Download or read book Science, Development and Violence written by Claude Alphonso Alvares and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a lively and acute assessment of the actual aims, methods, and results of the development process, as against its ostensible aims. The author asks several questions: Why is there such a mystical aura about the term 'development'? What are its underlying assumptions? Who is being 'developed', and to whose advantage? He also considers the fact that such 'development', which had promised a golden future to the 'backward' countries of the South, is now increasingly an excuse for mere plunder and violence directed both against Man and his environment. Can such views of development be countered? The author discusses resistance movements in India and other countries, such as the Philippines, and the reasons for the success of such resistance. Finally, there is the question of alternatives: if the clock cannot be turned back, can it be slowed down? Or turned in another direction? The author's views on these questions, which concern the thinking observer as much as the 'development expert' or policy-maker, make this book of enormous topical relevance.