Send message to Contributor

Contribution short abstract:

This paper explores UN policy's decade-long decays, mirroring losses of progressive capacity visible in lived experience. Considering ‘enthrallment’ thus enables playful exploration of necrotic maxims, while encouraging site-work to seek cultivable rumblings of renewal.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper adopts a discursive playfulness in charting decade-long decays implied by United Nations (and relatedly intertextual) development policies. Focusing on ‘receding horizons’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 2012), I discuss high-level policy shifts that mirror losses of progressive capacity visible in more everyday experiences (e.g., climate, gender inequality, and economic oppression).

Critiquing such policies for flattening development into a technical problem with only technical solutions (Telleria, 2017), it is widely posited that inherent flaws are discursively occluded to reduce development into a structure of slim expertise, re-enabling liberal economics to retain a long-discredited supremacy. Such analysis of ‘enthralled’ policies can thus be interpreted to show our era occupying an inter-reigning limbo state, where ‘Gramsci’s monsters’ are zombified maxims which cling to deathly existence and harm scope for flourishing. My paper however highlights that we do have schematics for inclusive futures, galvanising scope to return into the ‘bestial belly’ and seek cultivable rumblings for renewal amidst a miasma of necrotic rationalities.

I thus hope to show how accumulations of new vitalising norms and modalities of experience may reshape 'development', offering escape from the material/psychic violences inflicted by decaying structures in our shared times.