Unintended Revolution – Middle Class, Development, and Non–Governmental Organizations

Anna Romanowicz is assistant professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Jagiellonian University. Her research interests include class analysis, nongovernmental organizations, women’s rights, and anthropology of development and globalization.

An extremely important study with a provocative argument on class and development. . . . A significant new addition to existing studies in class theory and the literature on postdevelopment studies. The book demonstrates that practices of development and women’s empowerment are not some faceless discourses. Actors involved in the discourses of development and empowerment carry forward the logic of contemporary capitalism. NGOs are complicit in the expansion of capital in the neoliberal era. In a compelling combination of useful theory and literature and enlightening personal anecdote, this book is remarkably readable. Anna Romanowicz’s Unintended Revolution promises to become an indispensable book for anyone who wants to understand the class dimension and the roles of social and cultural capital used to work in the areas of women’s empowerment and development.