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

Keetie Roelen: Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us for the first in our OU Global Development Annual Lecture Series. My name is Keetie Roelen, I am a Senior Research Fellow in Poverty and Social Protection at the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies here at The Open University. I'm here together with Giles Mohan, Professor of International Development in FASS here at The Open University. We are both delighted to host this afternoon's event, this first one in the series that showcases our critical and forward-looking research on international and global development. Now at The Open University, we've been doing research into international development for over 50 years. Colleagues from across the University have been, and continue to do, significant work to understand and engage with economic, social, political processes of development and how to advance social justice and wellbeing. Groups include the Innovation, Knowledge and International Development Group as well as the Centre for the Study of Global Development. They offer vibrant communities for research that cross disciplinary silos, methodological divides and geographical boundaries. The Open University's teaching programme on global development celebrates its 42^nd anniversary this year or so we think. We started counting and we found it goes back to 1982 since the first Third World Studies course. As we work with communities across the world, our research on international development cuts across all three of The Open University's open societal challenges, tackling inequalities, living well and sustainability. This new Annual Lecture Series celebrates our work and demonstrates how we are engaging with current debates, including crucially, how to come to grips with international developments, colonial roots and challenge persistent power imbalances. So this afternoon we welcome our first speaker in the series, Dr Olivia Rutazibwa, to deliver a lecture on Abolition and International Aid and Development: Retreat, Repair and Dignity.

Before we begin some housekeeping. The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception. Oh sorry, I should say, first the Q&A session, then the drinks downstairs for anyone who's in here, the drinks, not the Q&A. For everyone in the audience, if you use social media, if you use X, please use the hashtag OUTalks, which I believe is on here, and tagging OpenUniversity. For those of you who are joining us online on YouTube, please use the email address provided and keep your comments and questions quite brief so we can ask Olivia as many as possible. Now I invite Giles to introduce our speaker.

Giles Mohan: Thank you Keetie, and hi everybody. So we are absolutely delighted to welcome Dr Olivia Rutazibwa to speak today. She is a Belgian Rwandan International Relations scholar. She has been a journalist. She has many careers. She will possibly talk about them. She's currently Assistant Professor at the LSE in Human Rights and Politics in the Department of Sociology. Her first degree is from the University of Ghent in Political Science and IR and then, very luckily if you've ever been there, went to the European University Institute just outside of Florence to do her PhD, and during that time did internships with the European Commission in Brussels and also with the EU Institute for Security Studies in Paris, so has that kind of interesting insider view of how some of these institutions work that she'll be talking about. Before joining LSE she was a Senior Lecturer in the European and International Development Studies at the University of Portsmouth, lovely place again. She's also a Senior Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies in South Africa, so I’m just delighted to welcome Olivia. Thank you very much.

[Applause]

Olivia Rutazibwa: Good evening. No, it's not evening yet, it feels like it. Good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for this kind introduction, and I'm also very, happy is maybe, no I am happy to be here, I'm honoured I think to open this lecture series, but it's also, and I'd like to acknowledge that, it’s really difficult at times I find to speak, even to do research, maybe also teaching, when we look at the state of the world. But at the same time, I think it's also moments where it becomes more important. You'll find me say a bunch of stuff, maybe also have really broad strokes, because when things are really extreme and so much in our face, I find myself with impatience in terms of referring to all the literature that might be there just to support whatever you're saying.

The invitation, even if I make grand claims, is that you just think from wherever you're listening to this, and any questions, comments you have, I'm very happy to be much more specific maybe, but yeah. So this is somehow the background or the idea that you can take with you in how I will approach this. So I think where I'll try to make an intervention is very much a concern I’ve had for a long time with how what we could call ethical foreign policies. Whether that's aid and development, or anything that we might do institutionally or ideologically, to do something good in the world, how that has been so implicated in the reproduction of coloniality in the colonial state of the world. Again, we have too many examples today to not even know what we're talking about. The answer that I want to address today here is to turn to abolition, not as a quick fix and the thing that will solve everything, but as both an urgent and a careful way of trying to stop going always back to something to do with reform or trying to salvage something, but that there is something very generative in also thinking what do we literally have to stop doing, because it is too much implicated in the colonial. That's the way I'm trying to seriously engage abolition.

I'm in the middle of my thought process so you'll see the hesitation in the rehearsals, in that I speak a bit from a very awkward position when it comes to being invited in a context of global development studies, because I'm actually not a global development scholar or a development scholar at all. As was said, I was trained as an IR scholar, but I was interested in ethical foreign policies, the European Union, and then I decided to look at the EU's policies with Sub-Saharan Africa, and when Africa pops up development also comes in. Then I also started teaching at the University of Portsmouth in International Aid and Development. So yeah, maybe it's easy for me to speak about abolition and international development because it's actually not my field or discipline. But on the other hand, I think also by engaging more and more decolonial approaches within development studies, I found myself also at a tension where at some point we have to be more serious about the implications of the anti-colonial critiques.

