Dependency theory and its relevance today: international institutions in telecommunications and structural power

The majority of political theories have arisen in opposition to existing theories and the interests they represent. Dependency theory was no different in this regard. It arose as a reaction to ‘modernization’ theory, which linked industrialization to political development and to those theories of political development which themselves represented American interests during the period of the Cold War.1 It arose also in reaction to the economic theory of ‘trickle down’ which characterized the post-war social democratic concern with economic growth and Keynesian economics in industrialized countries and which linked the poor in the industrialized West with the poor in the non-industrialized South. In both, Keynesian based, state led policies of capital investment were expected to provide the locomotive for indigenous development.