Arturo Escobar

Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, published in 1995, argues that Western development discourse itself created the category of the "underdeveloped" Third World. Escobar uses a Foucauldian analysis to show how development institutions, experts, and policies produced a regime of knowledge and power that perpetuated global inequality.

Postdevelopment theory questions the assumption that Western-style modernization and economic growth are the only valid paths for formerly colonized nations. Escobar is one of its leading figures, arguing in Encountering Development and subsequent works that the development industry has often done more harm than good by imposing external frameworks on local communities.

Beyond Encountering Development, Escobar has written Territories of Difference (2008), which examines place-based social movements in Colombia, and Designs for the Pluriverse (2018), which explores autonomous design from the perspective of relational ontologies and indigenous knowledge. His later work emphasizes the concept of the pluriverse—the idea that multiple worlds and ways of being coexist.

Arturo Escobar was a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for many years. Born in Colombia and educated in both Latin America and the United States, his work bridges Latin American critical traditions and Northern academic theory.