Beyond "dichotomania" : Drawing new worlds for global policies
Rioux, Rémy
Beyond "dichotomania" : Drawing new worlds for global policies - Éditions AFD,
2025.
The invention of the categories of “developed” and “developing” in the mid-20th century created a representation of the world whose impact has been nothing short of extraordinary. So much so that this binary opposition still constitutes today the basis for mapping all international institutions and global policies: globalization has been written in the language of development. This bipartition of the world has a double nature: it separates countries according to their economic and social indicators, but it also constitutes a division of nations according to shared identities, forged by modern history, along a dominant/dominated axis. However, since the beginning of the 21st century, the bipartition of the world into two homogeneous and separate economic blocs has been increasingly contradicted by facts. The “camel-like” global distribution of income has evolved from a “two-humped” model to a “one-humped”, Gaussian configuration. Regardless of the indicators one chooses to focus on, the world remains marked by deep inequalities, but has also become more “compact”, which has allowed for a state of developmental in-betweenness of considerable magnitude. At the same time, the political identity shared by countries originally defined as developing seems to have endured the test of time and has become a given in the cartographies of global policies. As a result, political structure of the world no longer corresponds to its material structure. The emergence and rapid affirmation of the notion of a global South is presumably part of this perspective. It is thus time to move beyond the dichotomy of development and to sketch new worlds for global politics.
Beyond "dichotomania" : Drawing new worlds for global policies - Éditions AFD,
2025.
The invention of the categories of “developed” and “developing” in the mid-20th century created a representation of the world whose impact has been nothing short of extraordinary. So much so that this binary opposition still constitutes today the basis for mapping all international institutions and global policies: globalization has been written in the language of development. This bipartition of the world has a double nature: it separates countries according to their economic and social indicators, but it also constitutes a division of nations according to shared identities, forged by modern history, along a dominant/dominated axis. However, since the beginning of the 21st century, the bipartition of the world into two homogeneous and separate economic blocs has been increasingly contradicted by facts. The “camel-like” global distribution of income has evolved from a “two-humped” model to a “one-humped”, Gaussian configuration. Regardless of the indicators one chooses to focus on, the world remains marked by deep inequalities, but has also become more “compact”, which has allowed for a state of developmental in-betweenness of considerable magnitude. At the same time, the political identity shared by countries originally defined as developing seems to have endured the test of time and has become a given in the cartographies of global policies. As a result, political structure of the world no longer corresponds to its material structure. The emergence and rapid affirmation of the notion of a global South is presumably part of this perspective. It is thus time to move beyond the dichotomy of development and to sketch new worlds for global politics.
Réseaux sociaux