Development Economics, Democracy & Revol

After World War II, the question of the development of so-called underdeveloped countries became an international priority. The timing was not casual: the demise of the colonial empires and the birth of new countries propagated the ideals of modernization worldwide. Moreover, in a world divided between two superpowers, the fate of less developed countries became a matter of foreign policy concern in the developed ones. Since then, development has become a major challenge for the contemporary world. The new relevance of the issue has also prompted, in the years after World War II, the birth of a new disciplinary field, namely, development economics, which is increasingly at the core of the economics profession, as demonstrated by the Nobel prizes in Economics to W. Arthur Lewis in 1979, to Amartya Sen in 1998, and to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer in 2019, as well as the work on development of other prominent economists such as Dani Rodrik, William Easterly, Jeffrey Sachs, and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

This seminar will explore the trajectory of the idea of development from World War II to the present, with a particular focus on how it has been discussed within the disciplinary field of development economics. We will discuss how different analyses of development processes—how they can be put in motion, how they evolve, and what are their potential outcomes—have intersected debates about dynamics of social and economic change, how the whole development field has been interpreted alternatively as a progressive endeavour or an ideological construct fostering a neocolonial agenda, and how development policies have been judged to strengthen democratic institutions or, on the contrary, as a mechanism reinforcing domestic and international inequality, to be opposed with revolution.

Although the focus of this seminar will be on understanding the history of development rather than shaping its future, graduate students from outside of history (including business, anthropology, political science, economics, human rights, law, sociology, and area studies) are welcomed to register, as this is a topic that would benefit greatly from an interdisciplinary perspective.