De/Recolonising development: Fanon, Rostow, and the violence of social change

Can development be decolonised? The dominant form of contemporary development thinking prioritises capital accumulation and economic growth, guided, if necessary, by violent means by national elites and hegemonic states. This article recounts an early moment in the struggle over the form and content of development. It argues that in response to post-World War 2 decolonisation, W.W. Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth represents the modernisation and application to development thinking of supremacist norms rooted in the standard of civilisation (recolonising development). By contrast, Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth proposed a “new humanist” alternative (decolonising development). However, reflecting and reinforcing the dominant ideology of development, the violence inherent in Rostow's notion of development has been whitewashed (development without violence), especially within the sub-discipline of development economics, while within various strands of development thinking Fanon's vision of development has been blackwashed (violence without development). Reclaiming Fanon's humanism requires grappling with his insistence upon revolutionary violence as necessary to overcome supremacist forms of development.