Rory Stewart, in his book about walking across Afghanistan, has this to say about the post-colonial cadres working for the UN and other international agencies in developing countries:<\/p>\n
Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neo-colonialism.\u00a0\u00a0 But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer.\u00a0 Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing.\u00a0 They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language.\u00a0 They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies and royal botanical gardens.\u00a0 They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn\u2019t their home government would rarely bail them out.\u00a0 If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.
\nPost-conflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism.\u00a0 Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention.\u00a0 Their policy fails but no one notices.\u00a0 There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility.\u00a0 Individual offices are never in any one place and rarely in one organization long enough to be adequately assessed.\u00a0 The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neo-colonialists have no such performance criteria.\u00a0 In fact their very uselessness benefits them.\u00a0 By avoiding any serious action or judgement they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation or oppression.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nReference<\/em>:
\nRory Stewart [2004]: The Places in Between<\/em>. London, UK:\u00a0 Picador, p.272, footnote #59.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rory Stewart, in his book about walking across Afghanistan, has this to say about the post-colonial cadres working for the UN and other international agencies in developing countries: Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neo-colonialism.\u00a0\u00a0 But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer.\u00a0 Colonial administrations may have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,32,35,54,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-anthropology","category-globalization","category-history","category-military-strategy","category-post-industrial-nomads","p1","y2009","m12","d29","h11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}