Claire Provost and Matt Kennard
Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy
The Bartlett Pan-African Indigenist Collective shares Silent Coup by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard.
Image of a reader of Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy.
ABOUT
Matt Kennard and Claire Provost uncover how multinational corporations and “development” aid use and create legal, financial, and political systems to rewrite the rules of governance in the Global South.
Drawing on years of fieldwork and leaked documents, this book details how mechanisms like Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), development finance institutions, and private arbitration allow companies to sue governments, shape public policy, and undermine democratic control. The book argues that this quiet seizure of power has created a system where accountability flows upward to investors and not downward to communities. It connects colonial economic patterns to today’s financialised development architecture.
WHO
This reference was recommended by the Bartlett Pan-African Indigenist Collective.
The Collective is a space for critical dialogue, activism, and scholarship that foregrounds Pan-African Indigenist ways of knowing, being, and creating. Formed by members of the Bartlett community dedicated to uplifting the voices, knowledge, and cultural legacies of people of African heritage and their respective Indigenous communities and lands, it aims to challenge colonial legacies and inspire transformation within institutional structures, research and curricula. By integrating creative and scholarly practices, the Collective works to restore narratives that have been silenced or misrepresented. Their work advances decolonial efforts in higher education by creating inclusive spaces and centring diverse African knowledge systems. Bartlett Alternative recognises the Collective’s vital contribution to broadening intellectual and cultural horizons through radical inclusivity and exclusivity, and thanks them for sharing resources that foreground lived experience, land-based knowledge systems, and epistemic justice.
Department Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment
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