Call for papers:
Association of American Geographers, Annual Meeting, Washington DC, April
14-18 2010
Sessions 8630 and 8632
The Rising Powers and the ‘new’ geographies of international development
Supported by the Africa and China Specialty Groups
For all of the post-war period the drivers of the global economy and the
trustees of international development were unproblematically seen as the
wealthy countries of Europe and North America. Yet over the past 10 years
this has changed with a number of Rising Powers taking a greater role in the
global economy and international politics. These countries have been growing
rapidly and see the developing world as a location for raw materials, land, new
markets and profitable infrastructure investment. Most research and policy
responses have been around China, but there are more countries we need to
consider, not least the so-called BRICs and a number of countries in SE Asia
and the Middle East. Individually and together they pose opportunities and
threats for developing countries and could potentially reorient the landscape
of global geopolitics. The sessions will explore the implications of these actors
for our understandings of international development. This is in terms of the
policies they have in place to achieve their goals, the nature of their
international strategies, the mediation of these with developing country
states, and the myriad impacts on the ground. We also want to consider
whether and how such activities re-shape our very understanding of
development.
Possible themes:
• To what extent is there a new aid architecture and what does the
emergence of the Rising Powers mean for established donors and questions of
aid effectiveness?
• Given that much of the interest of the Rising Powers in the
developing world is resource access of various kinds how far are developing
countries being ‘fixed’ into specific roles with the potential for a resource
curse to deepen?
• As the Rising Powers gain in economic power what impacts are they
having, or likely to have, on institutions of global governance and the balance
of world power?
• Given the need to industrialise and urbanise what impacts are the
Rising Powers having on the environment & climate change, as well as on the
governance mechanisms to mitigate such change?
• To what extent are we seeing genuine forms of ‘South-South’
cooperation and what policy space does the existence of the Rising Powers
afford the poorest developing countries?
• What does the existence of these the Rising Powers mean for
normative debates about the very nature of ‘development’?
To discuss submitting a paper contact either:
Dr Giles Mohan, Open University, [log in to unmask],
Tel: 0044 (0)1908 653654
or
Dr Marcus Power, University of Durham, [log in to unmask],
Tel: 0044 (0)191 334 1828
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