Question

Explain the rise and fall of what Vijay Prashad has called “The Third World Project.”

Answer 1

The Darker Nations, by brilliant young scholar - Vijay Prashad chronicles the rise and fall of the Third World. His motive was to give an account of the anti-colonial and nonaligned movement in the last half of the twentieth century instead of an entire history of the under-developed world. The work by Vijay Prashad conceives the third world's story as a tragedy in three acts: the origins of heroic running into the 1960s - “Quest”; the growth of traps and ambushes in the 1960s and ’70s- “Pitfalls”; and the rise and fall in the last two decades of the century- “Assassinations”. Prashad narrates “Assassinations” as the rise of the new bourgeoisies of East and South Asia (Singapore and New Delhi). His litany of failure: political exclusion of workers and peasants, lack of democracy, land reform failure, military takeover, bureaucratization, corruption, the rise of new bourgeoisies, ongoing economic dependency on the West, the onslaught of neoliberal adjustment in structure, and the emergence of religious and ethnic extremism, is exemplary. The impressive especially is the concluding section wherein he classes analysis of the recovery step wise of the old elites and the emergence of entrepreneurial bourgeoisies and new state in the under-developed states whose predominance spelled doom to the third world's project.