Rethinking Third World Politics - twenty years later

How to make sense of transfers of political concepts, models, ideas and institutions

Ole Therkildsen participated in and presented a paper at the workshop “From Asymmetry to Symmetry? The West, non-West and the idea of development as conceptual flow. An international trans-disciplinary workshop” held at the University of Heidelberg 13-16 July, 2009.

This workshop is conceptualized as an authors’ meeting to reflect on the findings of a conference held in Berlin in 1989 in the light of the vast changes in the landscape of the concept of ‘development’ since then.

The participants in the 1989 workshop saw the then existing paradigms as too limiting and confining in their explaining power. They regarded processes of political development in the ‘Third World’ as non-teleological or ‘open-ended’ – for the time being at least – but nevertheless pledged for a reassertion of the importance of politics (processes, institutions, ideologies, actors) in the study of the ‘Third World.’

The 1989 workshop resulted in an acclaimed book (Manor, James. 1991. Rethinking Third World Politics. London and New York: Longman), which brought to the fore a whole array of new thinking on governance and development.

Twenty years down the line, political developments in the former ‘Third World’ have become much more differentiated – even though most of them now take place under ‘democratic labels’. Many political systems have become more open, a process that has enabled cultural parameters such as religion, ethnicity and other cultural complexities – varying greatly from region to region – to become more important. The ‘good governance’ agenda with its concerns for transparency, accountability, rights, participatory development, etc. has acquired great salience. Major changes have occurred in the international architecture of aid, and international regimes as well as cultural flows of concepts and practices have become immensely important.

Among the important questions that the 2009 workshop addressed are the following:

1. How has the recent ‘intensification’ of globalisation processes challenged older ideas of development and good governance?
2. How can the ‘open-endedness’ of historical studies be effectively combined with a ‘paradigm-obsessed’ political science?
3. How can the scholar understand and analyse the incongruous hybrids which take shape, reflecting a diverse array of imported and indigenous resources available to the actor?

Ole Therkildsen presented a paper titled “Competitive elections, ethnicity and state elite policy responses, with examples from Tanzania.” It is one among several papers that analyse the varying outcomes of ‘democratization’ across countries.

Some of the 14 papers presented at the workshop will be revised and published in a forthcoming book edited by James Manor and Subrata Mitra.

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