Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright page -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: The endless quest -- 1. (The absence of) development -- 2. Evolutionism and the matryoshka doll -- 3. Sisyphus and the mountain called capitalism -- 4. We are the champions -- 5. We are the world -- Conclusion: Past, ____ and future -- Index.

This article analyses the marginal position cultural diversity is granted in the United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, it analyses and deconstructs the ontological assumptions of the UN's discourse. The inquiry shows that the ontological structure of the UN's agenda creates an essentialist and teleological understanding of history that privileges universality – unity – at the expense of diversity. In this way, the UN's plan of action reproduces what Ernesto Laclau defined as hegemony – a particularity assuming the representation of the totality. The 2030 Agenda naturalises the international power structure designed after World War II and presents it as beneficial for everyone. The article concludes that the 2030 Agenda's ontological assumptions create an inherently ethnocentric understanding of global issues.

Ziai, Aram. 2016: Development Discourse and Global History: From Colonialism to the Sustainable Development Goals. London: Routledge. 244 pp. £110.00. ISBN: 978113 8803251 (Hardback). £36.99. ISBN: 978113 8735132 (Paperback).

The article offers a critical analysis of the United Nations 2030 Global Development Agenda, whose stated aim is to "transform the world" in such a way that no one is left behind. Drawing on post-Marxist theory, we argue that the 2030 Global Development Agenda is a fantasmatic narrative seeking to conceal the conflictual causes and the antagonistic origins of global development and sustainability issues. Within this fantasmatic narrative, 'sustainable development' is the empty signifier that articulates and sustains the agenda's discourse. Our analysis of the ontological assumptions underpinning the documents that frame the agenda shows that, rather than transforming, the agenda naturalizes and consolidates the existing status quo: a status quo that has created (and continues to perpetuate) the global problems that the agenda aims to solve.

This volume looks at concepts and processes of social exclusion and social inclusion. It traces a number of discourses, all of them routed in a relational power analysis, examining them in the context of the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development 2030 with its commitment to "leave no one behind." The book combines analysis that is fundamentally critical of the rhetoric of social inclusion in academic and UN discourse with narratives of social exclusion processes and social inclusion contestation, based on ethnographic field research findings in La Paz, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Kampala, Beijing, Chongqing, Mumbai, Delhi, and villages in Northern India. As a result, it contributes to revealing the politics of social inclusion, offering policy proposals towards overcoming exclusions. ; Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) at the University of Bergen. ; publishedVersion