Global Development Politics

Conversations on Global Development Politics

Intrigued by global development? Fascinated by our changing world? Want to know more about how power, policies and publics are shaping it? We’ve got you covered. 

“Conversations on global development politics” is your portal to a richer understanding of the profound transformations that are shaping the world. We investigate issues of poverty and inequality; capitalism and democracy; and climate change, public health, and changing forms of human personhood as the political orders and economic structures that have framed social life for over two centuries are reconfigured. We investigate problems. We spotlight innovations. And we chat with experts who have written books that explore problems and solutions.

Join us on this intellectual quest with some of the sharpest minds who are reshaping our understanding of global development and its politics.

Conversations schedule

September 16 2024, 12 noon to 1 pm BST

The Politics of Development, a pathbreaking introduction to the controversial, contested and deeply political topic of development.
Speaker: Claire McLoughlin

Register here

September 26, 2024 10 am to 11 am BST

The Spectre of State Capitalism, a comprehensive study of the material, discursive, and ideological dimensions of the ongoing reconfiguration of the state's role as promoter, supervisor, shareholder-investor, and direct owner of capital across the world economy.

Speakers: llias Alami and Adam Dixon

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September 30, 2024  11am to 12 noon BST

Development, (Dual) Citizenship and its Discontents in Africa, a rich examination of socio-economic change in Liberia, Africa's first black republic, through the prism of citizenship.

Speaker: Robtel Neajai Pailey

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Decolonising Pedagogical Strategies: A summary

Joe Lin examines decolonial pedagogical strategies in  a report (August 2022-July-2023) funded by the PSA Research and Innovation Scheme. The report analyses voices of international studies in internationalised and multicultural settings of UK universities. The aim is to identify and confront Eurocentrism in the contested field of Global Development Politics and other fields within international studies, broadly defined.

This is a summary of the report - link

This is the full report - link

The Global Development Politics Specialist Group

The Global Development Politics Specialist Group provides a platform for researchers and teachers of development politics in the UK. Our work concentrates on the politics of development. We understand politics broadly as 'exercise and use of social power'. Development we conceptualise as the 'immanent processes and intentional projects of social and economic change'. Our members consider development across a wide array of sectors, including - but not limited to- financial instruments of economic growth, infrastructure, investments in health and education, rural and urban development, welfare and employment, wealth-creation, poverty and inequality, and changing ideas of human personhood, dignified lives and possibilities for the future. Although a large number of our members focus their research on 'developing' regions in southern Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, rapid changes in the global political economy have compelled our members to consider the afore-mentioned questions in the context of 'developed' countries as well. Profound changes such as the emergence of the BRICS, growing inequalities within countries rather than between them, and sustained interrogations of liberalism in the industrialised capitalist democracies of the North Atlantic have made this an exciting time to study, teach and research development politics. Membership is not restricted to the UK, but in fact includes colleagues from most of the world.