| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The current fashion for good governance and promoting democracy as an integral element of development is ironically having depoliticizing effects because of its articulation with a technocratic and Westernized vision of what a good society might be like. Proceeding empirically and using texts relating to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, this article demonstrates how discourses of democracy and development are mobilized in the contemporary international space, enabling the discursive taking of sides: for "democratic development" and against "Islamic extremism," in ways that elide other possible modes of seeing. "Democratic development" constitutes, and is constituted by, a "Western" (and British) identity in ways that are seductive, but also disciplinary: In particular, they turn out to produce and reproduce a particular set of gender relations as well as exhorting British Muslims to "fit in" with this identity. This exclusionary logic also transposes struggle over these power relations into an undemocratic international space. One key consequence of its mobilization is precisely the closing down of space for political resistance through democratic means, which I argue is not only ironically highly undemocratic, but also dangerous.
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