Clemens Six

The Rise of Postcolonial States as Donors: a challenge to the development paradigm?

Abstract The idea of development co-operation—the ‘development paradigm’—took shape during the decades of global decolonisation and growing political autonomy of the former colonies. It can be understood as a historic reconfiguration of the centre–periphery relationship originally established through colonisation. The rise of new state donors such as China or India questions not only the established modes of development co-operation but also the development paradigm as a whole. Themselves historical products of anti-colonialism and political autonomy understood as non-alignment as well as absolute sovereignty, these new ‘Southern’ donors question the very idea of development (co-operation) as a Western, postcolonial concept. This paper, first, attempts to characterise the ‘development paradigm’, providing a historical contextualisation of the development discourse in its continuities and ruptures. Second, it asks what the rise of new state donors such as China and India looks like at the political–normative level as well as at the level of Realpolitik. Lastly, some future consequences of these trends are discussed illustrating the far-reaching (normative) consequences and the necessity to reconsider the established political discourse on development.

Challenging the grammar of difference : Benoy Kumar Sarkar, global mobility and anti-imperialism around the First World War

Abstract The new imperial history has advanced our understanding of empires in many ways: it enhanced a networked interpretation of empires, brought space back into the discussion, and suggested a fresh reading of imperial careers to comprehend early forms of global inter-dependencies. This article discusses selected aspects of the life and work of Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887–1949), a Bengali social scientist and political activist, to illustrate that anti-imperial biographies were simultaneously rooted in local as well as transnational spaces. They thus connected national struggles with globe-spanning processes. Biographies like this are underacknowledged in their meaning for how empires functioned and failed, and in their potential for understanding transnational actors. Sarkar’s efforts to challenge the legitimacy of the British Empire were the result of his life in a transnational social field, which was equally shaped by his extensive experience abroad and his continuous rootedness in local Bengali affairs. Sarkar’s anti-imperialism was enhanced by the mobility structures of the British Empire and resulted in new constellations of imperial, cosmopolitan, local and regional orientations and attachments. In this view, anti-imperialism was less the result of local struggles but of life practices reaching beyond the borders of the empire and a high awareness of acting in a global context that located its protagonists in numerous social and spatial contexts.