Webinar series organized by medico international
November 2022 – March 2023
“The crises we are already familiar with – the climate crisis, the intensification of the racialized and gendered capitalist system, the health crisis, to name a few – are coming to a head and becoming increasingly intertwined. This creates new dynamics of power and violence, coupled with a growing sense of hopelessness. The (re)construction of the world, thinking and doing it differently, becomes a necessity. In this, aid remains an essential part of the way the world is thought and made. But aid is also bound up in its colonial legacy, in racist structures, and in a market orientation and neoliberal agenda that (re)produces inequalities and marginalizations.
These critical perspectives on development and aid from post-colonial and post-development perspectives have long been formulated by feminist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist voices. They point to how the aid system itself perpetuates forms of economic and financial dependence through institutions, conditionality, or tied aid. On the non-material level, the “global South” is constructed as a place of crises and vulnerability, whose people are defined by crisis – rather than as subjects of their selves and their contexts.
Critical actors around the world are making the case that we need a “decolonial turn” in development studies and practice to unravel the roots of the power relations that produce and stabilize the racist, gendered, sexualized, and class hierarchies that characterize the modern world. Decolonization goes beyond critique and paves the way for the realization of alternative visions and practices of world-making.
And in the spirit of Audre Lorde’s dictum, “The master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house,” the question is how to abolish the master’s house. Do we have to? And if it were (to be) abolished, would we also have to abolish aid?
Based on these strong critical interventions in development debates, the overarching theme of this series of events is the decolonization of aid and development. As we look toward a future of a good life for everyone and everything on the horizon of these crises, where is aid to be located? Can aid be part of the shift toward planetary solidarity, or does it stand in its way?
Decolonizing Aid is a series of dialogues. We would be happy if you join us and our guests in the (digital) fishbowl in English, Indonesian or German!”
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Source, more info, registration:
Website of medico international
