The Delinked Regionalisms of Walter Rodney and Samir Amin

Walter Rodney and Samir Amin made arguments for delinking and disengaging from the global economy. While this strategy was often branded as autarky, Amin was always at pains to argue that this is not in fact the case. Instead, he argued that delinking amounts to "self-determination in development," or "the reconstruction of a globalization based on negotiation, rather than submission to the exclusive interests of the imperialists monopolies." In this paper, I revisit the arguments made in favor of economic delinking and disengagement from the global economy in order to understand the ways in which political concepts such as domination, constraint, and self-determination were articulated in Third Worldist conceptions of a just international order. Doing so, I re-center the normative content of their argument by asking 1) What is the account of global justice that Rodney and Amin articulate through their critiques of the modern economy and its relations of domination? 2) In what ways do their accounts dovetail with or pose a challenge to the accounts of global justice that emphasize redistribution and non-domination?