Martha Jalali

While "antidevelopmentalists" have been sometimes successful in carrying out particular social and political goals in communities, argues Rabbani (Kansas U.), they have failed to adequately challenge the core assumptions of development discourse and therefore continue to unwittingly support rather than weaken a status quo they see as oppressive. As an alternative to this impasse, she proposes to bring into the development debate ideas from philosophers Jurgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel about the nature of human communication; specifically, the notion that human communication is intelligible because claims raised in speech can be universally validated. This idea, she argues, leads naturally to the recognition of the interdependency of all peoples and individuals and, therefore, founding development policies upon such recognition "can alone accomplish the practical goals of development and antidevelopment discourses respectively, namely the unfolding of individuals and community's unique and socially relevant qualities and capacities." Thus development ("understood as respect to and promotion of the diversity of individual and community life") can only be achieved when founded on the search for self-understanding of interdependent human unity. Annotation 穢2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)