The other awkward thing is that I intentionally have tried to move away from international development studies, but I am also still invited to talk about it, so that's the other context. Then the last awkward thing, something that again is part of our profession, but I am in a process of writing a book about this, because apparently we have to write books to stay in academia. Again, I say this in a way that is linked to this impatience that I was talking about before. I feel that maybe a lot of this has already been said, so you won't hear me say that many new things, but also the long form of a book, when I feel that the political urgencies of these conversations sometimes maybe come across much better just in a conversation. So that's the third thing, but that's why I'm very I think grateful, also specifically for the Q&A to have this room and people thinking, and online also, thinking with me and it will help me when I'm forced to finally put this book on paper and to rest.

Lastly, before I walk you through the structure that I had in mind for this conversation, I'd like to specify a bit where I'm speaking from so I've been introduced. I would say that I consider myself as someone that speaks from the West and in the West, even though I am also clearly visibly a child of the colonial diaspora, so of random heritage, born and raised in Belgium and then ended up in this country. There's plenty colonial to go around to some extent. But I specify this because I think that the way that we speak about international development, the word ‘international’ often actually speaks much more to something to do with Western. Western is not necessarily a geography, nor is it particular people, but it's an ideology and it's a history. I think I'm speaking specifically to this aspect of international development. Again, I know the audiences are much more international than that, but from where I'm sitting this is where I can best speak to. The invitation is how does that translate when we think about the same issues around aid and development from a different vantage point, whether that is geographic, I don't think identitarian is that important in this case, but specifically ideologically. I think when we invoke the West or whiteness, it's really important that we manage to grasp how it is a deeply entrenched ideology that very few of us, whenever you go through university, and that is almost wherever in the world, to have escaped that. In a way, there’s a shared conversation, but it's also a very specific one.

Then lastly, where I'm speaking from, I think, and you'll hear me use much more hesitant language than “I came up with this”, and “This is the ultimate solution to this”, or whatever. But the genealogy of my research interest in this came very much from EU studies, mainstream peace and state-building studies and trying to figure out why whatever we write about the international community on paper does not materialise in the actual world. Often again what we find in research, maybe also in policy formulations, is that when it goes wrong, or when let's say in my context it was the genocide in Rwanda. I was a teenager but I remember mostly that the international community left, and I couldn't really make sense of that. Then going to university and hearing about human rights and democracy being invented by the West, and the UN helping the rest of the world finding the same things, the EU as well. So these discrepancies really had a big impression on me and trying to think like how do we make sense of this in a way that it's more than a technical glitch, or it's more than ”We have to put more money in this”, or it's more than “We have to convince people of particular policy areas”. There is something much more structural going on in this case.

The very last thing that I can say is that I ended up in my dissertation in my PhD, again a long time ago, branding it as something to do with we should be more attentive, or try to study more what the salience of international, again, Western international absence could be, rather than always thinking we need to do more, we need to be more present, more specific. When I say that I won't say that much new, a lot of the critiques of the international aid system have come from the field, and have also come from different traditions, if we think of post-development, or when we turn to the bottom-up approaches, or the participative approaches. So there is nothing that I say that people have not thought about. But what I found when I use the term ‘ethical retreat’ was that we often go very far and in very much detail in what's actually wrong with aid and development, but never to the point where we question fundamentally the presence of these Western or international actors. Again, that presence can be financial or it can be ideological or it can be physical. The reason why today I titled it abolition, and I'm also like pausing at this because I also want to signal that words are not as important as they are, as in they help us articulate something but it's not that we now all have to get behind abolition, or all behind decolonial or whatever. There's other traditions that carry the same approaches. But it's specifically I think in the last decade where we see the rise of abolition as something that becomes a term or an idea or politics that is even being discussed in mainstream discussions around Black Lives Matter, the police and whatever. That's when I was realising that all the things I've been trying to articulate in the last two decades, they join existing traditions of abolitionist thought. Again, it's not something new that I'm putting up here.

I have four parts, but we'll see how well we do on time. What I wanted to do first is maybe pause a little bit at what I would call a diagnosis of what I call here ‘aid and development’, to somehow get us thinking about what is my problem with it actually, not just mine. In a way I'm going to try and spend as little time as possible on it, because again I think we have a lot of examples that make that we know actually what this is about. But I will offer a heuristic of the lie to somehow help our thinking there. The diagnosis again is not a general truth, but it's one that comes from an anti and decolonial lens. So I cast the decolonial lens on it, and this is what I end up with.

Secondly, I'll try and I pause to offer some clarifications. Again, not hardcore definitions, but to somehow situate what I mean when I say aid, development and abolition.

