In Encountering Development, Escobar’s intenon is to rethink the enre noon of development by approaching the subject via deconstrucon, prejudicial detachment, and the contextualizaon of development as a hegemonic all-encompassing cultural space. Relying heavily on “Foucault’s work on the dynamics of discourse and power in the representaon of social reality,” Escobar compares his concepon of development as a historically produced discourse to Edward Said’s groundbreaking work on “Orientalism.” The author proposes that “The West’s” inherently paternalisc and ethnocentric domain of thought and acon, a discursive regime, should be defined by the interplay amongst its three axes: “the forms of knowledge that refer to it and through which it comes into being…objects, concepts, theories and the like; the system of power that regulates its pracce; and the forms of subjecvity fostered by this discourse.” Encountering Development seeks to destroy the concept of development as arisen through this regime of order and truth (a quintessenal aspect of modernity) and provide a foundaonal query for the emerging theory of post-development. This task is begun by aacking the representave tradions of late-modernity, places of encounter where idenes are constructed; wherein the “Third World” and its people “exist ‘out there,’ to be known through theories and intervened upon from the outside. Escobar’s book takes on a range of heavily nuanced and oſten embedded issues. Broadly speaking, the deployment of a development discourse in a world system in which “The West” has a certain dominance over the Third World is central to understanding the profound polical, economic and cultural effects that have to be explored. As the discourse was constructed under this unequal exchange of power, it has come to be seen by Escobar as “the ulmate colonial move.” Some crics such as Sarden, Moss, Lewis, and Painter have suggested that while the concepon of development as a discursive power construcon remains valuable, the deconstrucve approaches are no less ideological than the populist ones. Sarden has even asserted that Escobar and others’ post-structuralist analysis should more aptly be deemed ideological deconstrucvism; the term itself a direct response to Escobar’s semanc construcon of the phrase “developmentalism” (the so called -ism “disease of the field”) Many of Escobar’s crics thus do not abandon deconstrucvist perspecves, but endeavor to make them methodological rather than ideological. Methods and data that form the book’s academic grounding come from a range of sources and authories. Because the book (as a starng point) rejects the objecve truth and order of modernity’s western cultural condion, most of the references come from anthropological and geographic case studies of development’s failures, as they affect real communies and their tradions. These studies explore how the displacement of indigenous communies, disrupon of people’s habitats and occupaons, and the increase in pressure on natural systems (forced upon rural sociees) are all rooted in the development process. Vandana Shiva, Judith Butler, Manthia Diawara, Wolfgang Sachs, Gustavo Esteva, Immanuel Wallerstein, David Harvey, Ivan Illich, Majid Rahnema, and Anibal Quijano are just a few of the more well known academics supporng and cited in Encountering Development. Escobar juxtaposes these cultural studies/analysis with UN, IMF and World Bank reports, internaonal government agency criques, and most importantly, crical analysis by professionals who previously worked in the development discourse (i.e., Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder of the Internaonal Society for Ecology and Culture). All of these methods serve to inform historical process, understand trends and acons in the paradigm, and ulmately discern their direct connecon to the creaon of “underdevelopment.” One of Escobar’s central conclusions is that there is no linear or universal model of economic or social development that can be objecvely applied to the diverse local cultures of the sociees misleadingly