Development and Aid in the Master‘s House.
Channel: medico international
Date: 2022-12-21

Online event series Decolonizing Aid - Planetary Solidarity beyond Aid. Critical perspectives on development and aid. Recording from 27.11.2022

Development and Aid in the Master‘s House: Unravelling the Architecture and the Imaginaries of the Master‘s House

The crisis of capitalism cannot be separated from the crisis of development and aid. A capitalism that has long since left the spheres of labor and has inscribed itself in our bodies in its neoliberal form. As the medico conference "beyond aid" (2014) convincingly argued: Aid must be grounded in a concept of power, space and political economy, otherwise it can at best cushion the suffering of a given situation, as efficiently as possible with diminishing resources. We want to question and deconstruct this substitute action, which is aid, for what is actually necessary - namely the transformation towards a good life for everyone and everything.

Against the backdrop of aid's entanglement with capitalist and neoliberal models of development, we want to ask how aid functions within the architecture of the "manor" and how this architecture shapes the practices of aid, its actors and institutions. Can we think aid beyond its effects on stabilizing existing structures and mechanisms of power and exploitation? How can we rethink aid to realize social justice, solidarity, and restitution?

Sima Luipert works in regional and rural development management in Namibia. She is a human rights and social change activist with a background in rural planning and regulation, project management, and community development. She is the Director of Development Planning at the Namibian Regional Council of Hardap. She is also Deputy Director of the Nama Genocide Technical Committee (NTLA) and Chair of the Board of Directors Riruako Centre for Genocide and Memory Studies.