The third part, and it's also the part that I'll try to develop in a book, is to work with the idea that abolition is not just a policy that we slap on something or something that will blow up the system and then we don't have to talk about anything anymore, but how it's offered by a lot of abolitionist thinkers as a rehearsal. It's as a long-term process to which we might never see the actual success or full success or end, but what world would that look like? So I'll try and do some rehearsal in three different areas. I will mostly pause at the one to do with pedagogy, because I'm most familiar with that, but maybe also offer some examples of anything to do with research and knowledge making, and then lastly with policy and politics. Again, when it comes to aid and development, how does it appear there? I'll try and end with some concluding reflections that are mainly about trying to distinguish how abolition shows up in aid and development in a way that is different from many of the right wing policymakers that we've seen super enthusiastic to maybe be able to cut aid. It's a different conversation and it's probably quite important also to make that distinction, and what types of words do we require to be able to make that distinction? I think that's where we treat repair and dignity as orientations, again not as solutions, but help us to be able to articulate what is different from Downing Street deciding that development is not a thing anymore, versus the conversation that we're having here and that's again just an example.

I'd like to start by reading a quote for the diagnosis by Sven Lindqvist, mostly because the book is called ‘Exterminate All The Brutes’. I've been obsessed over the quote that I'm going to read because it touches on something that I think also speaks to this impatience that I've been trying to articulate, not very well. Basically he's trying to engage with this idea that when it came to the colonial times maybe there were different morals, or people didn't know, and there is this move to innocence, where we say, ‘Okay, but…’, and I feel that a lot of the thinking that I've been trying to do around aid and development is situated in there. Also the fact that aid and development has often historically hand in hand came to be in a colonial context of extermination. So he started his book with the following. The book is 169 fragments. That's my ideal book where I don't have to write full chapters, but I can just have thoughts. He says, “You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions”. For me that's the context and he ends the book with the same quote. Then there is something about ‘Heart of Darkness’ that I might come back to if we have time. But the reason why I put this here in the diagnosis is that I could give you a whole history about aid and development and how it came to be, but I would like to focus the intervention that I have on what is the actual problem with aid and development around the heuristic of the lie. I got that from Eddie Glaude who wrote a book about James Baldwin. He was making actually a diagnosis again also about the United States, very specifically. But when you read it, it resonates with the international global order as well. The lie consists of all the different institutions that we have, the way we've organised society to maintain the value gap of life. In the case of the US, it is the value gap between a white life and all the other lives. When I started delving into decolonial approaches, and I cast that lens onto aid and development, a lot of conversations within the colonial thought are about mythology and that we need to demythologise a lot of the ways that we've organised our thinking even around aid and development. I found the heuristic of the lie quite powerful because we don't have to explain, is it good or bad? We kind of agree that a lie is not always useful. I mean, it can be useful. But the fact that we could think that aid and development participates in the reproduction of that lie is a very uncomfortable realisation that again we actually know. Every time we try and make aid and development better, we actually know that it does not depend on the people in the field, their good intentions, policymakers that have the energy to do it, lecturers that have the energy to, it's not at the level of the individual, good or bad person. So if it's a lie, and if it's a structural lie, I think it's quite important for us to try and think through that. Then when we think about it in that sense, we see so much in the literature of people having said the same thing all the way in the ‘50s. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism. He's like, “Colonialism is being sold to us through a project of civilisation, through a project of aid, of making societies better. The colonial aspect of it is the signification of certain peoples”. Again, the lie in the value gap. So the question of the lie as a heuristic then, is that we can actually approach every aspect, the very specific aspects of aid and development, and the extent to which they reproduce that or they don't. The reason why I get to abolition, I think, is that aid and development as both an ideology and a set of infrastructures and institutions, there is very few places where there is not a direct participation in that much bigger lie. I'll give you the example that makes me very uncomfortable. I don't even like to use the word uncomfortable, but distresses me today is when I was watching for the past year and the many years before, but specifically the past year, the conversations around the humanitarian catastrophes that we see in Gaza, and how it almost seemed more feasible to build a new port. The Americans were going to do that, to drop in aid so that there need not be a political conversation about just even opening the crossings, or just also kind of forcing a ceasefire or anything like that. It was so blatant. So the point is not to say, “Let's abolish humanitarianism, let's not help or aid anyone”, but it's how it pops up in a way that we can perpetuate the massive killings of people, because at least we're talking about the humanitarian thing, as if it's detached from that. That was already more than half a year ago. People literally also died by aid being dropped on their heads. Again, it was such a symbolic way for me to really try and articulate to myself, It's not a flippant thing like, “Let's just close the whole system”, because there is too much suffering to even interpret it in that way, but it makes it also so much more urgent, where now I think the latest that I heard from Biden was, “We give 30 days to Israel to make sure that the humanitarian catastrophe gets sorted”. How do you put 30 days? I don't even know how to finish this sentence, but there is something about how it is independent from the individuals in these industries. But there is something so pernicious about how the aid and development humanitarian infrastructure was created but continues to exist so that the other aspects of politics can continue the colonial exterminations of certain peoples. Again, you see me struggle how to put these things together, but actually I wanted to underscore that that diagnosis is that. It's not about technical problems. It's not about lack of funding. It's something much more structural about how the global order has been put together in very colonial ways. We need, and I've called it somewhere else a ‘Bandaid of colonialism’ that allows for it to be reproduced. How do we then deal or think about what would anti-colonial forms of solidarities of being in this world look like? I find myself struggling to see how aid and development as an infrastructure and as an ideology could actually ever be salvaged to do that work.  As I said, apart from other examples, I think I came to this research through the context of Rwanda. Again, as such a massive amount of suffering, the answer is not, “Okay, we should then have left” or “Intervention was not a good thing”, or whatever. But in hindsight, what I know from my own family, but also from a little research I've done, the collective realisation of the people that you cannot count on the international community, is the thing that got them out and on a different path of whatever they're doing today. Again, it's not rosy, If I put my gaze to the Congo, I can see how unrosy it is, and run as a country as well, at the moment the ties that they have with Israel. So none of this is to just big up one country or another, but just the realisation that it's not the international community that saves you, there is something about that that produces something else. I say this again with the distress and discomfort, because the point is not, let's then not do anything, but we need to learn from what we're seeing there.

