Global Development Politics

This paper will introduce and discuss a new textbook for postgraduate students, forthcoming with Routledge titled Global Development Politics. Co-authored by Indrajit Roy (York) and Samuel Hickey (Manchester), the textbook deepens and furthers a "global" approach to development that dismantles the hierarchical binary between the global North and global South that has framed the study of development. In thinking about the politics of global development, the book departs from the Eurocentric tendency to think about the discipline as a series of experiments on the world’s poor, aided by the benevolence of powerful actors in rich countries. Instead, it foregrounds the dynamic interplay between the international, national, and sub-national actors that are shaping a changing world, thus highlighting the ways in which what Adrian Leftwich (2013) called "rules of the game" and "games within the rules" shape one another. Inspired by the emerging field of "global studies", Global Development Politics is careful not to replace Eurocentric perspectives with Sinocentric, Indo-centric, and Afro-centric ones. Instead, it explores the "connected politics" that shape development practices in a world facing interlinked challenges. Global Development Politics shines a light on the new actors in the global South whose development interventions are profoundly transforming the world order, thus making it imperative to reimagine the discipline.