This interview has also been published on the EADI Blog

Professor Aram Ziai is an academic who has been writing on Post-Development for over 20 years. His work is all centred around decolonising the sector – and on how colonial injustices are still effective in our day-to-day life. He is also Executive Director of the Global Partnership Network, which has been explicitly set up to try to decolonise international cooperation and knowledge production as far as the structures of the ‘development industry’ will allow. 

Q: Could you briefly share with us a few of the absurdities you experienced, which also motivated you to found the Global Partnership Network?

A: Teaching in a research centre on ‘development’ I once asked the PhD students to state their country of origin and their country of research. It turned out that all the students from the global South were doing research on their own country, all the students from the global North on a country of the global South. Obviously only some people were considered capable of doing research on other countries than their own: those from ‘developed’ countries. I vividly remember how a German professor who gave a lecture in the colloquium of that centre was praised at length for his unique expertise on Ghana: he had written many articles on the country and even lived there for a few years. Next to the professor, three Ghanaian PhDs were sitting, and I was contemplating their expertise on Ghana: how many years does it take you to attain the language proficiency including dialects and slang, the knowledge about social norms, history, political economy, cultural and religious rituals to rival that of someone who has lived in this society all his life? Whose expertise is recognised and on what grounds? I think some elements of colonial difference and White privilege are still at work here.

I also remember writing a grant application for a graduate school with partners in Ghana where we had to outline how the collaboration would contribute to the capacity building of our partner university. I was thinking maybe we could devise an MA program for Development Studies together, but it turned out they already had five of such MA programs while my home university sadly had none. Nevertheless, the funding regulations demanded that we would show how we in the North would build their capacities, while we in fact would have benefitted from their experience in running these programs.

At another time, I was asked by a research foundation to review a research proposal on transitional justice in Brazil. I had never worked neither on transitional justice nor on Brazil. Yet for the foundation I seemed to possess a general expertise for ‘developing’ societies because I was working on development policy.  At the same time, it would have been completely unthinkable to ask me to review for example trade union policy in France without a solid research background. Again, questions of the geopolitics of knowledge and the academic division of labour become visible. ‘Normal’ political science, economics, sociology or international relations deal with societies in Western Europe and North America, while all other societies are relegated to the subdisciplines of ‘development’ sociology or economics and sometimes reduced to generic ‘developing countries’. 

Q: Very briefly, what have you done in the Global Partnership Network to break up the underlying structures of such injustices?

A: In the GPN, we wanted on the one hand to enable research on the long shadow of colonialism and how it affects relations between the global North and South up until today. Yet we also had to link it to the SDGs which were the dominant theme then (2019). On the other hand, we wanted to avoid (as far as we could) the paternalist structures of the aid industry. This meant above all that we were transparent about the budget and ensured that all major budget decisions are not taken by us in Kassel, but by the International Steering Committee where all university and civil society partners of the network are equally represented. Also, we are convinced that valuable knowledge can be equally gained in the universities of the global South, so we fund PhD fellowships in all partner universities, not only in ours, and strongly emphasise South-South cooperation and knowledge production in the global South. We try to reflect the relations of power implicit in our work and we have hired an independent consultant from the global South to interview our partners anonymously to produce an evaluation of these relations. There was a lot of criticism, but also much appreciation of our efforts.

Q: One layer of the structural coloniality we face is limited to the academic sector in which we work. Do you think some of the positive changes, e.g. in the Global Partnership Network but also elsewhere, can bring about the desired outcomes?

A: In the past decade post- and decolonial ideas have gained considerable ground in academia as well as in the field of ‘development’ cooperation. The GPN is founded by  money from the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the 2023 BMZ strategy paper declared the new ‘feminist development policy’ also to be postcolonial and anti-racist, and last year I was invited to talk to the foreign policy committee of the German parliament about the effects of colonialism on international politics. Yet of course we also witness problematic tendencies: First, a massive backlash against ‘woke’ disciplines like post- and decolonial studies from the far right. Second, a co-optation of decolonial ideas by state institutions confining them to the realm of culture and shying away from talking about the global economy where massive neocolonial transfers of wealth from South to North still take place. Thirdly, authoritarian nationalisms in the global South employ the language of decolonisation while pursuing exclusionary policies against religious minorities, women and LGBTIQ people, migrants or dissenters. Therefore, I think it is important for progressive forces to defend and extend the achievements of post- and decolonial movements against the current backlash while insisting on an intersectional critique of relations of power including race, gender and class.

Q: Another layer is the development cooperation sector as a whole. What do you observe here?

A: As authoritarian nationalisms are on the rise also in Europe and the USA, I think it is crucial to remind all those who question that we owe the global South anything, that the rise of West could take place only through centuries of colonial plunder and neocolonial exploitation. Jason Hickel calculated that the amount of silver transferred from Latin America until the early 19^th century was so huge that, would it have to be paid back with the historical average of 5% interest, it would exceed the global GDP.  Even today there is a massive transfer of resources from the global South to the global North in the form of debt service, unequal exchange and profit repatriation by Transnational Corporations. Development cooperation is entirely unable to compensate this even if it wanted to. The global economy, including trade, remittances and the flows mentioned above are clearly more important factors when it comes to questions of global inequality and poverty reduction than development cooperation. And regarding the objectives of “development” I think it is crucial not to lose sight of the fact that the mode of production and consumption of the global middle class depends on cheap labour and cheap resources from abroad. This holds true even if a rising number of people from the global South belong to this class. China has established itself as one of the most important actors in the global economy and its advances in poverty reduction are impressive. The price for its success is clearly a steep rise in environmental destruction and social inequality and its increasing participation in the imperial mode of living.