Politics of Development

The School has significant research strengths in the politics of development and social change, broadly understood. ‘Development’ has always been a contested concept, and yet has been central to world political change. This rich research field engages with important issues and concerns in development – theoretical and empirical - in relation to both global and local frameworks and contexts.

Our research in this field contributes to new efforts at thinking about the politics of development as a historically constituted global project. Researchers adopt approaches that combine analyses of macro-political frameworks and micro-political experiences and struggles to understand and explain global social change, and identify possibilities for positive transformations. Specifically, this work involves theoretical, methodological, and empirical reorientations as part of a new shift towards relational analysis.

Researchers in this field are recognized internationally, regionally and nationally, and also across disciplines and sub-disciplines, such as peace and conflict studies, feminist and gender politics, global political economy, critical security studies and postcolonial and de-colonial approaches.

• Critical development theory
• Critical historical approaches to understanding development: global and local
• Postcolonial and de-colonial politics and political theory
• Transnational indigenous politics
• Feminist and gender politics
• Politics of environmental change
• Human rights and international law
• Transnational social movements
• Critical security and the security-development nexus
• Global development and poverty focused strategies