An Assessment on the Contribution of Postmodern Views to Poverty Literature

Poverty is an important problem in all countries, especially in underdeveloped countries, and is generally associated with income. Individuals are considered poor when their income falls below a specified level. Concepts such as development, poverty alleviation and modernization are based on the distinction between rich and poor countries and the assumption that poor countries will develop with the support of rich countries. According to this assumption, poverty will be reduced with development policies and the living standards of underdeveloped countries will increase. In underdeveloped countries, targeting income increases and growth makes them dependent on the modernized, industrialized and developed rich countries that have experienced these transformations. The theoretical structure of this part of the development discourse, which is summarized, is shaped by modernist views. Postmodern views created a critical field especially in social sciences in the post-1980 period and evaluated development and poverty literature as discourses with the help of discourse analysis. When concepts such as development and poverty are deciphered through a postmodern lens, important differences emerge in defining and tackling these problems. In postmodern views, it is emphasized that the concepts such as scarcity, unlimited wants, limited resources and needs, which have an important place in the literature of poverty, are tools of conscious fiction developed by the development discourse. In this study, the criticisms of postmodern views on the literature of poverty are discussed and the different perspectives that this situation reveals on the issues of poverty and poverty alleviation are examined.