The background to a ‘complex emergency’.
The changing relationship with NGOs.
War and the destruction of culture.
The re-emergence of social cohesion.
Opposing economic differentiation.
Gender, natural economy and land.
Chapter 5: HUMAN SECURITY AND GLOBAL DANGER.
Human security as a technology of governance.
Internal war and the crisis of containment.
Globalising versus containing tendencies.
Reinstating the state.
Unending war, human security and NGOs.
Chapter 6: AFGHANISTAN, COHERENCE AND TALIBAN RULE.
From negotiation to coercion.
The strategic framework for Afghanistan.
Development and security in practice.
Aid and peace-building in a failed state.
The limits of principled engagement.
Problematising state-based politics.
UNSMA and the critique of aid.
Chapter 7: FRAGILE STATES AND NATIVE ADMINISTRATION.
Fragility and global instability.
Contingent sovereignty and non-material development.
The governance state.
The fragile state and liberal imperialism.
Reintroducing native administration.
Culture and the limits of government.
The necessity of despotism.
Adjusting government to culture.
Technologies of post-interventionary governance.
Chapter 8: RACISM, CIRCULATION AND SECURITY.
The collapse of the national/international dichotomy.
From race war to racism.
Liberalism, imperialism and culture.
Decolonisation and the new racism.
Racism and anti-racism.
Conjoining the internal and external frontiers.
Migration and the European state of exception.
The changing regime of internal development.
Chapter 9: CONCLUSION: FROM CONTAINMENT TO SOLIDARITY.
The biopolitics of insured and non-insured life.
Development and Emergency.
Governmentalising petty sovereignty.
The biopolitics of unending war.
Is there an alternative development?.
The solidarity of the governed.
- Accessible and path-breaking new book by an internationally
renowned expert in the field
- Questions the conventional wisdom of security and development
- Offers a profound critique of the new wave of Western
humanitarian and peace interventionism
- Features case-studies drawn from Mozambique, Ethiopia and
- Includes a critical and historically informed analysis of the NGO movement, humanitarian intervention, sustainable development, human security, coherence, fragile states, migration and the place of racism within development
Times Higher Education
“Duffield’s book turns the liberal vision of the
world upside down.”
“Mark Duffield has written a brilliant book which draws
together the strings of the end of the Cold War, the securitization
of politics, the development of a neo-liberal discourse of
humanitarian intervention, and the fusion of the national and the
international. Particularly compelling is his contrarian view of
the consequences of the liberation of the UN from the shackles of
the Cold War.”
Janice Stein, University of Toronto
“Once again, Mark Duffield has gone beyond the platitudes
of 'development speak', 'security speak' and 'humanitarian speak'.
The book is crammed with insights and with challenges to received
David Keen, London School of Economics and Political Science
“Humanitarian and development aid and actors as
counterinsurgency: in this carefully documented but devastating
analysis of the people-centred technology of security for the West
since the mid-1990s and its historical context, Duffield provides
both practitioners and scholars with an interpretive framework for
the new North–South division and consequences of liberal
internationalism that is original and challenging and which demands
Susan L. Woodward, City University of New York