Clive Gabay

The Millennium Development Goals and Ambitious Developmental Engineering

Abstract Donor governments have been accused of not doing enough to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (mdgs), while the mdgs have been accused from other quarters of not doing enough for development. The former position takes the mdgs as an unquestionable good, while the latter posits them as a Western ruse for the sedimentation of core–periphery relations. This paper transcends this debate, identifying in the goals a logic of ambitious social, cultural and spatial engineering. Inspired by Foucauldian development anthropology, the paper highlights three themes implicit in mdg texts, requiring biopolitical interventions on bodies, societies and spaces, namely risk, sex, gender and family; Homo Economicus; and the city. The paper concludes with a reflection on the likelihood of resistance to such interventions.

Consenting to ‘Heaven’: The Millennium Development Goals, Neo-liberal Governance and Global Civil Society in Malawi

This article investigates a significant actor within global civil society: the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP). GCAP claims to be the worlds largest civil society alliance, and was the umbrella coalition behind the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign, as well as the annual Stand Up against Poverty mobilisations. GCAP is constituted by autonomous non-governmental organisation coalitions in over 100 countries. Utilising an actor-network approach, the article finds that while GCAP at a global level seeks to mobilise its members into radical structural critiques of global poverty, other discursive and ontological arrangements exist within the national coalitions. Drawing on interviews, group observation and documentary analysis with the GCAP national coalition in Malawi, the article explores the power of the UN Millennium Development Goals to construct and monitor consenting subjects where notions of social justice become discursively articulated with key neo-liberal tenets regarding the individualisation and responsibilisation of poverty. Este artículo investiga a un actor importante dentro de la sociedad civil global: el ‘Llamado global a la acción contra la pobreza’ (GCAP, por sus siglas en inglés). La GCAP se declara como la mayor alianza de la sociedad civil del mundo, y fue la red de la coalición que actuó en representación de la campaña ‘Hagamos que la pobreza pase a la historia’ en el 2005 y también en las movilizaciones anuales de la campaña ‘Levántate contra la pobreza’. La GCAP está constituida por coaliciones de organizaciones no gubernamentales autónomas en más de 100 países. Con un enfoque en la red social como actor, el artículo encuentra que mientras la GCAP a un nivel global, busca movilizar a sus miembros dentro de críticas estructuras radicales sobre la pobreza global, existen otros acuerdos discursivos y ontológicos dentro de las coaliciones nacionales. Con base en entrevistas, observación de grupos y análisis de documentales con la coalición nacional GCAP en Malawi, el artículo explora el poder de la campaña de los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio de las Naciones Unidas para construir y monitorear temas acordes, en donde las nociones de justicia social se vuelvan discursivamente articuladas con dogmas neoliberales claves, con respecto a la individualización y responsabilidad de la pobreza. 本文研究全球公民社会中的一个重要行为者，即全球消除贫困联盟（GCAP）。全球消除贫困联盟声称是全球最大的公民社会联盟，并且是2005年“让贫困成为历史”运动以及每年一度“站起来反对贫困”大会背后的保护伞联盟。全球贫困联盟是由100多个国家的自治非政府组织联合组成的。 运用行为体—网络路径，本文发现，当全球层面上的全球消除贫困联盟寻求动员其成员加入对全球贫困激进的结构性批判时，其他的话语和本体论筹划则存在于国家联盟之内。利用对马拉维GCAP全国联盟的采访、团队观察和文档分析，本文探讨了联合国千年发展目标的构建和监督同意主体的力量，此处社会正义概念在话语上被新自由主义关于贫困的个人化和责任化的关键信条表达着。

Building States and Civil Societies in Africa: Liberal Interventions and Global Governmentality

