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Fieldwork as a Feminist Methodology in Economics – Developing Economics
What is a feminist methodology? Academicians and scholars of gender and feminist studies have focused on feminist research methodology since the introduction of gender studies as a course in universities.Feminist methodology has developed as a result of several objections towards traditional positivist research. Theory and methodology can be seen to be closely interrelated in a…
Condensing the Gaza crisis – Developing Economics
The Gaza crisis has underscored the deep fractures of domestic politics in Western Europe, the US and Australia. It is as much a domestic political crisis as a conflict in the Middle East. What is the nature of this crisis? Well, it is not one but multiple crises that are condensed around the Gaza war.…
So You’re a Professor? Here’s What You Can Do to Oppose Genocide – Developing Economics
By Steve Salaita Feeling helpless does not mean being useless. It is possible to support Palestinians from afar. College instructors, particularly those in Europe and North America, are generally limited when it comes to meaningful intervention in imperialist horrors afflicting the Global South. Nevertheless, it is usually their governments either orchestrating or abetting the horror. …
Palestine Changes Everything – Developing Economics
The on-going ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in 2023, marks the end of the façade of the peaceful Western liberal order. At least 940,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. While these countries were subject to the different ebbs and flows of US imperial violence. Palestinians have paid…
When economists shut off your water – Developing Economics
Researcher Irene Nduta in Kayole-Soweto. By Adrian Wilson, Faith Kasina, Irene Nduta and Jethron Ayumbah Akallah In August 2020, people all over the development world started talking about water in Nairobi. There was a lot of anger, and some calls for sending people to the guillotine. The reason: the publication of results from a development randomized controlled trial (RCT), run…
Palestine and the Meaning of Global Antifascism – Developing Economics
Photo: Courtesy of the Laura Rodig Brigade, Coordinadora Feminista 8M. What is particularly harrowing about the current situation in Gaza not only has to do with the multiplication of war crimes and with the moral and ideological bankruptcy of a Western liberal order that seeks to obfuscate, by all means – media blackouts, censorship, stigmatization,…
The three-stage process through which African resource sovereignty was ceded to foreign mining corporations – Developing Economics
In the 1960s, newly independent African governments asserted sovereignty over their metal and mineral resources, in a reversal of their prior colonial exploitation by European mining corporations. In this excerpt from his new book Disrupted Development in the Congo: The Fragile Foundations of the African Mining Consensus, Ben Radley shows how transnational corporations have once…
Why Palestine is a feminist and an anti-colonial issue – Developing Economics
I am writing this short commentary to bear witness of the ethnic cleansing that is going on since 7 October. As I write this short text, over 13000 including 5000 children have been killed by Israel in Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank), many thousand people are missing under the rubbles and as many have…
Impotent Capital – Developing Economics
It is an uncontroversial observation that the history of capitalist development in South America is characterised by its subsumption to global capital accumulation through the production and export of agricultural and mining commodities for the world market. From this common starting point, however, there emerge divergent ways to account for the reproduction, and development limits,…
Absorbing pressure: Bodily ‘tension’ in a changing Himalayan world – Developing Economics
The Gaddi community of the Indian Himalayas experience the present as fraught with various, entangled pressures – pressure to ensure upward social mobility and inclusion in India’s middle class, pressure to secure stable domestic incomes, pressure to maintain sexual and gendered propriety. Written by Nikita Simpson, this piece examines how such pressures are not evenly…
The Ideal Amount of Work and Leisure – Developing Economics
Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys, has attracted significant attention for his recent interview in which he advises Indian youth to work 70 hours a week to contribute to the nation’s growth. Mr. Murthy, who also happens to be the father-in-law of the UK’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, supports his advice by drawing parallels to…
Degrowth and the Global South: remarks on the twin problem of structural interdependencies – Developing Economics
By Claudius Gräbner-Radkowitsch and Birte Strunk The degrowth movement is a radical attempt to challenge our current economic system, arguing that its excessive focus on economic growth will ultimately harm people and planet. It has recently gained increasing attention, not only because it has found its way into mainstream political debates (see, for example, the…
Neoclassical Economics and Urban Planning: A Contentious Theoretical and Policy Making Relationship – Developing Economics
Neoclassical economics – and contemporary extensions of it – has an outsized presence in academic and policy making circuits. This position of privilege builds upon more than a century of theoretical development, comprising the contemporary “mainstream” of economic science. The characteristics and rise of this mainstream, determined in many cases by means beyond pure intellectual…
The city of the evicted: lives under pressure in the margins of an urban fantasy in Benin – Developing Economics
