Reconstruction and Social Development

Abstract

Reconstruction, after slavery and the Civil War, helped lay down the foundation of what we call Constitutional Democracy in America. As the world wars ended, countries woke up after a long oppressive night of bad dreams. These “undeveloped states” of the post-postcolonial heritage have evolved into the so-called Third World, aka, the “underdeveloped” or “developing” nations. There is a developmental dialectic in the becoming of these “welfare states” striving for democratic governance for progressive social change. A general rubric of reconstruction or “nation building” is usually referred to as Social Development (SD) with implicit specificity of regional goals. This article is a critique of the developmental processes which have impacted human lives and social structures in the global North and South with emphasis on the American history, racial ideology, and political structuralism, loosely entitled “Third Reconstruction.”