The Invention of Underdevelopment

In Encountering Development (1995), Arturo Escobar demonstrated that the postwar development apparatus did not arrive in the Global South to address problems that existed independently of the apparatus. The apparatus produced the problems it claimed to solve. Truman's inaugural address — declaring that more than half the world lived in 'conditions approaching misery' — performed a specific discursive operation: it reclassified populations who had understood themselves through the categories of their own cultures as lacking and deficient, and simultaneously positioned the United States as the agent capable of remedy. The invention was not malicious. It was structural, embedded in the vocabulary of GDP, literacy rates, and caloric intake — metrics that illuminated one dimension of existence while casting every other into shadow.