The Developmental State: Independence, Dependency and the History of the South

Abstract

In this chapter I examine the genesis and the importance of the developmental state for our thinking about both the period of decolonization and, in a more general sense, the history the international legal order. Using as a point of departure the earlier experience of Latin America with the European colonial enterprise, and later on with the challenges posed by colonial independence and state formation, and then tracing the legacies of this experience to the rest of the Global South after WWII, the chapter demonstrates how the developmental state became, during the era of decolonization, a mandatory form that came to outline the possibilities, as well as the limits, of what was thinkable and doable in a maybe never-to-be fully post-imperial world.

Keywords: International Law, Development, Developmental State, Global South, History