The Poverty of the Global Order: Limits of the North/South Division

Development in the global order is represented in economically reductionist, and in impoverished, terms. The latter refers to the global reproduction of material inequality through the progressive appropriation of alternative visions of development. We argue that the legitimacy of the global order, while represented in terms of 'economic progress,' depends on the progressive naturalization of its epistemological foundations. Here, solutions to the crisis of development become methods of social control through which the dominant visions of what count as viable futures are reproduced and regulated. We critique efforts to humanise development (eg, World Bank, Amartya Sen) as evidence of developmentalism's epistemological crisis. Karl Polanyi's distinction between 'formal' and 'substantive' economy allows us to transcend the reductionism of the scarcity paradigm and revalue difference as the foundation of equality. We consider examples of substantive economy, which realise equality through strategic sovereignty and representational power, in collective and individual terms. Among other such initiatives these represent practical and epistemological 'spaces of hope' for critique of the crisis of the market epistemology that infects both development studies and international studies. Present divisions of the world must be understood as the impoverished outcomes of a market epistemology's construction and development of inequality. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding