Development Studies Seminar Series

Professor Guy Standing (SOAS, Basic Income Earth Network) with Baroness Ruth Lister (House of Lords - Labour) and Zach Polanski (Green Party) discuss Guy's newest book, "The Politics of Time". 
 

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Dr Kate Raworth discusses her celebrated “Doughnut Economics” approach to solving the planet’s twin crises of meeting everyone’s needs while not exhausting our resources.

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Ethiopia stands out as a leading example of state-led development in Africa. Dr Tom Lavers (Global Development Institute, Manchester University) will be speaking about his much-anticipated book, Ethiopia’s ‘Developmental State’: Political Order and Distributive Crisis (Cambridge University Press 2023). 

The book is a comprehensive, multi-sector analysis of Ethiopia's development project that examines how regimes maintain power during the extended periods required to bring about economic transformation.

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The event is to launch Global Activism and Humanitarian Disarmament as part of the Development Studies Seminar Series.

This book launch happens in the context of renewed arms races, armed conflicts and booming arms trade. It is also a time when there is a growing threat of the use of nuclear weapons and the use of conventional weapons that are causing devastating civilian harm during protracted armed conflicts and long after these conflicts end. 

This edited volume showcases interdisciplinary research by scholars and practitioners seeking to understand the dynamics and impact of the new global activism on weapons. 

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Does dual citizenship reproduce inequalities? Robtel Neajai Pailey grapples with this question and more in her award-winning monograph Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia (Cambridge University Press, 2021). 

Hers is the first book to evaluate domestic and diasporic constructions and practices of Liberian citizenship across space and time and their myriad implications for development. In this presentation drawing on rich life histories from over 200 hundred in-depth interviews in West Africa, Europe, and North America, Pailey uses a contested dual citizenship bill, introduced in Liberia in 2008 but never passed, as an entry point to ask broader questions about how citizenship is differentiated by class, gender, race, ethnicity, etc. 

She develops a new model for conceptualising citizenship while offering a compelling critique of the neoliberal framing of diasporas and donors as the panacea to post-war reconstruction. 

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Hamza Hamouchene will be speaking about his latest book, Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region, providing a decolonial examination of the climate crisis. 

Human-made climate change is already a reality in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), undermining the ecological and socioeconomic basis of life in the region. Addressing this global climate crisis requires a rapid and drastic reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions, but if a transition towards renewable energies has become inevitable, justice has not.

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Mariz Tadros will discuss about redressing discrimination experienced by people on the basis of faith and non-faith in its intersections with other inequalities, why freedom of religion or belief is such a blind spot in development and how our search for legitimacy may lead us to unconventional approaches of engagement, such as one informed by heritage-sensitivity. 

Date:  Now POSTPONED to October 2024.

Venue: tbc

More information about the seminar, the speaker and registration link is available.

Alexandros Kentikelenis and Thomas Stubbs will be presenting their systematic assessments of how austerity has impacted people's lives and livelihoods around the world, including new findings on the impact of International Monetary Fund programs on social protection.

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