Week 1: Lecture 1

Development
 Introductions
• Ben Richardson
– B.J.Richardson@warwick.ac.uk
– A&F: Tuesday 10:30-11:30 and
Thursday 1:30-2:30 in E1.17
• Victor Agboga
– victor.agboga@warwick.ac.uk
– A&F: book via Victor’s University
webpage

Seminars start in Week 2 and cover Week 1 material

 Module overview
• This module is about what international
development means, how it is practiced and
realised, and what kinds of life it makes possible
• There is neither a single way to study the
politics of international development nor a
definitive set of canonical thinkers to read
• We will navigate our own way through the field,
learning from each other as we go → based on
student feedback last year, there is now a
revised assessment regime
 Assessment
Term Topics Assessment
Autumn Approaches to 1,500-word book review
Term 1 International Due at the end of Term 1 (Wednesday 7th December 2022)
Development
Spring Issues in 1,500-word policy paper review
Term 2 International Due at the end of Term 2 (Wednesday 15th March 2023)
Development

Summer Essay 2,500-word research essay

Term 3 Preparation Due in the middle of Term 3 (Wednesday 24th May)

Part-Year Visiting & Exchange students

Either one or two 1,500-word essays

Due at the end of Term 1 (Wednesday 7th December 2022) and/or Term 2 (Wednesday
15th March 2023)
 Reading
• Two essential readings per
week
• These will be introduced in
the lecture and are all
available online
• Focus on the three key terms Click through from Moodle to the Talis Aspire reading list

(Week 1 looks at
development, progress,
colonialism) and put the
readings in conversation with
each other
• From Week 2 onward, the
third reading on the list
See also Moodle section ‘Textbooks for Further Reading’
provides a textbook overview
The different uses of development
The contested cartographies of international
development

The World Bank has decided that the developing/developed

binary is no longer a useful categorisation (see Farias, 2019)
 A typology of development
• Thomas (2021) provides three main senses in which the
term ‘development’ is used:
1. As a vision, description or measure of the desirable: e.g. Sustainable
Development Goals
2. As an intervention to improve: e.g. projects by the U.S. Agency for
International Development
3. As an historical process of progressive social change: e.g. the
development of capitalism as the material foundation of modernity
• Big ‘D’ and little ‘d’ are also used to contrast intentional
Development from immanent development
• His chapter goes onto detail the approaches to
development that we cover in the remainder of Term 1
Approaches to international development

Development National development Underdevelopment

Private sector development Developmental state Human development

Gender and Development Sustainable development Post-development

 Development as master concept
• A master concept is one around which
theory and method in a field take shape
• Kothari (2013) → the cross-disciplinary
field of Development Studies has been
concerned with change in ‘developing
countries’ especially how to bring about
poverty reduction in practice The development
industry works in
• A radical history of development involves and against its
colonial past –
an archaeology of the field itself, which Uma Kothari
in the imperial British context unearths
foundations of colonial ideas concerning
progress, modernity and trusteeship
 The colonial past in development

The Journal of Race

Development offers itself
as a forum for the
discussion of the
problems which relate to
the progress of races and
states generally
considered backward in
their standards of
civilization. […] It seeks to
discover, not how weaker
races may best be
A cartoon published in the US’ magazine Judge in 1899 exploited, but how they
may best be helped by the
stronger – Blakeslee, 1910
 The colonial present in development?
A top priority of U.S. global health investments must be building the capacity of researchers and
public health leaders in the developing world... And the United States must help ensure that the
information generated by the technological revolution, much of it in private hands, can be used for
the good of public health without infringing on democratic values and individual rights – Ashish Jha
(2021) ‘System Failure: America Needs a Global Health Policy for the Pandemic Age’
 Conclusion
• Development as a concept has both a
normative and an historical dimension
• Development is inter-national: it is
about much more than one-way
interventions to ameliorate conditions
in ‘developing countries’
• Development is political: we will unpack
The world through the lens of
this by studying different approaches to imperial development → civilising
international development and asking: racial others
– What do they mean by development?
– Who is expected to drive and benefit from
development?
– And who gets to decide these goals and
strategies?