Iraq and human development: culture, education and the globalization of hope

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Spring, 2004 by Jacqueline Ismael, Tareq Y. Ismael, Raymond William Baker

HOW DO THE ARAB HUMAN DEVELOPMENT Reports relate to Iraq? The international discourse on human development, championed by the United Nations, came into being in 1990 with publication of the first Human Development Report. The UN initiated the discourse to buffer, with a human face, economic development theory and the neo-imperialist thrust of corporate globalization. While sanctions had removed Iraq from the purview of the human development approach for more than a decade, war and occupation reopened the examination through the discourse of post-conflict reconstruction. Although these two discourses of human development and post-war reconstruction provide recipes for rebuilding, there are crucial missing ingredients.

This essay reads human development and post-conflict reconstruction discourses against the grain to reveal, on the one hand, their inadequate conceptions of how to achieve more democratic and egalitarian societies, while also exposing the promising openings they nevertheless afford. The abstract humanism, without historical or cultural content, that characterizes the human development reports in general, and the first AHDR in particular, has the effect of masking new forms of assertive Western parochialism as universal civilization. However, even this hollow humanism does place the category of history and culture, albeit conceived in abstract terms, on the agenda of development and reconstruction, and thereby creates latent internal contradictions that can be exploited. In a departure from practices elsewhere, the human development reports for the Arab world were written by Arab intellectuals of standing who represent a wide spectrum of opinion in the Arab world, rather than the functionaries and specialists of international agencies. This departure has had important consequences. The second Arab Human Development Report, published when the implications for the Arab world of the American reaction to 11 September were clearer, takes greater advantage of the opportunity to give the human development discourse real Arab historical and cultural content.

The Arab authors of the report transcended the limitations of the neoliberal framework within which they wrote by intruding the unavoidably collective dimensions of both Arab history and culture into the analysis, notably with references to Palestine and Iraq. They also took pointed exception to the anti-Islamic animus of the American-led War on Terrorism.

This article aims to push exploitation of these internal contradictions in human development discourse further, by clarifying the ways in which Iraqi history and culture, in particular, can be made into resources to expose the dangers of an externally conceived and imposed mandate for educational reform. It then suggests alternative possibilities for mobilizing transnational resources in support of self-defined educational reform, with the specific example of a collaborative Iraqi-Canadian project that will rely on the people-to-people networks made possible by the Information Revolution. The project's goal is the establishment of a non-profit international university with global linkages to complement Iraqi national universities. This instance of grassroots globalism links Iraqi academics with their counterparts in Canada and around the world in the service of a project designed to meet self-defined educational needs that respond to the imperatives of Iraqi history and culture. It envisions spontaneous networks generated from below, including non-governmental academic associations, which are broadly inspired by anti-war, anti globalization, human rights and environmental movements--all urging action to mobilize human and capital resources in the human interest. In broadest terms, such efforts all contribute to anti-systemic struggles on behalf of a world, as Wallerstein puts it, that is "relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian". (1) Such efforts, even the most modest, localized, and experimental ones, are all part of what some have begun to call "the globalization of hope." (2)

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

With publication of the first Human Development Report in 1990, the United Nations announced the initiation of an international discourse on development to "contribute to the definition, measurement and policy analysis of human development." (3) In effect marginalizing the intense theoretical debates on development that raged throughout the eighties, the discourse was launched with the "hope that this Report--and its annual sequels--will make a significant contribution to the development dialogue in the 1990s and lead to a serious exploration of human development programming at the country level." (4) The first Report initiated the discourse with a humanist perspective, drawing a relational distinction between human development and economic development:

      People are the real wealth of a nation. The basic
   objective of development is to create an enabling environment
   for people to enjoy long, healthy, creative lives. This may
   appear to be a simple truth. But it is often forgotten in the
   immediate concern with the accumulation of commodities and
   financial wealth.

      Technical considerations of the means to achieve
   human development--and the use of statistical aggregates to
   measure national income and its growth--have at times
   obscured the fact that the primary objective of development is
   to benefit people. (5)