Rethinking development : In search of human alternatives

Recognized as one of the early initiators of the "alternatives movement" in ideas and assumptions about development, Rajni Kothari has dealt with the subject in its various facets over a long time now. Starting in the form of critiques of development polices and the over-all 'model of development in his own country in the late sixties, he soon joined the debate internationally too which led his involvement in a number intellectual efforts worldwide during the seventies. These efforts aimed at producing both an alternative vision on man, society and nature, and a set concrete ideas on how to move towards a more humane, equitable and democratic future, particularly for colonized and exploited societies oppressed peoples in all societies, what he calls the victims of history. He has since continued this interest although the precise concerns and dimensions contained in his more recent work on alternatives have changed. This book brings together a care fully selected set of his writings over entire edited rewritten many of his earlier writings and included several of recent vintage that have not been published.
When Kothari wrote his Footsteps into The Future and started the journal Alternatives (of which he was Editor for ten years). his concern was with creating viable and polities for the Third World. This was also reflected in State and Nation Building: A Third World Perspective he edited in the mid-seventies. Since then his concern has shifted more to the condition of the people, to grassroots perspectives in social movements and to the struggles of the oppressed. This shift from global structures to rights of peoples' also took him into the whole realm of civil society, the structures of oppression that inform it and the struggles for freedom and democracy that ate from it. His most recent work in this respect takes him beyond alternative development. It has taken him into the new upsurge of ethnicity in both its positive and its negative connotations. This dimension too is included in this book.