>>22816>whether it's possible for "developing" and "underdeveloped" countries to actually become "developed", and in what circumstances (I recognize the vagueness of these concepts)The first step is to question what we mean by "developed" and "underdeveloped." When we see a group of rural peasants in India living in thatched roof mud brick homes or nomads in the Sahara, the instant assumption that these people shouldn't be living this way. Now, one can live a happy and decent life as a nomadic pastoralist and many choose to do so. What we have here is a kind of value judgement about the lives of others who are branded 'poor' or 'backward' because they don't live urban lifestyles. Often, poverty is slapped onto groups of people who are not, by their own standards, poor. So where does this development discourse come from? Whose interests does it serve? And how is it used?
You will notice that development policies almost always involve some form of intervention by state authorities, UN agencies, or NGOs (the staff of which are almost all from the North American-European world) over the lives of "underdeveloped" people. Sometimes, this intervention is violent (e.g. US occupation of Afghanistan, Plan Colombia, Israeli displacement of Bedouins). Another feature is a tendency to discredit the political and social institutions of local communities in favor of top down solutions implemented by technocrats and a culture where liberal "modern" people must save local people from a series of "harmful cultural practices." Compare the way "female genital mutilation" is treated compared to the widespread practice of labiaplasty or transgender surgery in "developed" countries, which are not seen as "harmful cultural practices." Lastly, there's a whole phenomena of "third world" communities outright rejecting or avoiding development projects e.g. Afghan villagers refusing to participate in road building or rejecting schooling, North Sentinelese Islanders isolating themselves, Nomads who refuse to settle down, widespread rejection of vaccines.
>the extent to which the common problems of these countries (such as crime, disease, famine, lack of support and freedom) is tied to their place in the current world order, and the extent to which they can escape or limit these problems without some sort of major global rearrangementMarx's saying that the bourgeois society reveals to all pre-existing societies an image of its own future is pretty instructive here. Why do people in "third world" countries invest so much in trying to be "modern?" Is it really possible for every country on Earth, say even desert nations like Mali or Mauritania, to have suburbs, skyscrapers, asphalt streets designed for cars, gay bars, nightclubs? A common claim among "third world" elites is that colonial exploitation denied their societies the ability to be "modern." There's obviously an element of truth to it but what's overlooked here is how what it means to "be modern" was already exclusionary and built on value judgements about non-European cultures. Non-Western cultures had to be eradicated or Westernized to "be modern." So in a way development is just the logical continuation of the colonial civilizing mission and most development policies tend to benefit a handful of rich countries.
Marxist theory can be a bit limiting here because despite the analysis of capitalism, Marx's own theories of history are evolutionist and he assumes that desert nomads or hunter gatherers are simply stuck in a past stage of evolution that they eventually have to move on from. So again you see moralistic value judgements about how people ought to live. Marxist development policies have often been disasters too privileging heavy industry, urban lifestyles, secular habits, nuclear families etc.
Some good books to look at would be Arturo Escobar's Encountering Development, the Post-Development Reader, and J. C. Scott's books.