Similarly I did some research in Somaliland to actually ask political NGO and academic elites, “How did you experience the international community's presence?” Because unlike the rest of Somalia, there was not this massive UN and American interventions in the beginning of the ‘90s. They said, “We have our own systems of peace-building and state-building, but we could use some help with demining”, some very practical stuff. It's a self-declared independent state, but there's also a lot of, again a very different attitude towards the international community that you can even feel. So again, the diagnosis is not, “It's so bad, so let's just blow it up”, but “It's so bad, and what do we then follow-on from that?”

Let me move on to the clarifications. So when I say aid, again, I could give you a whole set of definitions because we have the long-term aid, we can also look at all the institutions, they have their own definition of it. It can be food aid, money aid, but it can also be technical assistance, we like to call it, or good governance aid, democratisation aid, all of that. What I think again as a shortcut, but it's an invitation for you to just see, like whatever aspect you're looking at, it is very much, as I said, this international/Western relation, and it's a historical one. But it is somehow a relation that points to a place from where aid can come, or assistance can come, to a place that seems to need it. It is a human reflex and a human condition in an ideal world. That's why I am still wedded or attached to ideas of solidarity, but I guess the clarification around aid and development, both as an ideology and infrastructure. The reason why I call it an ideology is that if the language of ‘aid’ is used after systematic robbery, which the colonial enterprise was, and it's not after because that robbery continues, then the word ‘aid’ does something that is again part of this. You cannot go and help someone that you just robbed blind. Then it's called repairing, reparation, something like that, but it's not aid. So what does again the word ‘aid’ do in that logic? Obviously there is a whole infrastructure of that. Again, that came from our imaginations of who needs help, who can be the helper, and all of that, so that binary. The ideology aspect is an important one, but also something to do with the Western genealogy of that.

When it comes to development, again we can think in very concrete terms what that is, but it does something more than just from one place something is given to another. Development is again a human condition and every society desires it, or every society engages in it. It actually just means social reproduction or something. But when development is invoked, again in our context, it does something specific. I would say here apart from the coolie, north, south whatever, which again already is a much more complicated relation, what is kind of reproduced, but not necessarily named as such, is that it's one very particular understanding of what good development is that has been universalised for everyone. That one is global racial capitalist accumulation. That's just the model that we've chosen. We obviously don't call it that because it doesn't sound that nice, but this idea of wealth created from a capitalist accumulative process is the problem with development in this context. Again, if we think about the whole globe, this is not just the West now imposing this on the rest, but it's somehow a shared globalised practice where that also needs to somehow be underscored. At the same time we find also in the literature, if we think of people like Walter Rodney, for instance, we can define development also just as people's or society's capacity to adapt to their life environments. Again, if we were to think of development like that, it would join a lot of the climate catastrophe concerns that we have. But I think often we're not critical enough of what is under the label of development, apart from the other lie where the development problem seems to be something that just popped up in certain places and did not pop up in other places and that's where the aid relationship comes up. Even though it's a very relational one, we sit on the wealth that was extracted somewhere else. That's again a very broad brush. I'm sure if there's economists in the room, they'll be like, “Okay, it's more complicated than that”, but there is something again about this that we know, but we don't necessarily organise our teaching and our practices around that knowledge as well.

