Possibility of local-expatriate equality in international development

Abstract

This thesis contemplates the persistence of local-expatriate difference and inequality in international development organizations. The persistence of such a condition, which I term the local-expatriate circumstance, is particularly perplexing given these organizations’ commitment to justice and improving lives, as well as explicit efforts to foster organizational equality. I develop my arguments through an encounter with an American-founded international development startup in Nairobi, Kenya, whose reckoning with the local-expatriate circumstance grounds my analysis. Working with decolonial critique, I postulate the local-expatriate circumstance as an effect of coloniality, which authorizes the local and expatriate as epistemically and ontologically different and, hence, unequal. That is, through the idealization of particular ways of knowing, which valorize some forms of knowledge while degrading others, the local and expatriate are rendered epistemically different. Through the attribution of idealized knowledge to particular geographies and associated subjects, the local and expatriate are rendered ontologically different. The naturalization of this ontoepistemic difference, rooted in colonial relations of domination and codified and institutionalized as an effect of racial difference, enables the persistence of the local-expatriate circumstance. Further, exhortations of universal equality function to obscure the operation of this ontoepistemic difference in the present.

In postulating the local-expatriate circumstance as a matter of ontoepistemic difference, I complicate the normative understanding of the local and the expatriate as natural consequences of national origin or economic circumstance.

Following from the proposition of the local-expatriate circumstance as ontoepistemically grounded, I suggest that any possibility of equality requires attending to the bases of difference that legitimize the local and the expatriate in the first instance, or, epistemic decolonization. In doing so, I contribute to understandings of the production of racial difference and, hence, inequality in organizations and international development. I further suggest that organizational efforts to enact equality that do not engage in epistemic decolonization will remain insufficient.