‘‘The Anti-Poverty Hoax’’: Development, pacification, and the making of community in the global 1960s Ananya Roy a,⇑ , Stuart Schrader b , Emma Shaw Crane a a University of California, Berkeley, United States b New York University, New York, United States article info Article history: Available online xxxx Keywords: Community Poverty Race Ford Foundation Ghetto Oakland abstract This essay provides an alternative history of U.S. community development by establishing a global con- text for such policies. It demonstrates that the emergence of poverty as a domestic and international pub- lic policy issue in the 1960s was closely linked to anxieties about racialized violence in American cities and wars of insurgency in the global South. In doing so, it traces how programs of pacification, both at home and abroad, sought to deal with delinquent youth, to marry policing to economic development, and to grapple with poverty and insecurity. Such a global view provides new insights into American-style community development, specifically how a double system of pacification was an integral part of this approach to urban policy. By focusing on an important precursor to the War on Poverty, the Ford Foun- dation’s Gray Areas program, the essay also highlights how the problem of poverty came to be territori- alized not only in the city but specifically in a unit understood as community. However, ‘‘community’’ was a space of contestation. Community action was rapidly transformed into programs of community development, especially those animated by the ethos of self-help. But, in cities like Oakland, the first of the Gray Areas cities, and described as a ‘‘racial tinderbox,’’ the bureaucracy of poverty became the platform for radical visions and practices of self-determination, notably by the Black Panther Party. Understood in this way, community is a key site for the analysis of liberal government. In particular, urban policy mandates such as community development and community participation reveal the endur- ing contradictions between ideologies of self-help and struggles for self-determination. Ó 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Introduction ‘‘Our slums are not foreign nations to be worked with in such man- ner as never to constitute a challenge to the status quo.’’ Saul Alinsky ‘‘The War on Poverty – Political Pornography’’, 1965: 41 In the lexicon of American urban policy, community develop- ment is a prominent force. Typically, histories of community devel- opment trace its origins to the Great Society programs of the 1960s and their efforts to negotiate the complex and contradictory entwining of civil rights movements, anti-poverty policy, and com- munity organizing. In this essay, we expand such interpretations of community development by providing a globalized history of this field of ideas and practices. We argue that the emergence of pov- erty as a domestic and international public policy issue in the 1960s was closely linked to anxieties about racialized violence in American cities and wars of insurgency in the global South. By holding the War on Poverty at home and American programs of pacification and counterinsurgency overseas in simultaneous view, we demonstrate the co-constitution of urban policy and imperial policy. Indeed, pacification was not just an American practice abroad, in the hamlets of Southeast Asia. After ghetto rebellions rocked US cities in the mid-1960s, police tactics and technologies for dealing with such unrest were directly adopted from military manuals and from the police assistance and training programs run by the United States Agency for International Development in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Ultimately such tactics and tech- nologies, rooted in global counterinsurgency, were central in the reconstruction of US urban policing in the 1970s and 1980s. With such histories in mind, the title of this essay refers to a 1970 article published by F. Nunes in Freedomways, the premier intellec- tual journal of Black freedom struggles. Titled ‘‘The Anti-Poverty Hoax,’’ it is a scathing critique of the War on Poverty, billing it as a ‘‘massive sham operation of which the poor are victims, not benefi- ciaries’’ (Nunes, 1970: 15). The critique echoes an earlier analysis by http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2014.07.005 0264-2751/Ó 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Department of City & Regional Planning, University of California, 228 Wurster Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-1850, United States. E-mail addresses: ananya@berkeley.edu (A. Roy), stschrader1@gmail.com (S. Schrader), emma.shaw.crane@gmail.com (E.S. Crane). Cities xxx (2014) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cities journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cities Please cite this article in press as: Roy, A., et al. ‘‘The Anti-Poverty Hoax’’: Development, pacification, and the making of community in the global 1960s. J. Cities (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2014.07.005