Ruth Buchanan and Olaoluwa Oni

From the first moments of the modern international regime à la the birth of the United Nations (“UN”), the project of development has been framed as a global concern.¹ Per the UN charter one of the institution’s aims is, “to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples,”² and Article 55 tasks the institution with promoting, amongst other things, “higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development.”³ With development so set as aspirational, categories, predictably, emerged to classify the world’s nations as either “developed” on the one hand, and “underdeveloped,” or, more politely, “developing” on the other. Scholars and historians of international development can scarcely forget US President Truman’s 1949 inaugural address which famously revealed the administration’s “Point Four” policy plan to make US “scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.”⁴ Development became synonymous with economic growth capable of being measured (such as via GDP) with set “goals” to be achieved, and nations could pass or fail the development test.

Development scholars, including in the field of international law and development, have noted that rigid measures and constructed indexes cannot be regarded as properly determinative of development for all countries around the world, and that development conceived in this way flattens the contours of the multitude of societies, cultures, and peoples that make up the international community.⁵ This flattening functions to reify a hierarchy where a set of countries (the developed countries of the global north) are placed in judgment over another set of countries (the developing countries of the global south.) States deemed underdeveloped are incentivized to focus on meeting the international metrics of development, often at the expense of other (more) important aspects of domestic life. As Ruth Buchanan, a co-author on this video essay has explained in previous work, “what gets measured gets done.”⁶

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), introduced in 2015 is the current metric by which the UN assesses its member nations for development. The test consists of seventeen “goals” and UN institutions monitor how individual nations are performing at these goals. This latest regime of international development has received critical attention from governments, academics, experts, and other stakeholders. The SDGs have been studied through different methodological approaches, viewpoints, and lenses to understand the operations and effects of the regime.

With this project, the authors contribute to this growing body of scholarship by using film as both material and form for their analysis. They use the 2015 Global Goals short film—#WEHAVEAPLAN—produced by Aardman Studios for the UN as text to understand if and how different the SDGs are from the previous international development agendas. The text, its paratexts, and other associated materials are analyzed to understand if new things are made, or old things unmade, with and through the SDGs. The authors also turn to film to present their reflections through the format of the video essay. The vision for this project is to create a work of videographic criticism that reflects the pedagogy of storytelling through film, with a film at the center of its plot.

This video essay is a film about what the films and other visual materials on the SDGs suggest about the hierarchies that organize the modern international order.

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1. See generally: Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (Cambridge, UNITED KINGDOM: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
2. United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, 1945, 1 UNTS XVI, available at: http://www.website.com [accessed 19th December, 2024]
3. Ibid. Article 55.
4. Harry Truman, 1949 inaugural address archived at the Truman library. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/19/inaugural-address [accessed 19th December, 2024.]
5. Samir Amin, “The Millennium Development Goals: A Critique from the South” (2006) 57:10 Monthly review (New York 1949) 1–15. Ugo Mattei & Margot E Salomon, “From Poverty and Development to People’s International Law” in Ruth Buchanan, Luis Eslava & Sundhya Pahuja, eds, The Oxford Handbook of International Law and Development, 1st ed (Oxford University Press, 2023) 773.
6. Ruth Buchanan, Kimberley Byers & Kristina Mansveld, “‘What gets measured gets done’: exploring the social construction of globalized knowledge for development” in Moshe Hirsch & Andrew Lang, eds, Research Handbook on the Sociology of International Law (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018).