The Oppression/Emancipation Nexus in
Ongoing Power Struggles: Village–Power
Dynamics in Western Nepal
1
KATSUHIKO MASAKI
Department of Studies on Global Citizenship, Seisen University, Tokyo, Japan
Final version received June 2005
ABSTRACT How can we gain a more nuanced understanding of power struggles than is assumed
under the ‘power as domination’ perception that attributes power to dominant actors who exercise
control over others, and thus dichotomises domination and emancipation? This article addresses
this question by exploring the power dynamics underlying ‘participatory’ public works in a village
in western Nepal. Drawing on an alternative analytical framework that brings together Giddens’
‘structuration’ perspective and the Foucauldian notion of power, the case study illustrates that
dominance and resistance are interwoven in day-to-day social interactions, and that the existing
social order is continually being readjusted. The article concludes by discussing this study’s
implications for proponents of empowerment, namely the need to ascertain the emancipatory
potentials that are immanent in daily power contestation, and then to develop strategies that
compensate for the limitations of everyday struggles.
I. Introduction
A long-term trend in development thinking has been the move away from grand
theories that regard social phenomena as patterned by macro-structures towards
agency-oriented views that realities are contested by stakeholders (Nederveen
Pieterse, 2001). One manifestation of this trend is a group of studies called
‘alternative development’ that focus on the empowerment of local communities to
render development processes more participatory and self-reliant. While this strand
of research has made a valuable contribution to re-orienting the goals of
development and to introducing novel practices, its major weakness is that it tends
to disregard macro–micro relations (Nederveen Pieterse, 2001), including the
influence over local communities of an insidious form of social control, or what
Foucault terms ‘disciplinary power’.
Correspondence Address: Katsuhiko Masaki, Associate Professor, Department of Studies on Global
Citizenship, Seisen University, 3-16-21 Higashi Gotanda, Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan 141-8642. Email:
k_masaki@seisen-u.ac.jp
Journal of Development Studies,
Vol. 42, No. 5, 721–738, July 2006
ISSN 0022-0388 Print/1743-9140 Online/06/050721-18 ª 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00220380600741847

‘Disciplinary power’ operates on community-based development endeavours,
however ‘endogenous’ they may be, in such a manner as to subjugate individuals to
constrained positions by pressurising them to conform to prevailing social norms.
Several studies (for example, Mosse, 2001; Kapoor, 2002) point out that the
implementation of ‘alternative development’ at the grassroots level is liable to press
local participants into making a pretence of acting for the greater good of society,
thus catering to the priorities of external agents, rather than unleashing their self-
organising potentials for societal change. According to such post-development
critics, who focus their attention on how ‘disciplinary power’ impacts on grassroots
endeavours, ‘development, for all its power to speak and to control the terms of
speaking’ (Crush, 1995: 8), is therefore in itself an ‘anti-politics machine’ (Ferguson,
1990: xv) that empties ‘alternative development’ of the radical content that poses a
principled challenge to mainstream thinking.
As pointed out by Foucault (for example, 1980: 105, 1982: 220), however,
‘disciplinary power’ not only moulds ‘docile bodies’, but also serves as a medium for
the renegotiations of the interpretations of social standards. A number of writers
accordingly criticise post-development for narrowly focusing on oppressive aspects
of power, at the expense of its productive features. Development is a complex
discursive field containing a myriad of theories and practices, the interpretations of
which are continually contested by the different actors involved (for example,
Gasper, 1996; Grillo, 1997). A ‘target population’, supposedly subjugated to the
discursive construction of client categories, does not passively accept top-down
direction, but assimilates the ‘knowledge’ into its day-to-day renegotiations of the
existing social order (for example, Gardner and Lewis, 1996; Cooper and Packard
1997). Instead of simplistically relegating local communities to ‘the colonised – the
stereotype’ (Haggis and Schech, 2002: xvi), it is crucial to ‘turn the language of
critique . . . to a language of possibility’ to pay attention to the actualities of the
everyday struggles of people (Fagan, 1999: 180).
This critique of the post-development construct of an ‘anti-politics machine’ has
opened up a terrain for empirical research to illustrate how development rhetoric
both constrains and shapes possibilities for the political mobilisation of local
communities. However, this insight into the intricate nature of ‘disciplinary power’
emanating from development has not percolated through to empirical studies on
local development, with some exceptions (for example, Kesby, 2003), which
generally fail to elucidate the intermingling of oppression and transformative
potentials. Instead, many studies cover over the tension by according oppression a
predominant position over emancipation. The unresolved domination/transforma-
tion dualism is exemplified by an edited volume that attempts to highlight the nexus
between the two, but which concludes by stating that ‘development is a terrain upon
which these battles of ideas and disputes will continue to be fought out . . . [but we]
must hope that the result is not . . . to bring about desolation and call it a peace’
(Minogue and Kothari, 2002: 190).
In order to elaborate the oppression/emancipation dialectic, it is crucial for
researchers to move away from the dichotomous view that power is exercised by
dominant players over oppressed actors. What is required of development analysts is
instead to adopt an alternative analytical framework that illuminates how
emancipation is immanent in daily power struggles, rather than standing in
722 K. Masaki