by Joël Noret & Narcisse M. Yedji Since 2017, Cotonou – the economic capital of Benin – has witnessed several urban development projects. Aiming to showcase the city as the new face of a new Benin, attractive to both businessmen and tourists, the plans have involved extensive tarmacking projects, the development of the city’s first…
Decolonising development with Frantz Fanon – Developing Economics
The great cultural theorist Stuart Hall called Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth ‘the bible of decolonisation’ as it encapsulated the urge for freedom across the colonial world (1). Fanon illuminates how racism represented an organising principle for capitalist classes by systematically devaluing the lives of the majority of the world’s population. ‘For centuries the capitalists have behaved…
What Pressure Produces: The Generative Aspects of Pressure amidst Urban Displacement in Dakar – Developing Economics
Figure 1: The old terminus building in Dakar, known simply as “La Gare” During my early days of fieldwork in the old city centre of Dakar, Senegal, I was sitting with the trader Fatim in her tiny market stall under a tattered, weather-worn parasol. Fatim watched over her goods that were balanced on top of…
De-dollarisation and Internationalisation of Other Currencies: Geopolitics and Implications for Dollar Diplomacy – Developing Economics
By Sangita Gazi and Christabel Randolph In a 2022 report, International Monetary Fund (IMF) states that ‘[t]he dollar’s share of global foreign-exchange reserves fell below 59 percent in the final quarter of last year, extending a two-decade decline’. However, surprisingly, the decline in the dollar is not associated with the ‘increase in the shares of…
An acknowledgement of women’s work in economics – hits, misses, and a long road ahead – Developing Economics
By Rosa Abraham and Surbhi Kesar The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 was awarded to Claudia Goldin, professor of economics at Harvard University, for “having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”. Goldin is now one of three women who have been awarded the prize, and, more…
So, Global or International Development: Why Not Both? Marx in the Field, Planetary Immanent Development, and Centering Political Economy in Development Studies – Developing Economics
In a compelling new contribution in the journal Development and Change, a political economy collective led by Jeorg Wiegratz builds a strong case against calls to “universalize” Development Studies shifting the focus from “International” to “Global” Development. Indeed, many such calls at universalization – at least in the two influential “pandemic papers” the collective thoroughly…
Review:* Special issue of Africa Development by Post-Colonialisms Today** – Developing Economics
A new calendar year ushers in the usual array of tropes on Africa. They include why the continent is failing, what it should be doing better and why it has so much resilience in dealing with its own frailty. Overwhelmingly, Western institutions (NGOs, credit rating agencies, etc.) repeat tired mantras of the international financial institutions,…
Financial Statecraft and its Limits in the Semi-Periphery – Developing Economics
Over the past decade, two, intertwined research agendas on international financial subordination (IFS) and subordinate financialization (SF) have proposed to identify how an increasingly finance-dominated global capitalism incorporates the (Semi-)Peripheries. The IFS research agenda recognizes that a “subordinate” national currency comes with a risk premium increasing the costs of financing public debt – in other…
Combining dependency theory and the regulation school: Understanding economic rents in Burkina Faso – Developing Economics
Dependency theory is experiencing some kind of comeback and has been discussed at length on the Developing Economics blog. However, one criticism that often comes up when researchers work on the phenomenon of dependency is the fact that the separation between the spheres of periphery and centre may be too simple, insofar as the working…
The South Asia to Gulf Migration Governance Complex – Edited by Crystal A. Ennis and Nicolas Blarel: Review – Developing Economics
Migration Governance: Moving Away from “Uncle Always Knows” Almost everyone on social media has that one Instagram friend who posts bronzed pictures in Santorini, or screenshots of champagne flutes atop the Burj Khalifa, the Dubai skyline looming in the background. To those internationals for whom travelling on holiday was an annual rite of passage, the…
Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Post-Soviet Currency Boards – Developing Economics
The surge of right-wing populism in East-Central Europe is often portrayed as an unforeseen shift from the earlier post-1989 liberalization path. The “illiberal transformation” narrative underlines stark differences between the policy arsenals that informed democratization and marketization reforms in the early 1990s and those fueling current “democratic backsliding.” Yet this framing conceals the analytical maneuver…
Working Overtime or Being Laid Off: The Pressure under Hopelessness among Workers in Chinese Internet Companies – Developing Economics
“I’ve been working until 1:00 am or later, then getting up at 8:00 am to continue working this week, but my mentor still pointed out a lot of problems that need to be reworked. But there’s no space to escape, if I don’t work harder, I would be laid off in the next quarter. I…
Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya: Q&A with Matteo Capasso – Developing Economics
In Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Matteo Capasso provides an alternative analysis of Libya’s history and regime under Colonel Gaddafi leading up to the 2011 events that sanctioned its fall. The book offers a compelling counterargument to the mainstream narrative of Libya as a stateless, authoritarian and rogue state by focusing on international and…
The Salaried Man and His Others: Rethinking Pressure in the Longue Durée – Developing Economics
