In December, as part of the Sussex Development Lecture series, Dr. Rutazibwa offered a conversation between personal experiences, reflections and decolonial scholarship to reflect on the fundamental, practical, institutional and epistemological implications of recognising the coloniality in the international development project. When we seek to part with the coloniality but not with the desire and imperative of global solidarity and justice, the following questions impose themselves: What do we keep? What do we throw out? IDS student Enggi Dewanti tells us more.


Uphold vs. Challenge
Dr. Olivia U. Rutazibwa tells us that in general, there are two opposites polar facing, whether to uphold the “frantic and violent attempt” of the colonialization status quo or to challenge the current state. Whether it is in the United States or in the Middle East there are, currently robust, global civil society groups demanding colonialization reform. People started by questioning the acceptable norm and now how to decolonise the education system is being researched by experts.
 

International Development Studies as an institutionalized model

Dr. Rutazibwa thinks that international development studies are an ideal tool with which to reach society, through academics, students, and its environment. However, the practice, which is institutionalized, cannot be separated from the expectation towards the educational investments by different actors, including students.Why baby and bathwater?
The metaphor is used to reconstruct and deconstruct the relations within the development studies. The babies represent the spirit of tirelessly contributing to the social reform agenda through ideas and thoughts, meanwhile the bathwater represents the system of development study courses.
 

The Diversity of Decolonialisation Uniformity

One of the most shocking practices, according to Dr. Rutazibwa, is that although the understanding of post-colonialism now is more acceptable among academics and those who are involved in development related work, the reality is that not much has changed. The evidence for the argument is basically how the “aid industries” still take control over most of the development related projects around the globe. This also raises questions of whether development studies institutions are emphasizing the fundamental reform towards its daily practice of teaching. However, the stress on the reform should be seen as unique rather than uniform since it might form in different phases and situations in different regions. For example, in the UK, the idea of decolonialisation has somehow been taken to the next phase, and in some other regions like European Union, the acceptance might be seen as absent.
 

Ontology, epistemology, and normativity as a Strategic Framework

In the case of development studies and its courses, the mythological perspective of colonialization plays an important role. What are the myths? One of the crucial points in the developmental thinking myth is the presence of western view and perspective as an influence. There are three ways to help to deconstruct the myth; by understanding where we locate the point of origin, the problems of fragmentation, and centrism.

Firstly, the point of origin speaks about the way academics in development related courses tend to explain the historical background in certain ways, e.g. the history of the World War and its influence on the world. The implication being that lecturers might create an historical, vacuum because it creates an absence of gap between the northern and the southern parts of the world which were caused by colonialism., To help solve this variety in the historical materials will help students start to question the current condition, such as by having discourse discussion about colonialism or the decolonialisation process in Africa in the 1970s.

The point of origin also relates to the problem of fragmentation where the stories told are framed in a particular point of view. Instead of giving both perspectives, the point of origin stories highlights one key message, e.g. the modernity in one side, or the turmoil of colonialization. The “highlight process”, where telling the point of origin might not be essential to understanding the whole process of how the modernity could be achieved without acknowledging the role of colonialism in the past, will not allow students to see problems in a more constructive way, e.g. how to eradicate corruption as a systematic way rather than fragmented way. Finally, on centrism, once the story acknowledging the spaces has been told, the next step would be to examine whether the process of bringing other spaces in will help us to understand the world better, rather than to hold on to one particular perspective.

Meanwhile, through the epistemology, the important understanding is how silencing helps continue knowledge production in development related courses. The silencing produces a ‘killing of thought’ sometimes unintentionally. Beside literal silencing, there are other ways of silencing, such as overrepresentation, hyper-visibility, simplification, delegitimisation of a particular voice in a systematic way, etc. Robbie Shilliam in his book, The Black Pacific, clearly defines the way to reconnect the dots of knowledge which already coexist and considers whole entities to have proportional roles within the production of knowledge.

Then, the normativity is about the purpose of producing the knowledge. Examining our research agendas, will help the process of decolonialisation. In other words, the purpose of the knowledge should be to support the material and immaterial substance of decolonialisation.It is also worth to note that within practical institutions, the concept of binary of hierarchy, e.g. equality and inequality, punishment and rewards still become the main major background of how development responds and aids are formularized. These concepts lead to the popular terms such as capacity building or how to bring equalities instead of concentrating on how deconstructing decolonisation can help.

The purpose of decolonialisation in international development studies relates to the importance of a shift of power, and whether knowledge can be produced in the vacuum of power. The question that should be asked is, can knowledge be produced without serving a certain power?
 

Reflections: The continuation of evaluating the learning, the practice, and the development

The topic of decolonialisation has been brought to the table since the importance of seeing the both sides of the story of development is inevitable and through the discussion and debate of the role of Southern countries in their own development. For instance, students at IDS are shown the representation of the balance in stories of the North and the South’s role in global governance and global development. Yet, how to shape academics who need to meet the expectation of the development industry itself is another question to answer when the pedagogical approach of learning is sometimes disturbed by the institutionalized system within Universities.

The main point to contemplate is that decolonialisation within development institutions should not be seen as a blame-game of who should be responsible on the binary of hierarchy within the scale of inequality to the equality, or the relation between the superior and the inferior. It should be utilized to deconstruct normative ways of teaching and broadening perspectives so that the purpose, the spirit, the ideas, and the thoughts of development related institutes can be used to answer questions of development complexity in the real world.
Decolonialisation of international development studies will challenge not only superiors, including lecturers, but also students who propose questions tilted towards their normality. We all need to think about how to link and connect knowledges to help the learning of development understand the world better.

You can watch the whole lecture here: