Political Change In The Third World

Discusses theories which have attempted to explain political development in developing countries since the 1950s.

This book examines the experience of democracy in developing countries such as Mexico, Zambia, India and Indonesia. The book will be of interest to scholars of Comparative Politics, Third World Politics and Development studies.

Praise for the first edition: "... this masterful and concise volume overviews the range of approaches social scientists have applied to explain events in the Third World." --Journal of Developing Areas Understanding Third World Politics is a comprehensive, critical introduction to political development and comparative politics in the non-Western world today. Beginning with an assessment of the shared factors that seem to determine underdevelopment, B. C. Smith introduces the major theories of development--development theory, modernization theory, neo-colonialism, and dependency theory--and examines the role and character of key political organizations, political parties, and the military in determining the fate of developing nations. This new edition gives special attention to the problems and challenges faced by developing nations as they become democratic states by addressing questions of political legitimacy, consensus building, religion, ethnicity, and class.

This clearly-written and comprehensive introductory text provides a critical review of the principal theoretical approaches to the study of Third World politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Arguments are illustrated by examples drawn from a wide and diverse range of regions and countries. All chapters have been extensively amended and updated for this substantially revised edition to include such developments as the debt crisis and democratisation, and a new chapter has been added on the impact of globalisation on the postcolonial world.

For nearly three decades, policymakers and students have been concerned with Third World societies in transition. Conventional interpretations of political change, formalized in studies of political development, have dominated approaches to analyzing such changes. Yet, argues the author, these interpretations have been justly criticized as bankrupt and irrelevant to Third World realities. Why are they reproduced? How can one explain the belief that these approaches remain viable? These are some of the questions addressed in this wideranging review of the literature of political development and the paradigms that have guided analysis of political change over the past thirty years. Examining how political development theories are rooted in U.S. foreign policy, domestic political trends, and changes in postwar political science, Dr. Gendzier grounds the traditional approach to political development in recent history and politics. Her analysis raises questions about how development doctrine is related to foreign policy, as well as noting development theory's debt to cold war ideology and revisionist theories of liberal democracy. Dr. Gendzier's interpretation sheds light on the reasons for the current theoretical bias that favors approaching politics in terms of psychology and culture—an approach that, she states, has had devastating effects on our understanding of politics.

This new, updated edition of the influential Development Against Democracy is a critical guide to postwar studies of modernisation and development. In the mid-twentieth century, models of development studies were products of postwar American policy. They focused on newly independent states in the Global South, aiming to assure their pro-Western orientation by promoting economic growth, political reform and liberal democracy. However, this prevented real democracy and radical change.Today, projects of democracy have evolved in a radically different political environment that seems to have little in common with the postwar period. Development Against Democracy, however, testifies to a revealing continuity in foreign policy, including in justifications of 'humanitarian intervention' that echo those of counterinsurgency decades earlier in Latin America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.Irene L. Gendzier argues that the fundamental ideas on which theories of modernisation and development rest have been resurrected in contemporary policy and its theories, representing the continuity of postwar US foreign policy in a world permanently altered by globalisation and its multiple discontents, the proliferation of 'failed states,' the unprecedented exodus of refugees, and Washington's declaration of a permanent war against terrorism.

An extensively revised edition of an acclaimed textbook on developing societies