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Deconstructing Development, Jon H. Sylvester, Ruth E. Gordon

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The objective in this article is to construct and then deconstruct the concept of development, and to question whether development is so fundamentally flawed that it should be abandoned in favor of a post-development paradigm.

Part I constructs the theory of development, beginning with the discovery of global poverty after the Second World War. It establishes how poverty is in some respects socially contingent, and how the notion of global poverty suddenly homogenized and problematized the lives of the majority of the world's peoples. With the impending Cold War and the disintegration of colonial empires as crucial backdrops, industrialized nations …