Sorry for X_posting: Please feel free to circulate this call far and wide.
Critical perspectives on International Development: New geographies of inequality?
CfP for a stream at the Critical Management Studies Conference, 3rd to 5th July 2017, Liverpool, UK
Abstracts of up to 500 words can be sent to ff48 (at) le.ac.uk. Deadline for submission of abstracts for inclusion in the stream is 31st January 2017. Decisions will be communicated by the Stream Convenors by February 15, 2017.
In this stream we seek to build on Critical Management Studies’ (CMS) engagement with and criticisms of international development, which we now know well, has been predicated on a geographical schism. The ‘South’ has long been used as a shorthand term to describe ‘under-developed countries’; that is, a global geography where those in need of development resided. The ‘North’, on the other hand, is used to designate the developed nations or liberal capitalist democracies. It has had, we are led to believe, the knowledge, history, resources, and readily available templates on which the ‘Global South’ is expected to model its ‘development’. The geographical schism is also evident in CMS’ criticism of managerialism of international development. Cooke, for example, terms management a ‘First World’ discipline that in its morphed avatar of development management now functions in the ‘Third World’ as part of its development. Of crucial importance here are constellations of meanings and practices that revolve around the structural and discursive divisions between the so-called ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’.
These divisions are now under challenge in a wide variety of ways. Living under neoliberal capitalism in the aftermath of austerity, the so-called developed countries are witnessing continuous and rising poverty, including in the USA, UK and, most notably of late, in southern European nations (Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal). This is evidenced from rising childhood poverty, ‘rough sleepers’ existing cheek and jowl with City bankers, the on-going diminishing of public services, and growing calls for reducing global development aid. At the same time, the global refugee crisis has brought large-scale camps and urban ‘slums’ to the ‘North’ (at Calais for example). As such, the United Nations has had to refocus its rescue and relief operations to parts of Mediterranean Europe. Meanwhile, growing private wealth in parts of India and China, for example, has done little for the redistribution of wealth. The persistence of poverty in the ‘South’ has not distracted its nation-states from collaborating for the New Development Bank, which requires us to re-think prior and long-standing global developmental hierarchies. The rise of emerging economies and their growing prominence in international development is hardly an endorsement of international development. But its nation-states are increasingly challenging the legitimacy of Western-liberal capitalist developmentalism, its universalizing discourse of human rights, and its INGOs operating variously through the rhetoric of national sovereignty, security and interest.
In this Stream, we invite submissions that represent explicitly critical perspectives (historical and contemporary) on global and incipient geographies of inequalities; and its implications for, and challenges to, our conceptions of development and managerialism. We would welcome contributions that deepen or widen CMS’s engagement with Development Studies, more generally.
Indicative
topics might include:
- Deconstructing the South/North divide
- Poverty eradication and its discourses; and
their differences in the North/South
- Emerging forms of inequalities in the
North/South
- Development and sustainability: conceptions, conflicts
and convergence
- International Development Policy and Global
Governance
- Relevance of Global Governance Institutions (G8, G20, UN,
IMF, World Bank)
- Emergent International Development
Institutions and their roles
- Geographies of ‘Corruption’
- Critical analyses of international
development discourse(s)
- International development and critical
project management studies
- Subaltern studies and postcolonial criticisms
of international development
Global, regional, and national
inequalities.
The
convenors would also welcome creative interpretations which challenge the
boundaries set by this call for papers.