Global Development and Colonial Power: German Development Policy at Home and Abroad [Hardcover]

Although Germany was one of the principal colonising nations in Africa and today is the worlds second largest aid donor, there is no literature on the postcolonial condition of contemporary German development policy.

This book explores German development endeavours by state institutions as well as NGOs, and provides evidence of development policys unacknowledged entanglement in colonial modes of thought and practice. It zooms in on concrete policies and practices in selected fields of intervention: development education and billboard advertising in Germany, and  taking Tanzania as a case in point  obstetric care and population control in the Global South. The analysis finds that disregarding colonial continuities means to perpetuate the inequalities and injustices that development policy claims to fight. This book argues that colonial power in global development needs to be understood as functioning through the transnational character of development policy at home and abroad.

Daniel Bendix's rigorous, daring and original analysis challenges dominant understandings of history and development by engaging with the violences, paradoxes and present effects of Germany's colonial power. Bendix invites readers to open horizons for postcolonial futures by facing their complicity in systemic harm and the complexities of our planetary interdependence. This book offers a major contribution to international debates about the historical and systemic (re)production of global inequalities. Vanessa Andreotti, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change at the University of British Columbia

In this accessible and meticulously-researched book, Daniel Bendix offers a nuanced and compelling account of Germanys development interventions, challenging the Anglocentric focus of much postcolonial and critical race thinking on developmlcQ