Abolition and International Aid and Development: Retreat, Repair and Dignity

The Open University (OU) is a longstanding hub for interdisciplinary, critical, and forward-looking research on international development. Celebrating its work and engaging with current debates, the University is launching the OU Global Development Annual Lecture series.

In the first in the series, Abolition and International Aid and Development, Dr Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa, Assistant Professor, MSc Human Rights and Politics, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science offers reflections on what it means to take anti-colonial and decolonial critiques of international aid and development seriously.

Dr Rutazibwa argues that this requires a genuine engagement with abolition rather than reform; and repair and dignity rather than aid and development.

Abstract

The lecture shares and builds on two decades of research and teaching Western practices and discourses of aid and development, and places it in the context of the ongoing resurgent attention and calls to decolonise (everything!). Amidst a growing co-optation and commodification of the decolonial project, the lecture explores what a truthful commitment to the radical/revolutionary purpose of decolonisation could look like, and what the implications are for discourses and practices of international aid and development.

It turns to abolitionist approaches as one of those avenues.

Abolitionism invites us to think about what we should let go of, move away from, stop doing, instead of endlessly improve or reform. The lecture offers the concept of ethical retreat to make sure we do this in a way that is clearly distinguishable from calls for international disengagement from the right-wing political spectrum.

The abolitionist approach is also rehearsed as more than a destructive or deconstructive project. We pause at its generative invitation: what are alternative visions, imaginations and points of attention that become available and visible from the grounds cleared by abolition?

The lecture zooms in on ideas of dignity and repair and thinks through the potential abundance they bring, instead of the deeply colonial, dehumanising and depraved enterprises of international aid and development.

Throughout, the lecture centres the epistemic implications of deploying decoloniality and abolition to international aid and development. What types of degrees, modes of study, institutional and intellectual re-orientations need to accompany the anticolonial abolitionist project of the global good life for all, human and non-human?

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