Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper seeks to disrupt the often ingenuous annotations of non-governmental socioeconomic intervention by offering a detailed description of how race and power are not just cursory features that surround the industry but are, in fact, woven into its core largely through organisational traditions and structures, operations, dominant narratives of poverty, and depictions of those who live in poverty. The central argument presented here holds that non-state intervention, well-meaning as it may be, is in no way, a neutral space that is devoid of race and inequitable reserves of power. Instead, the world and work of NGOs –despite dominant assertions of independence– is inextricably bound to its context and, through its internal workings, is largely ineffectual in reordering the arrangements of race and power in society. In particular, narratives of poverty and ‘the poor’ along with the racialised embodiment of deliverance peddle to the self-replicating traditions of the industry, thereby doing little to disrupt the set of power relations for which the sector claims its call. As such, the silence and general oversight on how ‘well-meaning’ socioeconomic interveners replicate the configurations of race and power is both mollifying and obstructive. These propositions– aimed largely at presenting contextual actualities which countervail this oversight– are drawn from personal and informal observations conflated from over a decade of the author’s affiliations with development NGOs. On the other hand, data collected in the small town of Makhanda in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province crystallise these reflections and substantiate the central thesis of the paper.