Beyond the ‘North’-’South’ impasse: self-effacing Japan, emancipatory movements of the Global South and West-Engineered aid architecture

Abstract

The article has three objectives. The first is to reconsider the popular taken-for-granted categories of ‘Global North’/’Global South’ and ‘Northern’ donors/’Southern’ providers and proposes an alternative account for examining Japan’s role in West-engineered aid architecture. The second is to examine why Japan has constructed a ‘sui generis’ foreign aid model by accommodating both the OECD-DAC and SSC (South-South Cooperation) norms. Finally, this article aims to explain how Japan’s alternative aid modality was possible by highlighting that the academic debate has failed to capture the significance of the emancipatory movements of the Global South epitomized by the 1955 Bandung Conference for Japan’s aid policy.

Keywords:

• Foreign aid
• Japan
• Northern donors
• Southern providers
• 1955 bandung conference

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tim Bunnell, Jamie Davidson, Patrick Quinton-Brown, Eve Warburton, Amit Julka, Michelle Tsay for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Parts of ideas for this paper came from the discussions at the workshop “Identity Politics and Foreign Policy: Non-Western Perspectives” organized by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS). Special thanks goes to Nafissa Insebayeva for providing invaluable, constructive feedback, which I greatly appreciated. My gratitude also goes to Institute of Social Science (the University of Tokyo), the Nippon Foundation Human Resource Development Project (University of Tsukuba, Japan) and Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan). Finally, I want to thank two anonymous reviewers and the entire team of the Pacific Review, Michael Hart in particular, for support and cooperation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In recent years, Japan has mostly been using the term ‘development cooperation’ (kaihatsu kyouryoku).