Economic Cleansing: Failure Dressed in Fine Clothes

There is a short and brutal history embedded in the longer trajectories of Global South countries. It emerged in the 1980s as part of the larger so-called neoliberal project. A key feature of this project is the ascendance of logics of extraction, ranging from mining to economic privatization and financialization. These were mostly presented as good for Global South countries. In fact, they destroyed social and economic infrastructures created in the post-independence period aimed at the larger population. And they shaped a new configuration marked by the enrichment of elites and the devastation of the poorer strata. This was failure of the deepest kind but represented as development.