Development Its Discontents

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Development has been a core concept in politics and the social sciences for more than 75 years, and its meaning has been shaped, debated, and transformed by an enormous group of people—economists and anthropologists, engineers and diplomats, colonial officers and anticolonial activists, communists and capitalists, home economists and agricultural extension experts. Today, the deployment of this concept is so widespread that it can be hard to imagine other ways of thinking about technological, environmental, social, economic, and political transformation. But as long as development has existed, so have its critics. In this class, we will both historicize the idea of development by tracing its roots into the early modern period. We will recover the contested and uneven history of development to better help us understand the appearance of this concept in urgent contemporary contexts, like the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We will also consider different alternatives to development that emerged at critical points in the history of the twentieth century.