POLI 269 - The Politics of Development

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

What is development? When and how did development emerge as a distinctive set of practices within the global system of nation-states? In what ways did the practices of “reconstruction and development” that emerged in the wake of the Second World War introduce truly novel practices and in what respects did they draw on older, colonial modes of political, economic, and cultural control? What kinds of political subjects do the practices of development produce and empower and what kinds of subjects do they silence and exclude? In this course, we will analyze the historical origins and contemporary political significances of the competing conceptions of development that emerged in the contexts of the Cold War and the period of decolonization. Specifically, we will focus on, among other models, theories, and practices, early Soviet-communist vs. American Fordist-capitalist models of internal and imperialist development; anti-colonial models of the self-sufficient and self-determined “developmental state”; post-Fordist models of neoliberal “structural adjustment”; and critical theories of the ways in which regimes of development produce familiar dependencies and modes of exploitation and exclusion. Mr. Hoffman.

Two 75-minute periods.