Chapter 3 documents the existence of a developmentalist legacy in Brazil as an outcome of the country’s state-directed industrialization (1951–1984) and market reforms (1985–2002.) It traces how in the 1940s a developmentalist frame put forward by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) was embraced by a wide set of policy-makers and business elites, and became institutionally embedded in the BNDES. It then shows how, in the following six decades, developmentalists adapted their ideas and institutions to changing circumstances – economic liberalization, regime change, economic crises, and party alternations – without renouncing their pursuit of structural transformation. Crucially, through this long-run process, they endowed the BNDES with autonomy from political pressures and influence over business strategies to achieve policy goals. This generated the necessary conditions for the adoption of globalized state-led development.

This chapter examines debates around state planning in Morocco and Tunisia, centering on the idea that the post-colonial state could engineer a great leap in the 1960s. Socialist leaders Mehdi Ben Barka and Ahmed Ben Salah pursued ambitious development plans—agrarian reform and industrialization— intended to “catch up” their so-called delay. These policies, however, were deeply entangled with French colonial knowledge and development experts, most notably on how they conceived of tradition as an obstacle for progress. This chapter explores these plans’ entanglements in the imaginations of international experts during development conferences in Paris and Algiers. In both cases, these socialist leaders placed their attentions on the social resistance of peasants and downplayed reactions from educated youth in the cities. By the mid to late 1960s, students protests raged in Casablanca and Tunis, revealing a generational rupture and a challenge to the socialists’ visions of national development. This chapter also illustrates the benefits of excavating printed traces. International conference proceedings reveal post-colonial entanglements with government policy documents such as the Tunisian and Moroccan development brochures of the 1960s. This connection highlights the shortcomings of post-colonial state power after independence.

There is a certain flip-flop mentality at play when it comes to assessing the green revolution. In many popular accounts, in reflections by scientists, or in policy discourses, the green revolution often comes across as all good or all bad. In the context of the prevailing charged debate around the subject, it may be better to assess the green revolution with a historical contextualization that highlights the contingencies and pitfalls of agrarian transformation. Its history reveals that HYVs are no magic wand that can transform agrarian lives for the better anywhere, anytime. A historical analysis also implores us to not to criticize the green revolution for not solving every problem of poverty and underdevelopment.

The Conclusion summarises the previous chapters and their approach. It concludes that Alania should be reintegrated into the historiographical mainstream of Mediterranean and West Eurasian studies. Alania’s example demonstrates that a state-centred approach to political complexity cannot be assumed as the norm; rather, the adoption of state institutions needs to be explicitly explained.

Of all the cases studied in this book, the 1972 coup d’état in Honduras is the one we know the least about. General Oswaldo López Arellano, the military general who led the coup, implemented a reformist agenda, the boldest in Central America – and, indeed, among the most progressive in Latin America. Given that his previous coup ended a Honduran experiment with social democracy, this shift away from repression and toward land reform and developmentalism is puzzling. To understand the political choices that led to this coup and its reformist character, this chapter chronologically reconstructs both the conjunctures in which the military could have overthrown the sitting president but did not, and the crucial months leading up to December 4, 1972, when López Arellano did overthrow President Ernesto Cruz. Hondurans anticipated the coup, but they did not know whether it would be, as one editorial writer noted at the time, “from the Left or the Right.” That it ended up being from the Left was not at all foretold by structural conditions – for similar conditions prevailed in neighboring El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua – and had everything to do with the political decision to address the problems faced by a landless peasantry.

The widespread view that so-called Socratic ethics is fundamentally different from Platonic ethics is examined. The so-called Socratic paradoxes are discussed (Section 4.1). The idea of Socratic ethics as independent of any metaphysical assumptions is critically examined (Section 4.2). The so-called Socratic intellectualism is examined and the claim that in Protagoras Socrates rejects the idea of incontinence is criticized (Section 4.3). The account in Protagoras of “being overcome by pleasure” and the possibility of incontinence are examined as a possible key to differentiating Socratic and Platonic ethics (Section 4.3). The connection between virtue and happiness in the “Socratic” dialogues and in the “Platonic” dialogues is explored. What is the connection between happiness and the Idea of the Good (Section 4.4)?

An important feature of Iran’s political economy is the variety of opportunities it provides, through which individuals and groups can accrue economic benefits from and through the state. At the broadest level, the Iranian economy cannot be said to be in a healthy state. The Iranian economy is structurally unhealthy. But the economy’s maladies are products of, and also contributing factors to, means of personal enrichment for those with the right political connections. There are a number of areas to focus on, including the strong connections between the state and bazaari merchants; the perverse consequences of resource curses such as overreliance on oil and rampant corruption; the state’s efforts at various welfare schemes and the impulse toward statist economics; and the processes and consequences of pulling back from statism through privatization. All of these developments have combined to undermine the economy’s developmental potential. They have also coalesced to provide multiple means of patronage and clientelism in which the state plays a critical facilitating role. As such, Iran’s economy, diseased and underperforming as it is, provides important sources of support and resilience for the state.

