Defying Displacement: Grassroots Resistance and the Critique of Development

Chapter One. Disasters of Development: Development Forced Displacement and Resettlement

Chapter one Disasters of Development Development Forced Displacement and Resettlement Introduction At the end of the twentieth century, following the collapse of its socialist challenger, the dominant Western model of development stood triumphant as the guide to improving human welfare. However, even as the socialist model began its precipitous decline, alternative interpretations of development had begun to emerge. These new approaches were not based on class conflict, although in some sense they included it, but on the discourses of the environment and human rights. Confronting the current neo-liberal version of the dominant model, voices articulating other interpretations and practices of development and advocating greater emphasis on social justice and environmental sustainability have appeared among many regions and peoples who have been forced to deal with a wide variety of losses, costs, and calamities brought about by misguided policies and projects. As Coronil points out, “In social spaces organized under neo-liberal global conditions, collective identities are being constructed in unprecedented ways through a complex articulation of such sources of identification as religion, territoriality, race, class, ethnicity, gender and nationality, but now informed by universal discourses of human rights, international law, ecology, feminism, cultural rights and other means of respecting difference within equality” (2001, p. 82). In the past several years, violent and nonviolent demonstrations have disrupted successive meetings of the World Trade Organization; also, wellorganized campaigns protesting the imposition of structural adjustment and privatization programs dictated by the International Monetary Fund (imF) have been frequent occurrences in many venues around the world. Increasingly over the last twenty-five years, the grassroots protests against and resistance to what some have called “big development” and others have  Defying Displacement labeled “development aggression” (Heijmans, 2001, p. 5) are being heard. This approach to development is chiefly characterized by capital-intensive, hightechnology , large-scale development projects that convert farmlands, fishing grounds, forests, and homes into dam-created reservoirs, irrigation schemes, mining operations, plantations, colonization projects, highways, industrial complexes, tourist resorts, and other large-scale forms of use favoring national or global interests over those of people at the local level. Putatively designed to spur economic growth and spread general welfare, many of these projects have left local people displaced, disempowered, and destitute. People around the world, from many different societies and cultures, urban and rural, proximate and remote, are raising their voices and taking action against development forced displacement and resettlement (DFDr), which was characterized recently as “development cleansing” that is analogous to the ethnic cleansing inflicted on minority populations by the Bosnian government (Rajagopal, 2001).* Media coverage of the major violations of human and environmental rights, as well as of the protests themselves, have given some of these projects, like the Three Gorges or the Sardar Sarovar dam projects, a high public profile and have embarrassed developers, governments, and multilateral funding agencies. The struggles of these local communities against their national governments and international capital have thrust them into the midst of global development politics. Uprooting and displacement have long been among the privations associated with development and modernity. Indeed, the economic model on which modern society is essentially organized articulates and requires both a social and spatial mobility as essential to the circulation of commodities, currency , and labor that vitalizes the model itself. The core concept and element of the Western model, capital, in its circulation and reproduction drives a process of continual social transformation that we have ideologically glossed at the individual level as freedom and self-realization. Displacement, virtually accepted as a way of life by First World elites, is disguised as natural, simply *For roughly the last twenty years, involuntary displacement and resettlement has been referred to as Development Induced Displacement and Resettlement (DiDr). However, a number of researchers and practitioners now suggest “induced” is not descriptive of the process because it suggests that people may be convinced by arguments or rewards to be resettled (Oliver-Smith, 2009c). When such is the case, resettlement becomes voluntary, not forced or imposed. But “induced” is not an appropriate term for a process that is determined by fiat, decided and planned out in advance (Cernea, personal communication, September 2005). Therefore I have chosen to employ the term Development Forced Displacement and Resettlement (DFDr). Disasters of Development  the workings out of the market, when in fact it is actually a form of structural violence (Farmer, 2004; Kothari & Harcourt, 2004). The means and context of transformation, also understood as the concept...