Dismantling Development: Towards an Abolitionist Theory of Development

Abstract

What might it mean to approach development from an epistemic and programmatic lens aimed at the displacement of the very conditions that necessitate and sustain the international development-industrial complex? This paper explores the productive possibilities inaugurated by taking an expressly abolitionist approach to development. In doing so, I build on but also extend beyond calls to decolonise development in acknowledgement of development’s inextricable imbrication with racial capitalism and neo-colonialism. I identify non-reformist reform, disepistemologies, practices of refusal and radical complicity, and the notion of the undercommons as particularly useful abolition tools with which to approach the project of dismantling development. The paper does not constitute a comprehensive or even concrete set of prescriptions in relation to abolishing development—instead, it seeds various intellectual and political possibilities by bringing together two rich traditions of critique and resisting, inviting those of us within the development-industrial complex to collectively imagine and enact an abolitionist approach to development.