AT5573: GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT (2026-2027)

The course will cover four main topics:

Topic One: The History of Global Development Theory & Practice

The prospect of the general amelioration of humankind has a long history. Initial ideas that the world could be improved began with religious cultures of hierarchy and conversion, later to become entangled with imperial projects of civilizational improvement. With the turn of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the idea of collective improvement of populations was intimately associated with racial hierarchies in both colonial and medical contexts, and, more broadly, with the idea of physically and mentally evolving the human population itself. It is only in the wake of the Second World War and the emergence of the Cold War that most of these ideas were jettisoned in favour of the notion of 'development' as the systematic improvement of societies and economies through infrastructural and educational transformation. Critiques of modern global development theory and strategy have been many, often based on the criticisms that the very idea of development hides a deep cultural (and possibly even religious) imperialism, that it achieves little beyond the growth of the state itself, or that its primary goals are less the improvement of local communities and more their embedding in a wider international and post-colonial dependency on commodity markets.

Question: How do we understand what it means to 'develop' humankind and the world?

Topic Two: The Changing Institutions of Global Development

The evolution of post-War of global development strategies has been profoundly influenced by the late 20th Century Cold War and key international institutions that grew up in its shadow. In 1944, the US-hosted Bretton Woods Conference saw the creation of key global institutions for rebuilding the post-WWII world: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), now known as the World Bank. Following on from this was the establishment of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, 1948) out of which would later emerge the World Trade Organisation in 1995. Particularly throughout the Cold War, these organisations provided much of the economic and legal context for Western projects for global development, while at the same time assuming that development itself would simultaneously promote constitutionally liberal institutions such as democratic governance, human rights, free speech, etc. In the Cold War context, this larger Western orientation was challenged by organisations such as the Soviet Union's Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA, 1949) and China's growing influence amongst the post-colonial states of Asia and Africa through events such as the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia.

Question: To what extent is development a neutral amelioration of the human condition, or a specifically political project?

Topic Three: Addressing Global Inequalities

With the opening up of the People's Republic of China during the 1980s and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, global development at a international level became increasingly subsumed within the larger project of globalization, understood in principle as greater trade, cultural exchange, the flow of capital, goods, and ideas across borders, and the creation of a single global economy. While this project sought to foster economic growth through increased trade, investment, and technology transfer, it also worsened inequalities, undermined local industries, and threatened cultural diversity, particularly in the context of the parallel internet revolution. By the turn of the millennium, criticisms of this were quickly developing surrounding the growing North-South Divide, postcolonial economic dependence, the impact of accelerated trade on the environment and climate, the legal, cultural and economic marginalisation of indigenous groups. In the United Nations, many of these criticisms were implicit within the Millennium Development goals of 2000 regarding child mortality, hunger, illiteracy, gender inequality, etc.

Question: How do disadvantaged, indigenous and marginalised communities experience global development initiatives?

Topic Four: Global Development Futures

By 2015, the accelerating pattern of climate change had begun to impact on internationally agreed global development goals. The UN's Millennium Development Goals gave way to the Sustainable Development Goals, a growing number of which not only emphasized climate mitigation goals, but also the question of human climate adaptations. While the prevention and mitigation remain the goals of global processes such as the annual COP meetings and the 2015 Paris Accords, major powers (especially China, Russia and the United States) have increasingly emphasized regional trade and infrastructure hinterland adaptation for a climate changed world through initiative such as the BRICS banking system, China's Belt and Road Initiative and the Northern Sea Route. Such initiatives suggest a return to a multi-polar, rather than genuinely global, world.

Question: What is the future of global development in an increasingly climate changed world?

There are no assessments for this course.