From the colonial mission civilisatrice right through to the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s, the promotion of multiparty democracy and the ‘good governance’ agenda of the 1990s and attempts to foster resilience amongst African states and civil societies in the 2000s*whether against terrorism, climate change, or pandemic diseases*Western actors have tried to promote and foster liberal values in Africa. This special issue, and the conference panels and workshop from which it has emerged, is an attempt to advance the study of these liberal interventions in two particular ways. First, it seeks to grasp some of the ‘messy actualities’ (Bachmann, this issue) and contradictions of such stateand civil society-building programmes in a variety of particular contexts. Each of the articles in this special issue is based on substantial empirical research and illustrates, within the confines of a short journal article, some of the tensions and the manifestations of local resistance to what Williams and Young have referred to as the ‘liberal project’ (this issue and 2007). Secondly, contributors to the conference panels and workshop were asked to reflect explicitly on the utility of our existing theoretical frameworks and conceptual toolkits for comprehending these liberal interventions in Africa. The following articles each combine rich empirical detail with theoretical reflection and development, either drawing upon the substantial literatures on liberalism and civil society more generally, or more specifically invoking Michel Foucault’s (2007) work on governmentality. Four out of the six articles here engage specifically with the Foucauldian concept of governmentality. The two other articles raise issues of direct relevance to the applicability of governmentality in the African context, namely the contradictions within the so-called ‘liberal project’ in Ghana and Sierra Leone (Williams and Young, this issue), and the existence of more locally rooted civil societies, grounded in autochthonous discourses, in places like Liberia, Côte D’Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (Bøås, this issue). As such, this special issue speaks directly to recent debates over the validity and applicability of the Foucauldian concept of governmentality to African politics,

Doing Biopolitics Differently? Radical Potential in the Post-2015 MDG and SDG Debates

Abstract The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been critiqued as an ambitious project which sought to produce entrepreneurial neo-liberal subjects. From this perspective, the opportunities and dangers of the post-2015 debates acquire a more urgent importance than the cynical dismissal of the MDGs as ‘minimum development goals’. This article identifies two potentially radical shifts in development discourse offered by the proposals for global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): first, that they might be genuinely global and hence destabilise long-standing divisions between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ societies; and second, that they might challenge existing growth paths of resource-intensive development. Two scenarios are offered through which these potential shifts are manifesting: first, a status-quo and growth-orientated outcome to the post-2015 agenda, and second, a more radical revisioning of development as a transformative project of global sustainability. However, even such an apparently attractive prospect as the latter has potential dangers, whether or not it is possible, which this article highlights. Whatever the outcome of the negotiations over the post-2015 SDGs, therefore, the process can tell us something about the opportunities and limits of processes of reform. The stakes could not be higher: whether a renewed and reshaped development project can drive future developmental governmentalities in radically new directions.

Special Forum on the Millennium Development Goals: Introduction

Abstract The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), eight time-bound targets aiming, amongst other issues, to reduce extreme poverty, address school enrollment and the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, expire in September 2015. World leaders, civil society organisations, philanthropists, and the private sector are all frantically negotiating and consulting over what will follow them. This special forum in Globalizations is dedicated to questions which explore the politics of the MDGs, and the subsequent discussions which are framing their successor development framework, the Sustainable Development Goals. Most research into the MDGs tends to be technocratic, addressing issues of how we might achieve the goals better, faster, and more efficiently. Questions of what kinds of societies might be created by the achievement of the goals, and what alternative societies people living in poverty might wish to build for themselves tend to get left aside, as do questions which address the fundamentally capitalocentric logics which underpin the MDGs. This special forum introduction briefly explores some of these issues before introducing the contributors, who include leading scholars on the critical politics and international political economy of international development, such as Suzan Ilcan, Philip McMichael, Kathleen Sexsmith, Carl Death, Japhy Wilson, Anita Lacey, Maia Green, and Heloise Weber.

Two ‘transitions’: the political economy of Joyce Banda's rise to power and the related role of civil society organisations in Malawi

When Joyce Banda became Malawis president in 2012, she was welcomed by the international community as an antidote to the increasingly erratic and autocratic behaviour of her unexpectedly deceased predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika. Banda appeared to be the product of the twin drivers of a ‘rising’ Africa; namely a newly empowered donor-supported civil society on the one hand, and a Western-oriented political elite committed to transparency and good governance on the other. Based on several field trips to Malawi over the past five years, this article seeks to problematise the degree to which Joyce Banda and Malawis civil society organisations represented a double transition from the more patrimonial form of politics which had dominated the political and civil society sectors throughout Malawis postcolonial era. Although prepared prior to recent corruption scandals which have engulfed the Banda government in the run-up to elections in May 2014, this article sets the context for understanding these cases as a product of Malawis political economy and uneven insertion into the global economy.

