Reinterpreting Bretton Woods: International Development and the Neglected Origins of Embedded Liberalism

This article offers a reinterpretation of the origins of the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreements, one that is of particular significance to scholars of international development. Conventional wisdom holds that the Agreements were primarily a product of US–British negotiations between 1942 and 1944, in which little attention was paid to international development issues and the concerns of poorer countries. This article demonstrates that the innovative ‘embedded liberal’ vision of Bretton Woods was in fact first put forward in the context of US–Latin American financial relations in the 1938–42 period, and that this experience influenced the subsequent Bretton Woods negotiations. The analysis highlights that the architects of Bretton Woods did not ignore development issues but rather attempted to pioneer a new model for both North–North and North–South economic relations. If this has been subsequently overlooked by historians, it may be because this latter feature of Bretton Woods was quickly buried by US policy makers in the immediate post‐war years. This historical reinterpretation helps both to explain some important puzzles about the origins of the Bretton Woods Agreements and to shed new light on the place of international development issues in the evolution of the post‐war international economic order.     

Continuity,Discontinuity and Incoherence in the Bretton Woods Order: A Hirschmanian Reading

This article examines the effects of the Asian crisis and especially the global financial crisis on developmental finance (that is, long‐term project finance and counter‐cyclical liquidity support) and the global financial architecture. In this connection three claims are advanced. The first is positive: that the crises occasioned meaningful although ad hoc, uneven discontinuities. The conjunction of discontinuities and continuities is imparting incoherence to the developmental and global financial architecture. The second claim is normative and controversial. Contrary to the common narrative, emergent incoherence is (on balance) productive of development and stability rather than debilitating. Actors in parts of the global South and East enjoy greater opportunities for institutional experimentation today in comparison with the limited space available in the coherent neoliberal era when the Bretton Woods institutions were monolithic. All of the experiments underway are not equally likely to survive, but even failures can provide lessons and networks that contribute to future successes. Emergent redundancy and new networks of institutional cooperation increase financial resilience. The article also explores the risks of incoherence and redundancy. The third claim is that productive incoherence can be understood within a ‘Hirschmanian mindset’ — an understanding of change and development informed by Albert Hirschman's theoretical and epistemic commitments.     

From Head‐hunter to Organ‐thief: Verisimilitude,Doubt, and Plausible Worlds in Indonesia and Beyond

In the last few years, occult head‐hunters – elusive figures that have haunted communities and the public imagination in Indonesia since at least colonial times – appear to have adopted a novel and troubling tactic. Instead of decapitating their victims and using the heads in construction rituals as they are said to have conventionally done, head‐hunters are now allegedly harvesting their victims’ organs to sell them on the global market of body parts. Based on a comparison of ethnographic material from North Maluku, a province in the eastern part of Indonesia, and news reports in regional and national papers, I trace how accounts about headhunting have morphed with narratives about organ theft. I argue that this plasticity is not a merely a change in symbolic ideas of the occult that reflects changing political and economic realities. Rather, I propose that their turn to organ theft enrols head‐hunters in a contemporary and global ‘travelling package’ that includes and entangles organ trafficking practices, media accounts, political imaginaries, and social anxieties within the same field of reality and possibility, a field of verisimilitude in which fiction and fact, rumour and reality, are fundamentally blurred. The article proposes a ‘more‐than‐representational’ approach to the organ‐stealing head‐hunter that sees him not just as a representation of particular political and historical circumstances but as a co‐producer of these circumstances, of particular political worlds and their attendant scales of anxiety. This approach, I argue, challenges the epistemological distinction between symbolic representation and political reality that informed (but also incommoded) the analyses of headhunting rumours in the 1980s and 1990s – and that continues to inform anthropological analyses of ‘the occult’ more generally.     

After the Nicaraguan Non‐Payment Crisis: Alternatives to Microfinance Narcissism

This article argues against ‘microfinance narcissism’ and calls for a re‐politicization of the microfinance paradigm. The dominant verdict on microcredit has undergone a damning transformation, from ‘magic bullet for poverty reduction’ to ‘cause of suicide’. Nowadays, both radical critics and mainstream voices deplore microcredit's negative impact on micro‐entrepreneurs. They argue for a reorientation where credit is targeted at established small and medium‐sized enterprises, particularly in rural areas. The crisis in microfinance worldwide, including burgeoning protests, are viewed as proof of the commercial derailment and/or misplaced faith in microfinance's positive social and economic impact on the poor. This article engages with this debate through a study of the Nicaraguan micro‐finance crisis. It challenges existing analyses that pin the crisis on agricultural over‐indebtedness, lack of due diligence, or Sandinista populist politics. Illustrating the dangers of neglecting the diverse nature of microfinance, it reveals the paradoxical outcomes of the crisis: a refocus on the urban at the expense of agricultural credit for small and medium enterprises and a consolidation of the power of national processing elites. Nicaragua's Non‐Payment Movement is also shown to be both a product of elite manipulation and an expression of legitimate resistance to an industry that turns a blind eye to the manner in which markets and politics constrain clients’ potential.     

