Entry requirements

For exchange students only.

Learning outcomes

• To understand how contemporary development interventions are shaped by historical processes of imperialism and colonialism.
• To achieve a critical understanding of dominant paradigms of development theory, practice and implementation.
• To achieve an understanding of feminist interventions in development theory and practice.
• To understand how gender shapes development and how development practice shapes local gendered realities.
• To develop in-depth understanding on how structural processes impact on everyday lives of people.

Content

This unit introduces students to the theoretical and conceptual approaches in development theory and its implementation. It critically engages with how gender shapes development theory and how development practice impacts on gender relations and gendered realities. Focusing primarily on the global south, the unit will draw empirical examples from Africa, the Middle East, South/South East Asia and Latin America. The unit will commence with an overview of how ‘orientalism’ serves as an effective discourse for the justification and institutionalisation of (neo)-imperialism globally and the ways in which it shapes debates on development in colonial and post-colonial contexts. We will move on to analyse the collusions and contestations between colonialism and nationalism and the important but often neglected role of ‘domesticity’ as an anti-colonial strategy.

We will then investigate how feminist theoretical models have challenged ma(le)instream development debates and the inherent ‘male bias’. Structural Adjustment programmes were the key development tool of financial giants such as IMF and World Bank, with the aim to bring developing societies ‘on track’ with the developed world. But things went wrong? Why? In addition, one purpose of these programmes was to control ‘population explosion’ in the developing world but which came at a huge cost to individual livelihoods and created gender-imbalances in societies.

As well as considering substantive development issues, the course allows the opportunity to look at the changing role of the state in relation to war and violence. The current explosion of ethnic and civil conflicts are not understood in terms of lack of development, but, problematically, in terms of innate barbarity and backwardness of nation-states. Is this entirely true?

The course will conclude by looking at how development processes, despite their inherent weaknesses, have created pockets of empowerment, which are self-sufficient and self-sustaining and have enabled many societies to recover from debt-led growth.

Instruction

The teaching consists of lectures and seminars. The course is taught in English.

Assessment

Students are examined through a written exam, oral presentation and active participation in seminars. Grades are awarded according the scale “failed”, "pass" or "pass with distinction".