SMASHING WINDOWS? RETHINKING AID BEYOND THE NORTH-SOUTH AXIS
Channel: medico international
Date: 2023-03-03

Online event series Decolonizing Aid - Planetary Solidarity beyond Aid. Critical perspectives on development and aid. Recording from 26.02.2023.

SMASHING WINDOWS? RETHINKING AID BEYOND THE NORTH-SOUTH AXIS

The North-South axis is characterized by unequal power and knowledge relations and hegemony based on a history of extractive colonial capitalism that continues to reverberate today. However, North-South relations as socio-spatial relations are neither as geographically fixed nor as immutable as the term suggests. We are witnessing new "rising powers" gaining economic power, forms of transregionalization, and regional shifts in hegemony through wars and conflicts, for example, as Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran gain new hegemonic positions through their entanglements in the long-running conflicts in Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

At the latest, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has underlined the need to strengthen decolonial ways of thinking that make it possible to understand the different practices, discourses, politics and forms of violence. These processes and dynamics entail not only new configurations of economic power, capitalism, and militarization, but also new perspectives on North-South and East-West relations, as well as new South-South practices, policies, narratives, and imaginaries beyond the constraints of nation-state relations.
At the latest, the Russian invasion of Ukraine have highlighted the need to intensify decolonial ways of thinking that allow imperialism and colonialisms in the majority to understand the different practices, discourses, politics and forms of violence. These emerging processes and dynamics entail not only new configurations of economic power, capitalism and militarization, but also new perspectives on north-south and east-west relations as well as new south-south practices, politics, narratives and imaginaries (beyond the restrictions of nation-state-relations).

Aid and development are part of these reconfigurations and get visible when when  China is addressing South Asian and African states with “win-win-development” or “South-South-cooperation” that promises “non-interference”,  “aid on an equal footing” or aid without conditionalities. It creates counter-narratives to models of development and aid grounded in Eurocentrism and western-centred understandings of human rights or social progress. How can we rethink these reconstructions of the world through the prism of aid and development? How are aid and development reshaped in these processes? Is aid here confined to a mere instrument of geopolitics that generates already known forms of financial dependency? Or do these transformations give hope for the establishment of new forms of transnational solidarity beyond developmentalist politics and thinking or structures of aid?

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is Professor and Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South with Emphasis on Africa at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. In addition, Prof Ndlovu-Gatsheni holds several professorships including Professor Extraordinarius in the Department of Leadership and Transformation (DLT) at the University of South Africa (UNISA); Professor Extraordinarius at the Centre for Gender and African Studies at the University of Free State (UFS) in South Africa; Honorary Professor in the School of Education (Education & Development Studies) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa; Visiting Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in South Africa; and is also a Research Associate of The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies at The Open University in the United Kingdom. He is also founding Head of the Archie Mafeje Research Institute for Applied Social Policy (AMRI) and the founder of the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN), both at the University of South Africa.