Beyond ‘State Ibuism’: Empowerment Effects in State‐led Development in Indonesia

This article examines the ways women's processes of self‐formation are indicative (or not) of new possibilities for women's gendered selves in the post‐Reformasi period in Indonesia. It focuses on the development arena to reveal how shifts in state rhetoric, from top‐down guidance based on a patriarchal familial model to bottom‐up, inclusive development based on empowerment, have transformed what is referred to as the ‘topography for self’. The article draws upon theories of personhood a) to show how gendered selves emerge and are contested within particular historical conditions; and b) to develop an alternative framework of ‘empowerment’ that focuses not on capabilities and choice, but on an expansion in the possibilities for self. It argues that models of community‐driven development have provided new opportunities for women to hold and enact socially recognizable subject positions. This constitutes a form of empowerment for individual women but does not necessarily reflect challenges to patriarchy in Indonesia.     

Beyond Fashoda: Anglo‐French security cooperation in Africa since Saint‐Malo

Traditionally divided on security matters, France and Britain broke new ground when they signed the 1998 Saint‐Malo agreement, promising to collaborate on defence and security, and pledging to cooperate bilaterally and in a ‘bi‐multi’ fashion on Africa. This Anglo‐French collaboration is the focus of this article, which begins by setting out the lack of UK–French security cooperation in Africa from the colonial to the early post‐Cold War era. It then shows how there has been a degree of institutionalization of Anglo‐French relations, alongside greater cooperation in terms of ESDP missions and the training of African peacekeepers. Next, this study explains the recent evolution of UK–French security relations in terms of neo‐classical realist theory. Finally, it assesses the likelihood of closer Anglo‐French security collaboration in the future.     

Resource Accessibility and Vulnerability in Andhra Pradesh: Caste and Non‐Caste Influences

Coastal Andhra Pradesh in southern India is prone to tropical cyclones. Access to key resources can reduce the vulnerability of the local population to both large‐scale disasters, such as cyclones, and to the sort of small‐scale crises that affect their everyday lives. This article uses primary fieldwork to present a resource accessibility vulnerability index for over 300 respondents. The index indicates that caste is the key factor in determining who has assets, who can access public facilities, who has political connections and who has supportive social networks. The ‘lower’ castes (which tend to be the poorest) are marginalized to the extent that they lack access to assets, public facilities and opportunities to improve their plight. However, the research also indicates that the poor and powerless lower castes are able to utilize informal social networks to bolster their resilience, typically by women's participation with CBOs and NGOs. Nevertheless it is doubtful whether this extra social capital counterbalances the overall results which show that — despite decades of counteractions by government — caste remains a dominant variable affecting the vulnerability of the people of coastal Andhra Pradesh to the hazards that they face.     

From Getting the Development Question Wrong to Bringing Emancipation Back In: Re‐reading Alice Amsden

This article appraises Alice Amsden's theory of development. In particular, it focuses on Amsden's juxtaposing of the concrete and the universal, and the national and the global, as antithetical, and her prioritizing of the former over the latter. The author argues that this key feature of Amsden's work reduces the concept of development to a nationally determined process and empties capitalist development of its class content. It is argued that Amsden's primary focus on why and how development occurs in the Third World bypasses the question of what development is, thereby reinforcing ‘Third World developmentalism’, and removes the emancipatory content from the concept of development. Given the continued legacy of Amsden's theory, as evidenced in recent debates, and the inadequacy of extant Marxist critiques in addressing its conceptual and political problems, this article proposes an alternative conceptualization of concrete–general and national–global relations based on Marx's critique of political economy, and calls for the resuscitation of the emancipatory content of the concept of development.     

Mothers and Non‐Mothers: Gendering the Discourse of Education in South Asia

This essay brings together and complicates three stories within South Asian education history by gendering them. Thus modern education was actively pursued by mothers for their sons; indigenous education should be understood as continuing at home; and women were crucial actors in men's reform and nationalism efforts through both collaboration and resistance. Gendered history should go beyond the separate story of girls and women, or the understanding of women as mothers and mothers as the nation, to see these three processes as gendered. The paper argues for the coming together of historical and anthropological arguments and for using literature imaginatively.