Abstract
The concept of development has been a controversial subject for many centuries. Not least for its promises. While the Global South remains ‘underdeveloped’ despite the promises of both dominant and alternative paradigms of development, the Global North still grapples with issues of violence, pollution and inequalities (Pedro-Carañana et al., 2023). The book Communicative Justice in the Pluriverse: An International Dialogue, edited by Joan Pedro-Carañana, Eliana Herrera-Huérfano and Juana Ochoa Almanza, attempts to offer solutions to this age-long problem of maldevelopment and seeks to suggest an alternative to development altogether through what they call the pluriverse—‘the world where many worlds fit, without the oppression of anyone and ensuring the dignity of all’ (Pedro-Carañana et al., 2023: 1). The authors argue that such a world can be attained by promoting the ecology of communication as a decolonial response to the monoculture of modern communication, a virtue called communicative justice.
The book is composed of 11 chapters written by 19 different scholars. The first chapter, Dialogue of Knowledges in the Pluriverse, lays out a theoretical framework to provide a foundation for the analyses in the succeeding chapters. The theory challenges the notion of universality, arguing that the world is made up of many worlds or ecologies of knowledges that interact with each other, with the argument that the pluriverse presents a reality beyond the universality of capitalism. The theory, therefore, ably shows that the global crises experienced today are structural and historical in nature. And the solution lies in a post-development approach—an understanding that faults capitalism, profiteering, dominion, patriarchy, communication monocultures and dominant paradigms of measuring progress on economic terms.
This theory is then used to explore case studies in chapters 2–9. The case studies reveal experiences and practices of communicative justice from a decolonial perspective drawn from Japan, the United Kingdom, Spain, Malawi, Ecuador, Bolivia and India. In these experiences, development is deconstructed through various concepts such as Ubuntu, Buen Vivir and Swaraj.
Overall, the book argues that dominant hegemonic paradigms sustain injustices; hence, its search to finding alternatives to development or promoting diverse knowledges or practices to address social injustices. This thinking sides with existing literature within the field of international development (see Freire, 1970; Manyozo, 2017) and looks closely at unequal power relations in society that lead to false consensus and hinder diversity, opposition and innovation. It seeks to promote dialogue and give space for subaltern voices to be heard. As such, postcoloniality and decoloniality come in as concepts to recover the voices of those individuals and groups who have been suppressed for centuries due to the dominant world system. In this case, communicative justice is positioned as crucial to the recovery of these subaltern voices by promoting the ecology of communication as a decolonial response to the Monoculture of Modern Communication, characterized by media monopoly, concentrated media ownership, corporate control of communication technologies and so on. The side effect of the elites’ control of the media and communication is that they control epistemologies and impose the hegemonic discourses and ideologies (monoculture of modernization) on subalterns since the former can decide what is published and not published, thereby making the pluriverse and its plural minds of thought invisible.
The book makes a significant contribution to the field of politics, social science and development studies, not least by focusing on postcolonial and decolonial scholarship to speak back to the centre within the pluriverse. For example, in chapter 8, using a case study on the Okinawa region in Japan, Broudy and Ikehara (2023) successfully explore how the people rose against (neo)colonialism that attempted to erase their history and culture after the Second World War through resistant movements to preserve and revitalize their culture. Similarly, in chapter 7, Pedro and Gutiérrez-Martínez (2023) explore gender equality and communicative justice in the pluriverse by analysing how popular music by female artists in Spain has emerged as a site for artistic expression and participation in the socio-economic sphere of the pluriverse.
One of the book’s major strengths lies in drawing experiences from issues of climate change and environmental justice where local communities are not given a voice to climate crises that affect them. This is achieved through chapter 9, in which Segovia (2023) explores post-development practices in relation to climate change and development in modern-day Malawi. The chapter lays bare how the U.S. Agency for International Development singlehandedly, without the involvement of the community, set up a water project in a rural area of Rumphi with preconceived assumptions that the project would address the ‘suffering’ of the Global South—in this case, scarcity of water due to recurrent droughts which forced women to travel long distances in search of water. However, the local women continued travelling long distances to fetch water. For them, this was not a problem because it provided an opportunity to meet fellow women from all corners of the village, catch up on life and maintain social relations.
Although it is a book loaded with a strong theoretical foundation as well as rich and diverse case studies, it falls short of conclusively addressing the question of how to successfully include all voices in the pluriverse. As much as it puts up a strong case for the inclusion of the subaltern voices in the pluriverse, it lacks case studies that argue for inclusive or participatory communication tools to provide evidence of community empowerment, or that successfully give a voice to subalterns. Such communication tools might have included theatre for development, participatory action research, participatory photography or film, among others. The book attempts to use training, workshops, lectures, and writings in chapter 3 to promote nonviolent communication for a harmonious communication ecosystem as a participatory approach to research, but this is discussed in passing without expanding on how participatory workshops could help empower communities.
Even so, it remains an important book for communication or development scholars and practitioners to read for a nuanced perspective of what it means to provide alternatives to development.