Then finally abolition, a rich tradition that we could think about. I will also have to engage with it in much more detail in my writings. As I said, for sure in my earlier days, abolition for me was much more related to the abolition of slavery and then abolition of the Prison Industrial Complex, Military Industrial Complex. We can think of very concrete things. As I mentioned, I think the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter conversations somehow managed to bring that much more in the mainstream to the extent that people asked the next question, “You want to abolish the police, but what about the criminals then?” I think that is a fruitful, is a generative way of trying to engage or imagine what that could mean. We need to think about the abolition of aid and development because the answer is always that there are infinite other ways of protecting social tissue, of organising ideas around justice, and healing in society. The Prison Industrial Complex is just one tiny very horrible one of that. But we even lack the imagination, but then again, we can study this. There's so many practices and examples around the world that engage that and might again not use abolitionist language, but where peoples and societies have had different ways of dealing with what comes after violence, or what comes after a breach in social fabric of society. So I think for the purpose of what I'm trying to do here is really to be attentive to the fact that in general reform tends to include in itself the way in which we reproduce the status quo. Language of abolition, not as a metaphor, but as an actual concrete political orientation, but also as a heuristic maybe, but it's not metaphorical, forces us to think about what is too violent to continue. It opens spaces for many other options. Rather than saying, “Let's just close it” and, like Downing Street would say, “We will stop sending money because we’re going to give it to the Commonwealth”, or something like that. That was the Brexit argument.

That's the clarifications I wanted to do around aid, development and abolition. Like again, it can get so much more technical, and from your own expertises you have many much more concrete ways to enter this but I wanted to offer the broadbrush here.

Then the really important thing about abolition I think is that it is indeed not a quick fix or, as I said, a call to destruction only. But as Ruth Wilson Gilmore or Ariella Azoulay or other people who have engaged with ideas about the potentiality that comes from abolitionist thought is that abolitionists can be most fruitfully seen as a rehearsal, a continuous, continuous rehearsal of what we could do differently. As I said for my fields of interest, I've been trying to think about what we can think about abolition of aid and development in terms of research. Many of you have probably many more examples than I have, but I was just thinking about the problem of knowledge extraction that is often at the heart of our global research when we internationalise research. The ethics forms that we fill out, if you think about it, those are some of the most racist documents I've ever had to fill out, if you think of it. But there is something that is reproduced in very detailed institutional set-ups, and those are just two fragments or examples for research.

In terms of politics and policy areas, and it's not just semantic, but just refrain or at least feel the obscenity of the word ‘aid’, especially when we think about this in the international context. But really foreground, whatever we're doing, how would it fundamentally be something else if we were to engage in reparations? It does not have to be just the money, but also the money because again they like to make a metaphor out of it, so we don't have to calculate anything. Or we talk about debts. Who is indebted to whom? Like the fact that we can cancel the debts of the global side, like there's some stuff again that is so absurd that I don't even understand how many decades we've spent trying to figure those things out. So again I refer to Lindquist. We actually know these things, and they're not just kind of a bracket or something. 

Then the most work I think that can be done, and I wanted to give more details, but I can do that also in the Q&A but it's around pedagogy. Specifically like just the institution of something like a degree in international aid and development, which I was part of. There is something that's got to give there. I can later give examples maybe of a particular course. I found myself at some point in Portsmouth thinking that we cannot keep offering these decolonial critical approaches and tell students from Year One how the whole thing is so horrible in this country, they pay so much to even hear that. Then actually send them on their way, saying, “If you work for the UN or whatever it is really bad.” That's the interpretation that they make. There is again something there and that's what brought me to thinking about would we have the courage to think about the abolition of these type of courses, because I think we would teach something fundamentally different in a degree in, I don't know, global justice and reparations. It speaks to the same sense of solidarity that brought them to the international development course, because they want to do something good in the world. But what would that require from us, even the way we're trained and everything. I think there's a lot for us to think with.

By way of concluding reflections. As I said, I think the invitation of abolition for me is a rehearsal, and it's not a hesitation that comes from trying to be wishy-washy or metaphorical or whatever, but it is because of the concrete examples that I gave. It's because of the stakes, but also because it's so entrenched, and it's a systemic critique. It's not something that we can enter just at policy level immediately, but it's also a level of accountability to humble the exercise to the extent of a rehearsal, but it also means that it's a life-long thing. It's not the way that people have tried to decolonise things with a tick the box exercise and then we're done. It's a different orientation. The way, as I said, that we need to also be mindful because it's so easily co-opted by much more conservative right wing protectionist for the wrong reasons type of politics to say, “Oh yeah, let's just abolish it and retreat to ourselves”. How do we make sure that we tie this project to an anti-colonial ethos. For me that's something that has helped me think that. I think that thinking through orientations of dignity, there’s a lot of aid and development that actually might use that language, but is actually the opposite of it. That can be dignity of all the participants by the way. A logic of repair is a different one than just saying that we're going to stop the money. It means that you need to do something else, but also that you might not be the agenda setter, which again would make a lot of policymakers a bit jittery. But thinking if we speak retreat or abolition to think those at all times with ideas of repair and dignity.

