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Book Review: Development: critical concepts in the social sciences

corporatized media’s silence or distortion of the events. Those watching CNN and/or the BBC are left with no doubt that the news is reported from the perspective of the police, the ‘law and order machinery’. The third part of the book focuses on old and new forms of subsistence in practice in various parts of the world, including Mexico (Gustave Esteva), Bangladesh (Farida Akhter) and Germany. The radical pluralism and ecological endurance of Zapatistas in Mexico as well as the Nayakrishi Andolan (New Agricultural Movement) in Bangladesh highlight the ways to combine theory and practice, to be inclusive without being universalistic, to combine individual initiative with collective action, to promote the creation of ‘convivial society’ (Esteva) where people have a ‘happy life’ (ananda). Helena Norberg-Hodge’s argument that in the long run neoliberal globalization is harmful for everyone, including its immediate beneficiaries, is interesting in that it shows in clear terms that the rich and poor are in the same boat and will float or sink together. Of course this does not deny that the space within the boat is gendered, racialized, and classified, and that when it comes to sinking, some will be in a position to do the ‘Titanic’ (where the victims were disproportionately from the lower decks). Christa Muller and Elisabeth MeyerRenschhausen give us an account of some ways in which Mies’s subsistence perspective has been put into practice within Germany. Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen provides a fitting conclusion to the collection by arguing that our urban civilization is ultimately based on subsistence activities of gendered and racialized subjectivities. The most common problem one expects to find in such a collection is an attempt to provide another metanarrative. Though its title is ‘there is an alternative’, the book is marked by ‘a reaffirmation and celebration of the amazingly creative, resourceful and resilient capacity of women, children and men to satisfy their immediate needs and resist corporate globalization through subsistence in a dazzlingly variegated number of ways’ (xv). This refusal to come up with ‘a solution’ is appreciable. The main strengths of the book include: transcending the theory–praxis divide, adoption of a critical attitude, challenging the myth of TINA and, finally, nurturing and offering hope that there are alternatives to dominant forms of globalization based on epistemic and structural violence.