Decolonising Grant-Funded Development Consortia: Some Reflections

By Kibui Edwin Rwigi / Second post in a mini-series on large grant-funded research centres: read the first one here)

In November 2019, I sat across the table from an older African professor — a well accomplished intellectual, the quintessential renaissance man: poet, philosopher, scholar-activist. “How is decolonisation different from what my generation was doing through post-colonial work?” he asked, after I had too exuberantly recounted work I had been part of in a North-South research consortium with a Dutch university as lead partner.

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Why the Next DSA and EADI Conferences Should Be Hosted in the Global South

By Luqman Ọpẹ́yẹmí Muraina and Aysha Valery

The Development Studies Association (DSA) conference held annually and the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) conference held every three-years bring together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to discuss some of the world’s most pressing challenges – inequality, sustainability, environment, migration, etc.

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Inverted Eurocentrism: The Consumption of Decolonization in the Global North

By Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven

At a moment when the United States has recently kidnapped the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, assassinated the Iranian supreme leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, is plotting regime change in Cuba, and is continuing to support genocide and colonial oppression in Palestine, the question of how to understand empire, capitalism, and possibilities for resistance is as pressing as ever. In a new article, I argue that any radical decolonization agenda must be aligned with critique of and resistance to contemporary oppression. I also posit that the most dominant form of decolonial theory – the one that is now pervasive across global North universities as well as many institutions across the global South – does not lend itself to such radical critique and resistance.

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What to Play Next: Development after the End of Development

By Heiner Janus and Michael Roll

Manchester embodies reinvention like few other places. It built the world’s first industrial economy, watched it rust, and recast itself as the capital of England’s north. When protests turned deadly at the Peterloo massacre, it helped galvanise a tradition of organised labour and democratic reform — one that later produced the suffragettes, founded there by Emmeline Pankhurst. And when the band Joy Division collapsed, the remaining members re-emerged as New Order. That instinct — not to reassemble what broke, but to build something new — was the animating spirit when the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute convened researchers in mid-April to ask: is the era of Development over? And if so, what replaces it?

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The Disciplinary Roots of Disagreement in Development Studies: Findings from a Global Survey of Scholars

By Ryan Briggs and Andy Sumner

Development Studies is institutionally well established. The QS rankings identify over 150 universities with postgraduate Development Studies programmes across approximately 40 countries. Journals, institutes and scholarly associations have proliferated since the 1960s.

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