How Francophone Scholarship Deepened our Understanding of Democracy and Social Change

By Christine Lutringer

What do Alfred Sauvy, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Frantz Fanon have in common?

Their works were all written in French and have made considerable contributions to our understanding of democracy and social change, whatever is the context. I explored this theme in a chapter of the upcoming book Building Development Studies for the New Millennium (Palgrave Macmillan), which analyses how Francophone academic literature played an important role in building development studies. Continue reading “How Francophone Scholarship Deepened our Understanding of Democracy and Social Change”

Development Studies in Spanish: Critical, Constructive and Peripheral

By Rogelio Madrueño Aguilar and Pablo José Martínez Oses

While Development Studies in Spanish (DSS) has remained to some extent side-lined from the mainstream development discourse, one should not minimise its importance and tradition in development thinking and practice. It can be argued that DSS, from conception to implementation, is substantially peripheral and heterodox. More importantly, DSS can be perceived as a response framework to Western ideas of progress and development from a wide range of disciplines and traditions of thought. In particular, we would like to emphasize four key ideas here: Continue reading “Development Studies in Spanish: Critical, Constructive and Peripheral”