Anarcho-cosmopolitanism: The Universalisation of the Equal Exchange

This paper concerns itself with the values which make up what has been labelled “ethical cosmopolitanism”—that which entails a universal scope of ethical concern. Conceptions of this ethic have underpinned the development of a “global civil society” and associated humanitarian and activist campaigns. However, such cosmopolitan campaigns have illustrated the ways in which the dismissals of difference and importance of embeddedness have caused suffering to the supposed beneficiaries of such campaigns. This is because of the unrecognised power relations that exist between moral agents, which result in “unequal exchanges”, that is, the exchange of physical, material and mental resources from positions of unequal negotiating positions, driven by power differentials and hierarchy. A theory of the “equal exchange” is developed upon which to base alternative cosmopolitan practices. Such a theory is grounded in Anarchist thought, which, it is argued, provides the most stringent philosophical underpinning for such a cosmopolitan theory.

Leaving No-one Behind? The Politics of Destination in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals

We are in the age of the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). Two years ago this journal published a special forum on the transition away from the previous UN millennium development goals (MDGs), which ran from 2000 to 2015, to the SDGs (Special Forum, 2015, p. 12[4]). The articles collected in that forum dwelt on debates prevalent during the 2012–2015 period concerning, for instance land rights (Sexsmith & McMichael, 2015), technical assistance (Green, 2015), and calculating poverty (Ilcan & Lacey, 2015). The articles collected in this special issue emerge from the SDG side of these debates, with the advantage of having been able to reflect on the content of the 17 goals and on the associated targets and programmes that have emerged since the unveiling of the SDGs in September 2015. As with the 2015 special forum, these articles, collected together, represent an unusual intervention in debates about the nature of contemporary international development, where the majority of scholarship tends to concern itself with measuring or collating goal performance. The articles, however, explore the SDGs as a political construct, and are less concerned with the technical aspects or realizable nature of the goals, than with the kinds of epistemological, hegemonic, or politico-economic assumptions built into them, and the ensuing effectiveness they will have in terms of addressing or perpetuating the historical impoverishment of large groups of people living in poverty. They take issue with many of the assumptions upon which SDGs rests, while also broadening the conversation to pay attention to knowledge production, modernity, colonialism, exclusion, citizenship, and other conceptual insights. In this context, the articles raise questions about the discourses and practices of the SDGs, especially in relation to how they can: define the limits of what can be said and what can be done; shape development logics through notions of division and forms of exclusion; construct political problems as technical problems; create certain spaces of imagination as a field of activity; and endorse particular ideas and forms of knowledge in models for sustainable development. The

The Affective Politics of the Sustainable Development Goals: Partnership, Capacity-Building, and Big Data

Abstract In this article, we argue that whilst international studies broadly construed has benefitted in recent years from a turn to theories of affect, a notable absentee in this regard has been critical accounts of international development. We suggest that theories of affect have much to contribute to an understanding of a set of international policies and practices that seek to remake individual and collective capacities to act in the pursuit of ‘development’. The article therefore sets out to briefly establish a genealogy of affect written through post-Second World War international development policies, before laying out three areas where contemporary international development policy, in the form of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, manifests most notably. These three areas are (i) Partnership; (ii) Capacity-Building, and (iii) Big Data. We provide evidence to illustrate how affect works to create embodied resonances and intensities that circulate socially between and through bodies and create new intimate connections, imaginations, and certain kinds of citizens, and in so doing creates not only political enclosures, but also opportunities to produce ‘counter-affects’ and other-form ways of being and living.

The Radical and Reactionary Politics of Malawi’s Hastings Banda: Roots, Fruit and Legacy

This article reconsiders the political thought and practice of Hastings Banda, prime minister and then president of Malawi from 1963 to 1994. Often side-lined and maligned in considerations of post-colonial African leaders for being an authoritarian comprador in service to western interests, the article suggests that Banda’s life and practice illustrates a complex interplay between two types of conservatism: a more radical anti-colonial conservatism, and a more reactionary post-colonial conservatism. This approach has important implications for how we consider independence-era African political leadership more generally, and for understanding contemporary public protest in Malawi, and more broadly. Mainstream scholarly interpretations of anti-government protests in Malawi in July 2011 presented them as a response to an uninterrupted continuum of authoritarianism in the country stretching back to Banda, playing on ideas of innate African autocratic tendencies. This article, however, argues that such comparisons result in an ahistorical consideration of post-colonial Malawi, leading to analyses that mistakenly suggest that protests in Malawi, as in other African countries in recent years, are the result of liberal rights claims, as opposed to a nostalgic and markedly different reclamation of the cultural, national and economic promises of African independence.