Global Development, liberal multiculturalism and the silencing of anti-racist solidarities

Keywords: Global development, race, belonging, multiculturalism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 5

Abstract

The first white paper produced by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) in November 1997 committed the British government to: ‘build on the skills and talents of migrants and other members of ethnic minorities within the UK to promote the development of their countries of origin’. This desire to engage racialized and minoritized communities in state-led development produced numerous initiatives from DFID’s origin in 1997 to its reconfiguration in 2020. By analysing these initiatives this paper, inspired by Kalpana Wilson’s (2012) analysis, attends to the connections between the politics of race and belonging and the operationalizing of global development.

Based on archival and interview material this paper considers how state-based multiculturalism provided a framework through which the British government attempted to engage racialized and minoritized groups in the (white) development sphere. In one of its early initiatives DFID sought to bring racialised communities into contact with the state via the production of an umbrella network, a ‘community of communities’. The operationalization and management of this network silenced anti-racist solidarities and organising, despite the importance placed on this by minoritised organisations themselves, producing further exclusion and limiting engagement in addressing the intersections between racism, development and marginalization. State-led development is then shaped by (and reproduces) the shifting politics and discourses of race and belonging and can act as a conduit for the silencing of anti-racist solidarities and the reproduction of racialised narratives of belonging.