Communication for Development in the Third World: Theory and Practice for Empowerment

Author(s):  
Srinivas Melkote ◽  
H. Steeves
1975 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 226-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Mack

The purpose of this essay is to provide a brief overview of the theory and practice of counterinsurgency in the Third World since World War II. Given the obvious limitations of space, descriptions of particular COIN (counterinsurgency) campaigns have been avoided except to illustrate an argument. Furthermore, this essay concentrates primarily on U.S. counterinsurgency doctrines and methods. This is not to underestimate the contributions – both theoretical and practical – made by the former colonial powers in attempting to crush the impulse to national liberation in the Third World. But the European powers – with the recent exception of Portugal – had, by the beginning of the 1960s, neither the capability nor (following a number of humiliating setbacks) much enthusiasm for further military adventures in the Third World. There have, of course, been exceptions – the French in Mali, Britain in Borneo and the Anguilla affair – but these pale into insignificance when compared with the American counterinsurgency effort in the Third World, which began to gather impetus just as the major European colonial powers were abdicating their former role as Third World policemen.1


2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 695-695
Author(s):  
Howard P. Lehman

Since the end of the Cold War, development studies have fallen to the wayside as attention has shifted to the democratization process in Eastern Europe, the increased integration of the European Union, and the effects of economic globalization in the advanced industrialized countries. The developing world was seen as an afterthought or, in some cases, as arenas of misunderstandable ethnic or religious conflict, structural poverty, disease, and other hardships. However, in the context of September 11, more attention now is on the developing world, perhaps not so much on economic development, but more on containing various terrorist organizations. Yet development studies still exist, and this area of study maintains an historical connection to several decades worth of academic research. Scholars persistently ask such questions as why the South is poor and politically weak compared to countries in the North. Answers generally are located in the dependency literature of unequal economic relations leading to unequal power relations. Darryl C. Thomas, in The Theory and Practice of Third World Solidarity, asks this question but provides a somewhat different response. The economic and political inequality in the world is not necessarily due to economic ideology but to the color of skin (p. xi). The solidarity of the Third World that Thomas sees in the past is one based on race, and racial solidarity should be the means by which the poor and powerless of the Third World transform unequal power relations. Thomas refers to this relationship as global apartheid, defining it as a structure of the world system that combines political economy and racial antagonism (p. 26). He states that global apartheid refers to the continuation of white-minority dominance of political, social, legal, cultural, and economic decision-making apparatuses within the world system (p. 111) and that this form of racial capitalism has become a permanent feature in the world system.


2021 ◽  
pp. 227797602110009
Author(s):  
Prabhat Patnaik

Friedrich Engels’ bicentenary was celebrated in 2020. As a contribution to this celebration, this article argues that Engels, among his various other substantive contributions, must be credited with his conceptualization of the worker–peasant alliance. Given that this alliance was fundamental to democratic and socialist revolutions in the Third World in the twentieth century, and continues to be so in the twenty-first, it remains important to clarify its trajectory within classical Marxism. Engels turned his attention to the sixteenth-century peasant war in Germany so as to illuminate the challenges faced in the course of the 1848 revolutions that swept across Europe. He argued that, for large sections of the peasantry, the throwing off of their feudal yoke required an alliance with the proletariat. This, however, did not mean land redistribution via private landholdings but nationalization of the land. It also did not mean an alliance with the whole of the peasantry. These two questions and the antagonisms that they entailed were central to the development of Marxist theory and practice in the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions, as well as others in the Third World. Today, neoliberal globalization has shifted the terrain of struggle further by the fact of corporate dominance over the whole of the peasantry. The massive agitation of the Indian agriculturists since the end of 2020 and the alliances that have emerged should be an eye-opener.


1980 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Biersteker

Self-reliance is a logical prescription of Latin American dependency writers and a great many other contemporary critics of the international economic and political order. It is based on assumptions and values shared by contemporary critics, employs the same definitions of central concepts, and most important, identifies specific policies designed to eliminate the bases of dependence and exploitation that critics hold responsible for a distortion of the development process throughout much of the Third World. Despite the significance of self-reliance for dependency and other critical writers, it is rarely defined and even less frequently examined systematically. As a result, self-reliance has too often been dismissed as merely part of the ideological jargon that necessarily accompanies discussions of the new international economic order.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document