I will as a final, final point, because I think the way that we can keep our attention to the facts, or hopefully the idea that we're doing something more radical than just joining the new turn and abolition is a turn that has come after decolonisation, is when we see that there is pushback, and that the pushback is actually quite severe. I'm thinking of all the activism around Gaza that has happened in the last year, and the extreme pushbacks that we've seen in this country of freedom of speech like it's baffled me, but also universities suing their own students. It's also left an impression on me.

So Lindquist ends his book, as I said, with the very same quote, but the quote before that reads as follows "Everywhere in the world where knowledge is being suppressed, knowledge that, if it were made known, would shatter our image of the world and force us to question ourselves – everywhere there ‘Heart of Darkness’ is being enacted. You already know that, so do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions”. So that's my rehearsal for that. Thank you so much.

[Applause]

Keetie:  Thank you Olivia. We can go and sit over there. Thank you for a very interesting and thought-provoking lecture. As we are seated here, it's now time for questions and comments from you. So we have a roving mic on this end and that end. If you have a question please raise your hand, and please also say who you are, where you're from. Keep your questions short if you can, so we have time to go through quite a few, and that's the same for the online audience, please share your questions and on that - are there any questions? Well online is first.

Speaker: Do you consider globalisation of Western culture and economics to be an extension of colonialism and considering the impacts of globalisation, how can you un-ring the bell in an equitable way? Are we Western-standing entrained scholars and practitioners even capable of having unbiased conversations about how to decolonise without including the target communities? That's from Holly E Eaton.

Keetie: Do you want to take that one first Olivia, or see if there's another question?

Olivia: We can see if there's another question. Allows me to think.

Keetie: Are there any questions in the room?

Barry: Hello. Great talk, by the way. I wanted to ask, my name is Barry, I work at The Open University. Is there anything that the average person can do to help promote the cause? It's like, what you talked about is great, but I think in terms of raising awareness for somebody like myself sitting in the audience, what can I do to help spread the word on the street as it were?

Speaker: There's another one online. What should we as Africans do to build awareness among the people about the abolition of international aid and development while neoliberal imaginings are as seductive as they are. That's from Rahul, PhD candidate in Global Politics.

Keetie: I'll let you answer these first before the other questions in a minute.

Olivia: These are huge questions. Let me start with the first question on globalisation of Western economic and other models. I think it's useful for us to try and think of that question not as an abstract or theoretical question. It actually happened, and that means that it's not the only thing that happened. So there's been other diffusions of ideas. A lot of what we claim as Western knowledge or whatever literally also came from somewhere else. But I would really like to be specific with the histories of what happened before we try and make grand claims. In that context I think the problem with the globalisation of Western models is not that it's Western, but that it was a very, and is a very violent, destructive version of economic reproduction, of imposition of certain knowledges and erasure of the many others that exist, and also the depredation of life environments and the actual extermination of many people. So that's the problem with Western globalisation. It's not because it's Western. So when we organise it like that, we can see that many, and maybe that is a way also to jump into the very last question, but many peoples in the world have joined that same project. So it's not as easy as saying, which we also did, “We kick out the white Westerners. They go back home. We have our own independence, and then everything is fine”. So the decolonial thing or the anti-colonial call is both being specific about histories and what actually happened, but also being specific about the models that we take as the best models and then reproduce.

So I think in that sense, the call for abolition and the radical questioning of aid and development is a very urgent one, also for a lot of elites in the Global South or peoples in Africa. But I think that the way we set up the priorities, they will look maybe different for whomever has that conversation. So again, we should try not to be seduced into formulating what the Global South needs to think about decolonisation in that context, but it doesn't mean that that conversation doesn't need to happen. So as a concrete example, I think banging on about reparations if, for instance, I have conversations with my colleagues or friends in Rwanda, sometimes I get the answer, “Listen, we don't have time for that. We don't have time for the West feeling guilty now and coming up with this whole reparation. We're developing so…” and that's the thing but I think that that answer does not absolve us from thinking about reparations rather than aid. But at the same time the consequence will be there. The steering wheel needs to be handed over and if then the answer is like, “Yeah, okay, you guys do reparations but we actually were thinking this or that”, but then again, that can be debated. So there is this double problem that it's again not one horrible programme that can be replaced with one unitary other horrible programme, because it's more specific than that. I think that ties into also the second part of the first question online, whether as Westerners we can have an unbiased participation in this without the other peoples concerned. My short answer to that is, there is no such thing as an unbiased position in any of this from anyone, but that's kind of a cop out. But I think it's important because often in academic thinking we think if it's good research then it's objective and unbiased, so it's not that. It's also not, “Oh, I realise now that as white middle-aged men, we had the microphone way too long, so now I'll just be silent and see what you guys have come up with”. It's actually the more power you have, the more responsibility you have. But it doesn't mean that you always need to have the microphone. So by definition, you cannot do any of this work in the absence of the previously colonised people, let's say. But it's not that they're not there, that you need to go and find them. We just have to stop erasing those voices, and that I think again is a much more difficult thing than worrying about, yeah. But the responsibility is shared and the bigger it is, especially also when it comes to who does the labour.  A lot of us are really, really tired, and I'm already sitting in the West doing this. So that's already a caveat, but to try and think like, how do we show up for each other, I think is an important question, so I really appreciate it.

