Human (In)Security and Development in the 21st Century

In this contribution we focus on the political merits as well as limitations of the project of Third Worldism. Through critical historical analysis we identify the difference that Third Worldism made to world politics. At the same time it was without a doubt beset with contradictions from its inception. By foregrounding the contexts of development struggles, we hope to illustrate—at least minimally—these contradictions. From our perspective these are to be found in the politics of emancipatory nationalism. On the one hand, this facilitated a freedom of a kind: recognition and formal equality in world politics. On the other, the institutional form this took was premised on the assumption that national development (especially of the postcolonial states) was somehow independent of wider historical as well as ‘transnational’ social and political relations. A more relational understanding of the history of development would reveal the extent to which wealth and poverty, order, violence and conflict are outcomes of multifaceted, but combined social and political processes that cannot be reduced to the parameters of the nation-state or the nation-state system. For all its contradictions, Third Worldism articulated a radical political imagination (for its time). However, ironically, to carry forth its underlying concerns, we need to move beyond the territorial imagination and the equation of progress and modernity with the sovereign nation-state to understand why it was a contradictory project. Perhaps, through understanding its contradictions, spaces of hope might be opened up to (re)imagine radical and more humane alternatives.