This chapter examines the birth control survey research conducted by population technocrats c.1947–60, and analyzes how this research resonated with government efforts to manage the emerging problem of “overpopulation” via fertility regulation. Focusing on the leading population technocrat Shinozaki Nobuo, this chapter depicts how human agency participated in the at times precarious relationship between policy and practice. It also shows how the epistemological framework inscribed in the scientific knowledge produced by the survey research, harmonized with the economic and political rationale that buttressed the post-WWII state’s reconstruction efforts. To illustrate this point, the chapter examines: (1) the evident absence of the category of race and (2) the categorization of data by region and the research participants’ socioeconomic status. For (1), it contends that, by maintaining silence on the question of race, the research consolidated an image of Japan’s population as ethnically homogeneous, which was becoming increasingly dominant political discourse during this period. The phenomenon (2), I argue, embodied the burgeoning developmentalist logic that explicitly portrayed reproductive practices in terms of a nation’s socioeconomic achievement. Together, these phenomena served to produce a certain knowledge of the Japanese population that was particularly compatible with post-WWII Japan’s reconstruction efforts.

The state that evolved under the second Pahlavi monarch featured rapid economic development and persistent political underdevelopment. Especially from the 1950s onward, when the amount of oil revenues coming into the economy increased significantly compared with before, the economy began showing classic signs of the “resource curse.” As is often the case, resource curse – that is, the negative consequences of overabundance of a single commodity and the riches accrued from it to the economy – had manifold ramifications for Iran. As the economy grew, reliance on its single, biggest source of growth, oil, deepened greatly. This occurred at the expense of other sectors of the economy, especially agriculture. It also hastened rural flight, resulted in unplanned urban growth, and brought about maladjustments between economic needs on the one hand and resources, skills, and opportunities on the other. More detrimentally, it froze or significantly slowed down any transition out of rentier arrangements and strengthened existing institutions and practices where they were. The state may have fostered economic development, but it remained politically underdeveloped itself.

This chapter revisits the 1940s moment of urban and national reconstruction when the modern planning system emerged out of a tumult of ideas for the reformation of state and society. The 1940s saw the production of a wave of ambitious civic reconstruction plans, and these were often inspired by collectivist visions of social renewal, but the material presented here shows that reconstruction as it was actually practised focused overwhelmingly upon repairing the most valuable commercial districts of blitzed cities—the central shopping districts. I relate this pattern to the intensely productivist vision of reconstruction planning that emanated from central government at this time, as well as an engrained liberalism and administrative economism on the part of central officials. The new Planning Ministry placed supreme emphasis upon business growth and developmental needs while making strenuous efforts to rein in local planning ambitions and public spending commitments. The upshot of these agendas was a mode of reconstruction which aimed to grow the value and enhance the performance of central shopping districts, and planners worked closely with a range of commercial experts and interests to develop planning principles and policies that would maximise the efficiency of local retail environments.

The conclusion of the book calls for a renewed international law approach to minority rights and the question of statehood – one that takes into account the unique nature and background of postcolonial states and, at the same time, pays attention to minority perspectives going beyond state-centrism, liberal individualism, and neoliberal developmentalism. In this regard, I critically examine a wide range of possible ways out and reform agendas to propose a more humane interrelationship between minorities, postcolonial states, and international law. My reflections, offered as potential approaches to redefining international legal architectures to the advantage of minority groups, cover a wide range of avenues: from revisiting colonial boundaries in principled ways, to accommodating more robust protection for minorities within existing state structures, to radically reconceptualising the state itself through feminist and historiographic revision. I conclude that it is through these alternative approaches to minorities that international law can finally make sense of humanitarian catastrophes in postcolonial states and its involvement therein. Given that the book exposes the way in which international law advances the ideological making of the postcolonial state vis-à-vis minorities, this normative argument can also be replicated in cases beyond the Rohingya and the CHT hill people.

This chapter summarizes the characteristics of the Chinese development approach, dubbed as coevolutionary pragmatism. It has three intertwined components: unwavering targets to promote sustainable economic development, comprehensive transformation toward a market economy and industrialization, and flexible approaches to coordinate multiple aspects and interact with partners during the transformation. It is the interaction, mutual adaptation, and consensus formation that count for advancing market economy and industrialization. Paradoxically, the lack of a defined model turns out to be the key to China’s success, as it allows diverse practices and flexible adjustments. Therefore, as an alternative to the Western model, China presents a different perspective to understand and promote development rather than a rivalry model. Actually, China and Africa’s shift from pursuing traditional values to striving for development is an integral part of the compelling global capitalism. This revelation of the nature of China-Africa coevolution can help people reflect on the destination of global development.

Ideas provided the ballast for the continuity of the economic policy commitments of this era. Developmentalism – the notion that underdevelopment can be overcome “through capitalist industrialization, planned and supported by the state” (Bielschowsky, 1988) – served as a long-term constraint within institutions, pointing toward particular equilibrium outcomes, prioritizing between conflicting alternatives, and providing guidance that drove diverse and uncoordinated actors toward particular preferences and behaviors.As a consequence, even under the most reformist of governments, including at the height of the “Washington Consensus,” Brazilian policymaking was far more gradual, inward-looking, and accepting of an active role for the state in regulating and shaping markets than its large Latin American peers. Using Argentina and Chile as comparisons, the chapter illustrates how developmentalist ideas remained relatively embedded in Brazilian policymaking, academia, and popular thought, even as the “old’ developmentalism was supplanted by a “new” variant.