Barry, thank you for your question in terms of how do we spread the news about this. In a way I now applied something to very specifically international aid and development, and maybe also specifically within the University, because for me this is where I work, so this is where I feel I have a responsibility. So it will look different in the way I teach. It will look different in the way I hopefully do research differently, whatever, but then when I think about it, a lot of my ideas actually came much more from the world out there than in the books that I had in school. So I think in a way, it might not necessarily be bringing this news into the streets, but actually realising that a lot of people that have been fighting against racism, fighting against colonisation, like the people organising in the street, most of our ideas were borrowed from there. So depending on also where you are, the way we raise our kids, the conversations we have, maybe the useful thing is that in our everyday conversations when we naturalise the fact that there is this different value of life, if we have the courage to push back against that systematically, I think it's quite important. A very concrete example. We all find borders the most normal way of organising societies, and then when we see people drowning in the Mediterranean or the Channel, we don't go quickly to, “Why do we have borders?” We have like, “Oh, maybe they should not have or they are illegal, or they shouldn't break the rules”, or whatever. So all the work that we do to actually explain why their lives are kind of disposable, whereas if I take a plane, I don't expect to die, or if I move from point A to B. So sometimes it's in the very everyday things, but it's mostly also unlearning, because most of us have been socialised. It's with the official language of equality, but everything that we learn confirms that some lives are worth something, and others are not. So it's not a very concrete call to arms answer, but I really appreciate your question. Thank you.

Theo: Hi, thanks very much for your talk. Theo Papaioannou, Professor of Politics, Innovation & Development in DPP.  A very interesting talk. Abolition as such is a very radical claim, right? I would say it’s a radical normative claim. Abolition of aid as a whole, do we keep something there, even when we have reasons to think that maybe it’s justified from the point of global justice. That's one question. The other is, I mean, if we agree that your claim is a radical normative claim, what kind of actions follow that claim from where, for example? I mean, do we put our faith, for example, in social movements? Do we put our faith in formal political systems ourselves? How do we go down from this normative claim to think more specifically about actions? Thank you.

Speaker: Lisa Richie says, fantastic talk Olivia. I would love to hear more about the paths that repair might consider in policy and our practice. Do you have any examples that you can share of collaboration with aid dissenters on the inside.

Eric: Hi Olivia, Eric Addae-Kyeremeh from the OU, a great talk as well. Mine is kind of a follow-on from the previous questions around what we do. I’m very interested in your concept of ethical retreat. I wish we had more time to explore that even more, but putting your international relations policy hat on the side, I know you say you're not a development practitioner or researcher, but some of us in the room are. So try to put a hat on, so as a development researcher or practitioner, you’re definitely concerned about the endlessness of trying to reform, trying to intervene, etc. What can we do? What are some of your suggestions for researchers like ourselves where a lot of our work is externally funded, but we'd want to actually ethically retreat and find new ways of doing things. So what are some of your thoughts on that?

