Posted on

Contested development imaginaries: Hindutva and the co-optation of ‘decolonisation’

By Kalpana Wilson, Giti Chandra and Lata Narayanaswamy

We live in a time where deeply embedded, historically entangled perceptions persist of a bifurcated world, made up of a civilised ‘developed’ or ‘rich’ world as set against a largely corrupt, ungovernable ‘developing’ or ‘poor’ world. The perniciousness of these ‘development’ imaginaries came into sharp relief in October 2022 when Josep Borrell, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, in a keynote speech to the European Diplomatic Academy, described Europe as a ‘garden’ where ‘everything works’ and the rest of the world as a ‘jungle’, a metaphor that he extended to further suggest that the ‘jungle’, without political engagement, ‘could invade the garden’.

Continue reading “Contested development imaginaries: Hindutva and the co-optation of ‘decolonisation’”
Posted on

Development Studies cannot become an apology for the status quo

By Alfredo Saad-Filho

Development Studies must always be critical, or it becomes just an apology for the status quo, for exploitation, for the reproduction of inequality within and between nations, and for the destruction of the conditions of life on Earth.

We live in times of converging crises, across the economy, democracy, health, the environment and more, with sprawling implications for ways of living around the globe. These crises and their mutual relationships offer the opportunity for new understandings of the problems of development and possible ways forward, which will inevitably be contested. These debates can be examined historically, focusing on the implications for our discipline.

Continue reading “Development Studies cannot become an apology for the status quo”
Posted on

Securing sufficient, sustainable energy for-all needs a massive reduction in global inequality

By Joel Millward-Hopkins

Few people believe that the world’s poorest should remain in their current situation of material poverty – and fewer still would admit such a belief in public. Perhaps even fewer believe that it would be acceptable for humans to trigger a global ecological disaster. Most can thus agree that there are billions around the world for whom living standards should be improved, and that humans should endeavour to keep the only habitat in our solar system habitable.

Continue reading “Securing sufficient, sustainable energy for-all needs a massive reduction in global inequality”
Posted on

Understanding epistemic erasures of local & indigenous communities:

Decolonizing research and re-imagining alternative partnerships in Development Studies

By Yafa El Masri, Melis Cin, Kitty Furtado, Paola Minoia and Rahime Süleymanoğlu-Kürüm / New Rhythms of Development blog series

Epistemic erasures continue to exist in a wide range of institutional designs at the local, national, regional, European and international level. Bringing up a debate on this topic not only opens the possibility to raise awareness on the concept, but also motivates research to shed light on alternative partnerships of resistance to these erasures. As Sharon Stein and others have pointed out,  partnerships that arise collaboratively between actors from academia, civil society and politics can contribute to recognizing, repairing and re-imagining new decolonial futures.

Continue reading “Understanding epistemic erasures of local & indigenous communities:”
Posted on

How ethical can research relationships be in Development Studies?

By Isis Barei-Guyot

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted research practice, and where research was possible to continue nevertheless, researchers had to ask themselves how it could do so ethically. The context of the pandemic meant that many of such ethical considerations were new to researchers, and we witnessed a moment of overcoming and adapting that produced changes on a scale and at a pace that would have been previously inconceivable. However, these extraordinary efforts to keep research moving during the pandemic highlighted the inequalities that had become normalised within research practice, and particularly within research relationships.

Continue reading “How ethical can research relationships be in Development Studies?”