Bonn Juego
Chair of the Finnish Society for Development Research, Co-Chair of Development Days 2025, and Senior Lecturer in International Development Studies at the University of Jyväskylä
[Opening remarks to the Development Days conference with the theme “Development Transitions: Amidst Waste, Wars, and Maldevelopment”, 27 February 2025, Helsinki]
Good morning, everyone! And to international participants joining us online – warm greetings from Helsinki, Finland!
Let me begin with an admission: we, the Board of the Finnish Society for Development Research and the Organizing Committee of the Development Days 2025, have been pleasantly surprised by the number of registrants and participants, both onsite and online, for our activities. We have dealt with more than 200 people altogether, who registered for our two-day conference and the pre-conference events yesterday – the DocShop for doctoral researchers, the Master’s Workshop for graduate students, and the Public Forum. We received a record number of working group proposals, nominations for Master’s Thesis award, and applicants for the research training activities. Our sincere thanks go to all of you for your attention and cooperation, and to the youth volunteers, colleagues who offered their services as mentors, and those serving on the selection and award committees. We are also grateful for the generous institutional support and financial subsidies granted to us.
We did not expect that this year’s theme – “Development Transitions: Amidst Waste, Wars, and Maldevelopment” – would generate such great interest. Given the current global and national realpolitik, it is becoming less appealing and, in fact, more threatening to stay, study, or pursue the field of development.
For a long time, critics of our academic discipline and professional practice have been relentless in trying to make us irrelevant. But we have pressed on, insisting on the truth of our relevance.
Here in Finland, our detractors often tell us that we, in development studies and research, are “too small” a community. Yet, we march on, refusing to be gaslighted, because the reality is that, together with our partners and colleagues in academia, government, and civil society, and the constituencies and beneficiaries of our development work, we boldly assert: “we are many, they are few.”
The key concept we are to reflect on during our two-day conference is “development transitions.” We convene here with a reminder that “development”—best understood as a concept of processes and relationships—is constantly engaged in the process of change, whether as an academic discipline, a foreign policy, or a professional practice. Through our diverse, yet interrelated, working group themes, we shall inquire into the issue from a historical perspective – examining the present (“How is development transitioning?”), in light of the past (“How has development transitioned?”), with a view to the future (“What development transitions should happen?”).
With Donald Trump’s assumption of the US presidency, in close alliance with ultra-conservative ideologues represented by his Vice President JD Vance and his circle of super-rich Big Tech billionaires led by Elon Musk, global development discourse and practice are undergoing a historic transition, dramatically unfolding before us. This period of transition is a moment of crisis and, as such, can be a turning point whose outcome is open-ended. We are in an interregnum, or as is popularly quoted, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
The past few weeks have been a time of monsters for the global development community, being haunted and assaulted by the Trump-Musk hydra. Using military-style shock-and-awe tactics and a scorched-earth strategy against us, Trump and Musk started with forcefully by shutting down the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and insensitively undermining human rights and other foundational values associated with liberalism. Over the long term, what is more dangerous and alarming for us development scholars is that Trump, Musk, and their right-wing populist following are not only attacking the institutions of international development, but also the very ideas and progressive principles of good development. This ideological affront to our community also makes us realize how we have neglected the core function of ‘development communication’, which does not simply mean doing ‘information dissemination’ but, most importantly, ‘raising consciousness’ of the public.
Many of us in the tradition of critical development studies understand the historical geopolitics and geoeconomics of the USAID as a tool of the US empire for the West’s continued colonialism and capitalist expansion into the resources and markets of their former colonies. Yet, even if the Trump-Musk duo would completely dismantle colonialist institutions like the USAID, or even if their aggressive drive for government efficiency and de-bureaucratization is extended to the so-called “Washington Consensus” (namely, the World Bank, IMF, and WTO), the ‘unholy trinity’ of institutions for neoliberalism governance (that have caused the destruction of economies and societies in parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America), the mentality and vested interests underpinning the Trump-Musk doctrine of development are totally different from our contextual analysis, sensibilities, morality, and progressive vision in critical development studies.
For quite some time now, we have already been living in a multipolar world. Global capitalism has evolved towards real competition – meaning, no single country, not even the United States, can control the new era of competitive capitalist development. Trump’s nationalist and protectionist “America First” policy is not a retreat from neoliberal globalization, but an obvious response to the imperatives of hyper-competition in the present-day world capitalist system.
