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Abstract
The rhetoric of aid is increasingly carried forward by catchwords and phrases that constitute a ‘language of development’. This has an important role to play in justifying decision-making and when turning the aid discourse in yet another direction. Often, concepts with a relatively well-defined meaning in the social science literature are hijacked, turned and twisted by the aid community, in order opportunistically to serve the latest fashion. On the basis of a close reading of documents from Danida and Danish NGOs, the article argues that current Danish aid practices are guided by ‘mythological’ notions of history, grounded in an idealised rendition of ‘Western’/Danish society. It is a development discourse that tends to establish understandings and concepts as part of a knowledge system, that repeats itself and points to the main actors in the aid community as self-evidently important players—and the rescuers of a divided world.