Christian NGOs, foundations, charities and community organizations are ubiquitous throughout much of Asia. Whether you drive across the Cambodian countryside or walk through the streets of Jakarta, signboards of NGOs indicating some Christian affiliation have become very much part of the landscape. From health-care and English classes, to refugee services and micro-loans, there are few sectors that don’t count Christian NGOs among its providers. While along with other Faith-Based Organizations, Christian development actors moved into the limelight of development studies just over a decade ago, their presence and activity in Asia, and indeed right across the developing world, is far from a recent emergence. Indeed, as we examine in this volume, Christian missionaries sent all over the world have long been active in the fields of education, health, agriculture, entrepreneurship and diverse advocacy programs. Their work has been surprisingly influential and the traces of early missionaries continue to be felt in myriad ways today.
Recent histories have connected this early missionary work with the ideas, discourses and practices of contemporary international aid and development, shedding light on so far little studied relations. Stimulated by this emerging and thought-provoking scholarship, our aim was to direct the lens—still largely focused on the Western world—to Asia. This volume includes contributions from both historians and anthropologists exploring the enduring legacies and current dynamics of religion and development across diverse Asian contexts. In doing so, it also highlights issues of ‘techno-politics’ as a way of facilitating of critical analysis of the interweaving of religious, political and technical considerations.
This volume and the conference out of which it originated would not have been possible without the generous support of the Asia Research Institute and the Henry R. Luce Foundation, to whom we would like to express our sincere gratitude. As editors we would also like to thank the contributors of this volume who have enthusiastically embarked with us on these reflections on techno-politics and Christian actors engaged in development work, and from whom we have learned a great deal. We are also grateful to the good folks at Brill, especially Mirjam Elbers and Liesbeth Kanis, for working with us on this project. The manuscript has benefited from additional copyediting and formatting by Adora Elisapeta Jones. Last but not least, we are deeply grateful to the people who have—over the years and across Asia—been so generous in sharing their time, stories and experiences with us.