Colon statue, Côte d’Ivoire. Author’s collection, 2023. The burgeoning scholarship over the past several decades documenting youth stalled in their quest for adulthood, the scholarship on waiting, on restless underemployed laborers buying time in the informal economy, on the crisis of African masculinities, on the accumulating material and psychic pressures of unmet familial and community…
The Rise of ‘Accountability Patriotism’: Fighting fraud through citizen engagement – Developing Economics
By Nicolette Makovicky and Jörg Wiegratz Faced with rampant fraud and corruption, government and civic actors in Slovakia and Uganda have in response turned to appeals to discourses of public ethics, and personal responsibility, and patriotism rather than addressing issues of political economy and power. Governments and NGOs across the world have recently started using…
Walt Rostow’s development theory shows that capitalism relies on brutal violence – Developing Economics
Economist Walt Rostow advanced an influential development theory while working as an adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Rostow’s advocacy of murderous violence in Vietnam flowed directly from his theory of how to promote capitalist growth. Commonsense notions of development associate it with capitalist modernization. Such notions assume that cumulative economic growth enables poor…
Colonialism and Indian Famines: A Response – Developing Economics
Tamoghna Halder criticized one of my writings on nineteenth-century Indian famines. Halder distorts my views and wrongly implies that I suppressed data. He misreads the very nature of the Indian famine debate, thinking it is about facts. It is not. It is about method, about how economic historians and development scholars should read the history…
The Academic Labour Movement: Lessons from the New School and Beyond – Developing Economics
“At its best, one of the most creative activities is being involved in a struggle with other people, breaking out of our isolation, seeing our relations with others change, discovering new dimensions in our lives … it [is] a powerful collective experience”. Silvia Federici, 1984 News broke on the very last day of 2022 that…
Structural Transformation: Then and Now – Developing Economics
by C.R.Yadu and Sahil Mehra A major theme that dominates the literature on development economics is the narrative of ‘Structural Transformation’, which, based on the experience of developed economies, envisages a gradual ‘modernisation’ of the economy. This process is expected to unfold in a similar way across the economies of global South, where the importance…
Limits to Supply Chain Resilience: A Monopoly Capital Critique – Developing Economics
As the COVID-19 pandemic expanded across the world in early 2020, it generated the “first global supply chain crisis.”1 Global supply chains represent the integrative structure of contemporary global capitalism, and any disruption to them potentially threatens the functioning of the system itself. In response to the crisis, the global supply chain community, encompassing academics and…
Hierarchies of Development podcast: Season 2 – Developing Economics
In collaboration with EADI and King’s College, London, Developing Economics has launched Season of the Hierarchies of Development podcast. The podcast offers long format interviews focusing on enduring global inequalities. Conversations focus on contemporary research projects by critical scholars and help us understand how and why structural hierarchies persist. Join hosts Ingrid Kvangraven (KCL/DE) and Basile…
The evolution of mainstream economics in five political-economic questions – Developing Economics
The trajectory of mainstream economics can be understood in terms of how the discipline historically responded to moments of crises by attempting to “theoretically fix” the understandings related to five core “questions” of capitalist political economy – namely land, trade, labour, state, and legal-institutional framework. This involved legitimising improvements in land that led to the…
Colonialism and the Indian Famines: A response to Tirthankar Roy – Developing Economics
Responding to Sullivan and Hickel's recently published research article (in World Development) and an opinion article (in Al Jazeera), Tirthankar Roy, points out how the authors are wrong in claiming that British colonial policies caused several famines in India. All that is fine, except that these articles neither investigate nor come up with any original…
Amartya Sen’s Work Shows Us the Human Cost of Capitalist Development – Developing Economics
Indian economist Amartya Sen has posed a devastating challenge to the dominant capitalist understanding of development. But Sen’s own analytical framework doesn’t go far enough in exposing the inherently exploitative logic of capitalism. Amartya Sen is one of the most influential thinkers about development in the contemporary world. Since the 1970s, he has published widely…
A Multilateral International Monetary System – Developing Economics
By Paulo L. dos Santos and Devika Dutt “One of the chief contributions to peace that the Bretton Woods program offers is that it will free the small and even the middle-sized nations from the danger of economic aggression by more powerful neighbours. The lesser nation will no longer be obliged to look to a…
Whose Polycrisis? – Developing Economics
‘if God the Father had created things by naming them, Elstir recreated them by removing their names, or by giving them another name’. Marcel Proust (II, 566) An emerging consensus originated in the US has declared 2022 as the year of the ‘Polycrisis’, with a view to marking the beginning of an era of turbulence…
The labor of land – Developing Economics
Contemporary land grabs and agricultural investments have generated huge attention. The transformations in land tenure, production and social reproduction in the aftermath of land rushes have generated a rich literature. A central question is about labor, and its implications for structural transformation and agrarian futures. Extraversion, exports and the labor question In Senegambia, the intersecting pressures of food, land, and capital…