Partisans of Progress? Labor and the ‘Development Project’ in Bangladesh’s Semi-Centennial Decade

Mushahid Hussain, Cornell University

The international development industry is in the business of showcasing selected countries as ‘success cases’ of economic development, often as proof that liberal democracy and capitalism go together. Enthusiasm is currently expressed on Bangladesh’s entry into this list. The image of a ‘basket case’ produced at a Cold War frontier of genocidal conflict in 1971 offers the industry a useful past for comparison. Not only is Bangladesh poised to officially ‘graduate’ to a middle-income country, but it consistently outperforms ‘peers’ across a range of indices, from infant mortality to women’s empowerment. Critics do not question these gains but point to the costs which appear to undermine their sustainability. These are usually articulated as problems of growing inequality and undemocratic governance, where the ability to weather global economic as well as ecological shocks is unevenly distributed among the country’s population along class, gender, and ethnic divides. What is often omitted in such discussions on ‘sustainable development’ is a theoretically grounded historical understanding of the ‘development project’ in relation to the social reproduction of labor in capitalism. In this paper, I focus on one aspect of this relation – the changing social scientific claims of the ‘development concept’ between the 1940s and 1980s – in delineating a conjunctural shift in the global political economy of capitalist development. Drawing on a growing literature on ‘histories of development’ and my ongoing historical research on Bangladeshi state formation, I show how the changing object of poverty and disempowerment between these decades, i.e., from ‘nation-states’ to ‘target populations’, both a) narrowed the scope for identifying specific development projects and institutional initiatives as part of a broader political project in regulating (insurgent) constituencies of labor, and b) generated new possibilities for politicizing liberal democratic claims on the state around technologies of governmentality.

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 Presented in Session 196. Postcolonial Development: Legacies and Strategies