Violence, Development and Difference

International organizations such as the World Bank view violence as “development in reverse,” that is, as one of the most serious obstacles to development due to its negative effects on human welfare and economic growth. However, there are many more ways in which violence and development intertwine. Historically, one can note a mutually reinforcing relation between colonial violence and capitalist development. More recently, international development projects (such as the construction of dams for “clean energy”) have had deadly consequences for subaltern peoples and their different cultural, political, and economic ways of being in the world. This course explores the contentious links between violence and development by focusing attention on the problem of difference, that is, the diverse visions of social life held by those inhabiting the margins of the Global South. Guided by authors that center the colonial encounter and its legacies, this course will challenge you to make sense of the relationship between violence and development on your own terms. Rather than accumulating information on a conceptual object named violence or development, the focus of our course will be on gaining a critical perspective from which to understand the pressing political issues of the global present — including the exorbitant levels of violence affecting certain parts of the world — and how colonial pasts and presents intersect with these realities.