Technologies of Empire: IMF Conditionality and the Reinscription of the North/South Divide

Abstract

This article seeks to complicate conventional understandings of the way in which IMF conditionality operates in relation to North/South relations. It begins with a genealogy of how the Fund became involved in lending to the South and argues that the Fund was transformed from an essentially monetary institution concerned with the industrialised states to a surveillance organisation directed at providing information about the South to the North. The article then explores what discursive functions the Fund might be performing in the context of the relationship between North and South. In this regard the author identifies two major themes underlying IMF discourse, both of which suggest that an underlying sense of danger of the South is felt by the North, and that this sense of danger replicates older fears. The author then argues that the discursive practices employed to address these fears resonate with older discursive strategies and considers why the reoccurrence of these “technologies of empire” might be problematic. It concludes with some (tentative) suggestions about how we might productively disrupt the colonial continuum of which these discursive practices seem to form part. There is a disturbing tendency in the Western Academy today to divorce the study of discursive forms from the study of other institutional forms, and the study of literary discourses from the mundane discourses of bureaucracies, armies, private corporations, and nonstate social organizations. […] [I]f the postcolony is in part a discursive formation, it is also true that discursivity has become too exclusively the sign and space of the colony and the postcolony in contemporary cultural studies. To widen the sense of what counts as discourse demands a corresponding widening of the sphere of the postcolony, to extend it beyond the geographical spaces of the former colonial world.