But while the preeminence of the US is over, the incumbent empire and longtime hegemon won’t easily give up power. After all, notwithstanding Trump’s campaign rhetoric promising “no wars” or “stopping wars,” we know too well in the geopolitical economy of development that wars—imperialist wars—are the foundations that protect, promote, and sustain the vested interests of the American empire’s military-industrial-financial complex, the racial-gender-class supremacy of the white male capitalist class, the Global North’s techno-cultural superiority, and the ideology of economic nationalism.
Nevertheless, the imperial overstretch of the US and the decline of the European Union can be momentous for alternative development forces to bypass and uproot Americentrism and Eurocentrism. In this disruptive phase in global development, it is important for critical scholars not to get distracted, to not allow ourselves to lose perspective by getting caught in the inter-elite squabble between the ‘hypocritical’ internationalism of the liberal elites and the ‘fascist’ nationalism of the oligarchs.
In social science research and scholarship, the development process has been analyzed at various scales—grassroots, national, and international. Despite differing levels of analysis, there is a common understanding that our strategies for transitioning into alternative futures are path-dependent. This means that achieving our envisioned future—be it through political-economic reforms, technological innovations, socio-ecological transformations, sustainable communities, commoning, or social movement struggles—requires us to consider the specificities of our past and present contexts.
At this juncture, global development processes and relationships—marked by advances in science and technology—are shaped by three major tendencies: first, the enduring discursive dominance of the modernization paradigm; secondly, the continuity of dependency in the unequal North-South relations; and, third, a new era of intense capitalist competition for global competitiveness. These three logics – capitalist modernization, dependency, and competition – simultaneously exist and interact in shaping today’s world-system.
Yet, the fundamental challenges facing humanity persist. Development is transitioning, and it must continue to do so amidst the realities of waste, wars, and mal-development.
Waste is conventionally interpreted in environmental sense, including the problems of climate change and extractivism. But waste also has a class connotation – notably, the exploitative relationship between the wasted and wasting classes, transforming valuable beings into wasteful things.
Wars are typically seen as the absence of development whose aftermath demands humanitarian and development interventions. But, in fact, wars are products of—and organic to—the racialized and gendered power relations inherent in the globalizing process of capitalist accumulation.
Mal-development is a deeper and more complex historical-structural issue than the economistic view of under-development. Maldevelopment reflects the postcolonial trauma caused by the history of imperialism’s violent development.
The intricacies of these convoluted phenomena encourage us to remain introspective and self-critical as development actors and development subjects ourselves. To this end, we are lucky to have our guest speakers, all coming from outside Europe, fellow researchers and scholars, who will help us navigate these issues and possibly capture them into an appropriate theoretical and analytical framework.
Our keynote speaker, Ali Kadri, is a leading scholar who has theorized exactly about our conference’s theme, understanding the phenomenon of ‘de-development’ whereby the political economy of waste is intrinsically linked to the logic of capital accumulation (where surplus value is tremendously realized through imperialist wars) and to the process of metabolic social-natural reproduction (which, eventually, results in the structural genocide of humans and nature).
Our Kapuscinski lecturer, Alina Sajed, has made substantive contributions to studying anti-colonial thought and decolonization projects, focused on the original geographical area of development studies – the Global South, otherwise called the Third World or developing countries.
And for the plenary session tomorrow, we will have the fortunate opportunity to take a reflexive approach to the theory and praxis of “scholarship activism” or “activist scholarship” – drawing lessons and inspiration from Manuela Picq, the recent recipient of the International Studies Association’s Outstanding Activist Scholar Award, hopefully as a morale booster at these trying times for our development studies community and allied socio-political-ecological movements.
Oftentimes, our pursuit of development studies is associated with the principle of ‘justice’ – and rightly so. But I believe that there’s a shared virtue among all of us – development researchers, practitioners, and activists – that motivates us to keep moving forward to transition into our vision for alternative futures of human living together. That virtue is ‘hope’.
Indeed, amidst a world thoroughly permeated with waste, wars, and maldevelopment, let us choose and act to be for hope.
Again, welcome to the Development Days 2025 conference! Enjoy the engaging space for learning with one another, and let’s have some meaningful time together.
Thank you.
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