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Notes for Quiz 3 -Core Module IR
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Part III: Conflict and security
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Lecture 10: Development Politics (Introduction)Development is political:
Thought this part we will talk about:
• Colonial legacies shaping international (development) politics
• Trade politics shaping development politics
• Sustainable Development Goals as policy instruments shaping IR of development
• Civil Society Organizations as transnational politics
• Today: Introduction to notion of development politics—with a focus on interstate
cooperation for development (where 2 states engage in a development cooperation
relation, very often a donor state (+rich and affluent country donates/lands money)
and a recipient states (-affluent) to reach development.
• In a different file on Canvas: remembering the post-WWII political history of the
international political economy → RECAP VIDEO
During the webinar lecture, I asked:
=>, “What IR factor do you think is most important in explaining why some countries are
poor, i.e. belong to the category of least developed states in the world order?”
• Because of how inter-state development cooperation works: COOPERATION
• Because of the effect of colonial legacies: COLONIAL
• Because of how international trade agreements work: TRADE
• Because of how the Sustainable Development Goals work: SDG
• Because of how civil society organisations work on development: CIVIL
The students attending then voted and..:
• 63% of the respondents considered colonial legacies most important
• 22% considered trade politics most important
• Leaving only small percentages to the other three options
,Agenda today:
I. What is development?
II. International organisation set al.et al. and what developmental policy looks like...or:
The politics of development according to constructivists and poststructuralists
III. Inter-state development cooperation politics and which states engage with what
recipient states...or: The politics of development according to realists
I. What is development?
Development in IR: economic or human development?
• Development:
When people often talk about development they refer to development as economic
development, this means that they look at the question of whether the people can make a
living, or whether people and their families can get buyed over time as the thing that they
understand to be developed. On the societal level, the question is whether the society is
organized in a way that people can get buyed and make a living and sustain it.
• Scale of economic measurements:
When it comes to measuring whether people or countries are developed, many economists
focus on GDP per capita (measures a monetary value of goods and services produced in a
country each year) → country level. Is this useful to understand development? A lot of
people want to look at individuals, at what they have to allow them to get byed and sustain
their living and increase their income. GDP doe not take into account inequalities /inside
countries (across regions, households, communities) → Have to look at a lower scale and try
to establish what goes on across households and across communities in terms of what
monetary value can you attach to their economic activities and how that monetary values
says something about you are able to make a living and sustain it for yourself and children.
But again, this kind of measurement doesn't take into account that inequalities can still
happen inside a household or the community, and some people can be very very well off and
keep most of the economic gains while others don't have much, this will still mean that
poverty persists inside the unit (poverty can be gendered) → Look at individual level.
• Economic growth or a more general sense of well-being?:
Do we only need to look at this economic definition of development or is development also a
more general sense of well-being?? → it might be that we ask what does it say about
development tif we are rich but we don't have access to water, food, or school? What does it
say if you can get byed over years but infant mortality is very high in the region? What does
it say if in a monetary sense you are able to get buyed but there is a very high chance of
natural disasters happening and upsetting standard of living and lives of people you love?
=> Argument to open up the measure of development tand take all the other factors into
account (things that are not only economic and that have to do with the social and natural,
political as well) → Human development.
• Sustainable growth?:
,Whether development can be sustainable, sustainability is defined by the question of “the
kind of life that u lead as a person and way that u make ur living, whether the way you earn
money is sustainable in the sense that in next generation your children can still also get
buyed in that region pursuing economic activities and that there is no harm done by the
economic activities that you currently pursue as to make it impossible or difficult to the next
generation to get buyed in the same region (ex: cutting trees business if you do not plant
trees, mining and polluting rivers...).
Development in IR: economic or human development?
One of the pioneers to open up discussion about what development is and isn't is Sen,
indian economist that pushed this human development, where social and political
phenomena will be included to understand how people were doing across continents.
• Redefined as human development (Sen 1999), broadens the definition .
• For him, freedom as “the primary end and principal means of development” (Sen 1999: 42),
freedom ment:
- Freedom from deprivation like hunger or early death
- Freedom to literacy and numeracy
- Freedom of participation, association, and speech
• He has a very multidimensional view of looking at development and also emphasizes
psychological aspects of poverty: Consider inequality and psychological dimensions of
poverty, what the effects of inequality in societies could be? → he inspired the The Human
Development Index (HDI).
Example of more expensive versions of looking at development:
Experiment that the organization on economic cooperation and development (OECD) made,
tries to measure well-being in different regions of the world by looking at all kinds of
indicators that economists and geographers can measure.
, Development in IR:
The question is: Whether a particular measure of development has a particular implication of
how the future world in terms of being developed, or not being develmet or equal or unequal
in economic terms? Look at the average real GDP per capita across regions → we look at
the kind of distribution of development in this graph → western offshoots (US and western
europe) are leading on top in terms of the amount of dollars earned in relation to other
regions of the world. For a long while in the history of the world terms of levels of
development measured by average real GDP per capita across regions the difference
between regions in the world is not that big, it starts in the 40’s-50’s onwards to leads to
these disparities.
Development in IR:
If we look at the HDI, we notice that this graph gives a scale of developmental patterns that
are much closer together, we see some disparities as well and based on the HDI the regions
of the world are organized a bit differently which makes the comparison a bit more difficult.
The HDI puts counties closer together and we can also see some particular patterns that are
historical in nature and that might point to the effect of particular phenomena happening.
- (ex: Red central and eatsr europe swings to a more flat horizontal pattern after the
CW → dissolution of the USSR → economic and political fading)
- (ex: china line → cultural revolution hits china → deaths)
- (ex: sub saharan africa → line that shows the impact of the HIV pandemic).
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