Development and Change Special Issues – serie

Where is the world heading at the turn of the twenty-first century? Towards a desolate landscape of disintegrating societies or towards the construction of new institutions to mitigate violence, reduce poverty and promote peace in a rapidly changing global context? Do ideas of globalization reflect reality and how far are they either new or helpful? Can trends identified in the near and distant past be helpfully extrapolated to predict the future and to understand the present? Ralf Dahrendorf, Amitai Etzioni, Johan Galtung, Anthony Giddens, Eric Hobsbawm, Fatima Mernissi, Tetsuo Najita, Emma Rothschild, Wole Soyinka and Tatyana Tolstaya take up these and other questions and provide some searching and provocative answers. Their discussions span academic disciplines and continents to provide a truly international dialogue on the future of humankind.

Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure"Globalization" and "Identity" are an explosive combination, demonstrated by recent outbursts of communalist violence in many parts of the world. Their varying articulations highlight the paradox that accelerating global flows of goods, persons and images go together with determined efforts towards closure, emphasis on cultural difference and fixing of identities. This collection explores this paradox of 'flow' and 'closure' through a series of detailed case studies in comparative perspective.

The interlinkages between gender and poverty have, until recently, escaped careful analytical scrutiny. The contributors to this edited volume critically reflect on some of the key methodological and analytical issues that a gendered analysis of poverty needs to address. These foundational issues have serious implications for public action in this area.

The papers in this volume highlight in various ways the complex articulations of local processes and global forces in tropical forest struggles. Taken together, they show how social science research has come of age, moving beyond the crude 'tragedy of the commons' and 'prisoner's dilemma' approaches of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Rule and Rupture - State Formation Through the Production of Property and Citizenship examines the ways in which political authority is defined and created by the rights of community membership and access to resources. Combines the latest theory on property rights and citizenship with extensive fieldwork to provide a more complex, nuanced assessment of political states commonly viewed as  “weak,” “fragile,” and “failed”Contains ten case studies taken from post-colonial settings around the world, including Cambodia, Nepal, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, and BoliviaCharacterizes the results of societal ruptures into three types of outcomes for political power: reconstituted and consolidated, challenged, and fragmentedBrings together exciting insights from a global group of scholars in the fields of political science, development studies, and geography

This book situates state failure and state collapse in historical context and explains the structures and forces that have led to state collapse in a number of countries around the world. It also analyses and critiques contemporary interventions and reconstruction efforts in collapsed states. Addresses the subject of state failure which has received high-profile attention from both scholars and policy-makers. Examines how and why states collapse. Analyses and critiques post-conflict reconstruction efforts. Has contemporary relevance for developments in places such as East Timor, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Georgia. Challenges our assumptions about states and the state system.

This volume presents a state-of-the-art debate on the controversial topic of development aid. The contributors are all experts in the field of international development. Presents some challenging conclusions about the role that aid plays in catalysing, or stifling, development. Represents a wide range of different analytical perspectives.

In this book a multi-disciplinary team of experts from around the world studies the environmental challenge posed by China’s phenomenal economic growth. An exploration of the environmental challenge posed by China’s phenomenal economic growth. Written by a multi-disciplinary team of experts from around the world. Argues that China’s development poses the greatest ever challenge for the modern world in terms of speed, size and resource scarcity. Discusses issues such as cleaner production, green car technology, resettlement resulting from dam building, and biotechnology. Moves beyond the dichotomy between alarmist, radical views and moderate notions of incremental change.

Focusing on the condition of public authority in Africa, Twilight Institutions investigates how, when confronted with state failure, public institutions attempt to gain authority; operating in the twilight between state and society, between public and private. Approaches public authority ‘from below’, exploring a variety of concrete encounters between forms of public authority and the more or less mundane practices of ordinary people

This collection brings together leading feminist thinkers who examine the struggles for interpretive power which underlies international development. Questions why the insights from years of feminist gender and development research are so often turned into ‘gender myths’ and ‘feminist fables’: women are more likely to care for the environment; are better at working together; are less corrupt; have a seemingly infinite capacity to surviveExplores how bowdlerized and impoverished representations of gender relations have simultaneously come to be embedded in development policy and practiceTraces the ways in which language and images of development are related to practice and provides a nuanced account of the politics of knowledge productionArgues that struggles for interpretive power are not only important for our own sake, but also for the implications they have for women’s lives worldwideAn informed analysis of how ‘gender’ has been transformed in its transfer into development policy and how many authors are now revisiting and reflecting on their earlier work

The Politics of Possession investigates how struggles over access to resources and political power constitute property and authority recursively. Such dynamics are integral to state formation in societies characterized by normative and legal pluralism. Includes some of the latest theoretical work on the dynamics of access and property and how they are joined to questions of power and authorityExplores how access to resources is often contested and rife with conflict, particularly in post-colonial and post-socialist countriesOffers a thought-provoking approach to the study of everyday processes of state formationShows how the process of seeking authorization for property claims works to legitimize the authorizers, and the efforts undertaken by politico-legal institutions to gain legitimacy underpin and undermine various claims of access and propertyContributors explore from a wide empirical compass of original research spanning Latin America, Africa, South-East Asia, and Eastern Europe

Contributors analyze the care economy in the developing world, at a moment when existing systems are under strain and new ideas are coming into focus.Offers the first global, regionally diverse study of the “invisible economy” of care, including case studies from diverse regional contexts of Africa, Asia and Latin AmericaFrames the debate on care and highlights policy experimentation and ideas currently in fluxIncludes new research and data on developing countries, showing how, where care options for the socially disadvantaged are limited, failing to socialize the costs of care exacerbates existing inequalitiesComes at a moment when, if not yet marked by a generalized care crisis, the world’s existing systems are under strain and in need of rethinkingFeatures introductory chapters that set out the conceptual framework and findings on individual country studies, and a concluding chapter that draws out the transnational dimensions of care

This collection of essays in Governing Global Land Deals provides new empirical and theoretical analyses of the relationships between global land grabs and processes of government and governance. Reframes debates on global land grabs by focusing on the relationship between large-scale land deals and processes of governanceOffers new theoretical insights into the different forms and effects of global land acquisitionsIlluminates both the micro-processes of transaction and expropriation, as well as the broader structural forces at play in global land dealsProvides new empirical data on the different actors involved in contemporary land deals occurring across the globe and focuses on the specific institutional, political, and economic contexts in which they are acting