Coloniality of Power in Development Studies and the Impact of Global Imperial Designs on Africa

This article draws on a world-systems approach and decolonial epistemic perspectives to reveal how Development Studies has remained deeply interpellated by its Euro-American modernist and ‘civilising mission’ genealogy. This reality has made it difficult for alternatives to current Western-centric neo-liberal thinking to emerge. An orientalist discourse permeates existing development discourses, which provokes the need to unpack the imperial global designs embedded in development thinking and determine how these impinge on African political and economic discourses. Besides unmasking how particular language and discourse concealed global imperial designs, this article will also analyse how postcolonial states and their African national projects have remained hostage to the immanent logic of colonialism and coloniality. Broadly, this article demonstrates how ‘development ’ as a concept, process, discourse and practice, remains caught up in coloniality of power, which hampers the formulation of possibilities for decolonised, democratic and inclusive development in Africa