Although Germany was one of the central colonial powers in Africa and is today the second largest donor of development aid, there is a lack of comprehensive work on the postcolonial constitution of contemporary German development policy. In his study Global Development and Colonial Power – German Development Policy at Home and Abroad, Daniel Bendix examines German development activities of state institutions and NGOs and demonstrates the unacknowledged involvement of development policy in colonial ways of thinking and acting.
The book analyzes concrete policies and practices in selected fields of intervention: development education and fundraising in Germany, and maternal health policy and population control in the Global South. It elaborates how inequalities and injustices that development policy claims to address are perpetuated when development actors fail to address the colonial legacy. According to the study, it is necessary to understand colonial power as operating transnationally, in the interplay of development policies internally and externally.
The introductory chapter is freely available, and the paperback edition will be published in summer 2019.
Voices on the book:
“Daniel Bendix’s rigorous, daring and original analysis challenges dominant understandings of history and development by engaging with the violences, paradoxes and present effects of Germany’s colonial power. Bendix invites readers to open horizons for postcolonial futures by facing their complicity in systemic harm and the complexities of our planetary interdependence. This book offers a major contribution to international debates about the historical and systemic (re)production of global inequalities.”
Vanessa Andreotti, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change at the University of British Columbia.
Daniel Bendix 2018: Global Development and Colonial Power – German Development Policy at Home and Abroad. Series Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Questions. London – New York: Rowman & Littlefield International.