Advanced Introduction to Critical Global Development

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world’s leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas.

This stimulating and accessible Advanced Introduction critically engages with dominant, modernist, and ahistorical narratives of development, foregrounding the overlooked dissonant discourses that are largely written out of mainstream development. It argues that development discourse and practice must remain aware of how historically unequal relations continue to be reproduced today and outlines a range of effective strategies for guiding change towards achieving global social justice.

Features include:

• challenges to the claims of universality evident in much development scholarship
• exposure of critical discourses overlooked by conventional development histories
• identification of progressive ways to guide change towards achieving global social justice
• guidance on development approaches and ideas that avoid reproducing colonial forms of representation, knowledge, power, and control
• the foregrounding of critical postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist perspectives to identify how progressive possibilities for change can emerge.

This insightful Advanced Introduction will be beneficial to students and scholars of development studies, geography, sociology, anthropology, history, and indigenous studies seeking an understanding of unequal global relations, knowledge production, and the exercise of global power and control. Further, it will be of great value to academics and students interested in postcolonialism, contemporary colonial legacies, and processes of decolonisation and decoloniality.

Uma Kothari, Professor of Migration and Postcolonial Studies, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK and Elise Klein, Associate Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia