Development Against Democracy

"This new, updated edition of the influential Development Against Democracy is a critical guide to postwar studies of modernization and development. In the mid-twentieth century, models of development studies were products of postwar American policy. They focused on newly independent states in the Global South, aiming to assure their pro-Western orientation by claiming to promote economic growth and democracy, while masking U.S. intervention to block radical change. Irene L. Gendzier argues that the fundamental ideas on which theories of modernization and development rest have been resurrected in contemporary policy and its theories, representing the continuity of postwar U.S. foreign policy and its claims of American exceptionalism in a world permanently altered by globalization and its multiple discontents, the proliferation of "failed state," the unprecedented exodus of refugees, and Washington‘s declaration of a permanent "war against terrorism". "