Olivia: I really wish that I had the answers. I will, because I think the three questions actually go really well together, so maybe come back to why I used the idea of rehearsal, because it speaks to an orientation in how we think about problems and solutions in the world that does go straight into something was wrong. How do we do it differently? That is at the heart also of reform. But I promise I'm going to try not to cop out. But in a very radical way again, I think for me abolition means that you can have the openness to think about the abolition of the work that you're doing, of the work of your own involvement in it, not as an endpoint. So it's not again, we blow it up, but if it's not on the table it won't allow us to actually think of solutions. The multiple, it's not the one solution will replace everything else, because otherwise we go straight into “I’ll just change my practice a little bit”, which is again reform. I'll say very concretely again, during Black Lives Matters a lot of NGOs also started, in Belgium for instance, started picking up this question around decolonisation. They're like, “Oh, can you come and give a talk about decolonisation for our platform of 100 NGOs”. I said, “I can, but first of all, again I'm not even the person with the most expertise related to whatever you guys are doing. But the very short message is an invitation to think of your own disposability as an organisation in a structure and a logic”. I think what that means if I had to translate that for myself, the reason why I bring up international aid and development studies as a structure, that is how it translated for me as a lecturer, a person whose career income depends on international aid and development. It's not a flippant call to, “Let's just change the name of the degree, and everything stays the same”. But in my case, the example I had is that we were teaching in the first year Modernisation Theory to start with. That was a method course. Then it was Introduction to the Global South. Then we questioned the Global South, this label and that label, or whatever. At some point I was like, “Okay, what would it actually mean to have a much more radical approach to this?” What I keep, so in terms of aid, to not just chuck out everything, what you keep is the seriousness of students’ commitment to wanting to do something good in the world. You can't be cynical about that. Similarly, you can’t be cynical about a human desire to be nice or useful. The problem is that none of these desires exist in a historic vacuum or outside of power. So we changed one of the courses. Nobody stopped me, and I was not too loud about it either. I was like I can't start with Rostow and modernisation theory, or the gender approach to development and the religious approach to development, as if those are just, so we started a course called, in the first year, The Making of the Global South. Every week we just chose the dates in history. For instance, we started in 1492 and then in the same week also to obviously somehow pinpoint, not to say this is when the inequalities in the world started, but I think in a Western context it made sense. So every week it was an example of how the Global South as a place of poverty was made, but also that there always existed radical pushbacks and resistances to those inequalities, or to those violences. So 1492 came hand in hand with the Haitian Revolution, for instance. So we go into history until the present. So one week it was around the date 1948. It was the Logic of Partition. Partition you go all the way from the Indian subcontinent to Israel and Palestine, the creation, whatever, and students start seeing the connections of many of the problems we look at today as nothing that just fell out of the sky. At the same time by focusing on the resistances as well, because we don't actually need to invent new policies. It's really about what are the alternatives that we always write out of any policy, imagination even that we have. So I am a bit frustrated. I can't be more specific, because you can't go straight into the policy of it. But when I say we actually know, I think everyone can have this imagination in their own practice. What is it of what we do, independent of our intention, that keeps the system in place? I would say mostly it's most of it, and what is it that we have to stop forgetting to come up with alternatives. So the short answer is, there's a lot of work to do, and we cannot be content. But that's why I think the idea of rehearsal is useful, because it pushes back against our own desire to have a quick answer to any of this, but it also is an invitation to not just say, “Oh, it's complicated. Let's just sit back and relax”. I don't know how we are on time, but I haven't addressed the ethical retreat, but I know also I had to follow-up on that, but it can be seen in the same light, because I think it is an extension to, no it was the precursor to abolition for me. I put the aspect of ethical in front of it just to distinguish it actually from this even more cruel neglect and complete disinterest in the others. But I'll come back to this.

Keetie: Thank you Olivia. I'm afraid we have to leave it at that, those questions and the discussion. For those of us in the room, you'll have a chance to talk to Olivia afterwards, but for now, thank you very much.

[Applause]

Before we leave I'll just briefly hand over to Giles.

Giles: Thank you very much and thanks Olivia. I guess it's a mark of a good lecture when you feel less certain of what you thought you knew. I certainly do feel less certain of a lot of things, and we've got so many questions, but unfortunately we do have to stop asking questions, just for a few minutes. We can adjourn elsewhere to ask a few more. So that was obviously the first in an annual lecture. I thought it was brilliant. The bar has been set very, very high, so I feel sorry for next year's speaker, but we'll find some good suggestions and hopefully keep the momentum going. I think it was really useful, already we've used Olivia’s work in our new courses, which is great. So I think there's ways in which this is feeding directly into the way we're trying to teach and grapple with some of these issues. So it was great to hear Olivia talking so profoundly about that herself.

I also wanted just to thank various people, so the Events Team, Babette and Helene and their teams, also the AV Team. Thank you very much, and to be able to speak to people out there somewhere. To everybody who attended, we do want to get things right, get them better, if we can. It would be hard to get better than just now but anyway. There is a form if you'd like to feedback anything, suggestions on how we might improve, that would be fantastic. It just remains to say, thank you for supporting The Open University. We do appreciate that. We try and be as open to ideas and things as we can, and certainly, as I said, my ideas have been opened up in a way that I really appreciate. For those that are here, sorry for you guys out there, it's tough. We're going to go, if you'd like to join us for some drinks downstairs and carry on the conversation, get to know each other better. If you are on campus then you've got something to do at 7 o'clock. There is apparently another drinks reception for those that know the campus, at the Pavilion. So do rock along there, support the OU Club, and it just remains to say have a good evening to everybody else, and thank you again.

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