States, Societies and World Development In depth
Diversity
Our staff group is a meeting point for a diversity of disciplines, approaches and cultural orientations. We are around 18 academics, currently from ten different countries, including countries in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe. As a group we are both multi- and interdisciplinary in our approach, coming from
- political science
- development studies
- economics
- law
- anthropology
- international relations and
- public policy.
We all share a commitment to combining academic disciplines and transcending their restrictions when needed for tackling complex issues.
Our diversity helps foster deeper insights into how ideas, skills and and practice can promote equality and social justice, or at least contest the destructive impacts of social divisions. While our main focus is on low-income countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, we also have a strong interest in how global processes are connected. For us the ‘Global South’ is not mainly a geographical expression, but it is about the challenges of global circuits of poverty and deprivation, which need to be tackled across the globe. We share an interest in understanding systems of power and politics, with special attention to the situation of poorer and disadvantaged people(s). We seek to make our work relevant to practical action that advances people’s interests, needs and rights, whether through states, grassroots movements, international interventions or coalitions of local, national, international actors.
Our multinational, multi- and interdisciplinary, team-based approach makes us careful about adopting highly generalized models that claim to explain everything everywhere. Instead we look for informed ideas about what might be the most appropriate ways forward in specific situations and at particular junctures. We aim for sensitivity to diverse situations, traditions and opportunities within and between different countries, regions and localities around the world. Part of this is a sensitivity to the diverse backgrounds, experiences and knowledge of our students and collaborators. We question, for example, universalistic assumptions about the nation-state and about western-style democratic institutions for highly polarised and divided societies; and we are aware that in western democracies there are many political and justice issues that are far from being resolved.
Our field of work
With staff, students and professional partners from all over the world, we mainly study interactions between states, civil society, private business, families and individuals. We take the many strands and variants in each of these categories into account. Besides executive, legislative, and judicial branches, states have multiple levels and components, depending on the issues at hand. ‘Civil society’ not only includes a huge variety of associations and movements, but can mean different things from different vantage points. Businesses also span from global corporations to small family businesses in the informal sector. Families and persons live in all kinds of circumstances, ranging from utmost luxury to extreme destitution.
Flows of international trade and investment, military alliances and interventions, migration and refugee flows, interchanges of inventions, ideas and fashions, international aid and cooperation, international crime and disease, and environmental processes continually impact on the world. The associated processes of development are profoundly political. They reflect continuities and changes in patterns of power. They also create losers and winners with different political agendas and diverse strategies for improving their lot or protecting their positions.
Governments, and the state more generally, have already been substantially restructured by the impacts of such globalizing forces. However, the state’s essential role has gained more recognition since the onset of the present crisis. We share the view that without robust mechanisms to aggregate interests, to enforce contractual agreements and to adjudicate conflicts, global and civil social tensions can promote disharmony and violent outcomes. We recognise the role of states and international institutions in promoting ‘global’ and ‘good’ governance. Policy and legal instruments and arrangements can steer, guide and sometimes restrict market forces and social trends in meaningful ways. Despite its retrenchment in some respects, the state remains responsible for the rule of law, for public administration, for ensuring that markets can work, and for political participation and democracy. Whatever its limitations and in spite of its often hegemonic nature, in many countries the state remains a key potential mediator between international, regional, national and local interests in politics, economy, law and society.
Our group combines work on the state and public policy with a strong interest in social movements: – of
- workers
- students
- the urban poor
- intellectuals
- women and
- indigenous people among others.
Our activities cut across many countries and agendas, including demands for popular participation and protection of human rights. Our fields of study thus also span the circuits of ‘global civil society’. We also focus on transnational agencies —regional alliances, multilateral organizations, components of the UN system, transnational advocacy and NGOs, and global industrial and financial capital. All have reshaped the political economy of the world and of individual countries during the past few generations. We take a particular interest in how local and global agents seek to reshape local, national, regional and world politics with demands for democratization, respect for human rights and social justice.
A summary of the Staff Group’s approach and orientation
1. Multi- and interdisciplinarity is our strength. We aim to offer something different from conventional university departments and programmes. We provide a critical approach by questioning some of the ruling orthodoxies, of academic disciplines, economic or political systems and regimes. We seek to promote the identification of broad alternatives to current policies.
2. We give central attention to the politics of development, and the political dimensions of decision-making. We ask who sets the agenda, whose ideas are heard, how concepts and theories can be developed in ways that are sensitive to the range of different actors, who decides, who benefits and who loses.
3. We offer global perspectives. Our comparative work focuses on global interconnections, including through human movement. This informs our study of ideas and ideologies, and of how global networks and organizations can reinforce positive social change.
These features are reflected in strong attention to the following:
• value-critical analysis, including with respect to issues of equality, poverty, gender, and sustainability, and to claims, violations, and uses of human rights and other value systems;
• social movements and civil society building;
• skills in critical, politically aware policy analysis, including in policy design; implementation and evaluation;
• skills in value-critical, politically aware research;
• support to capacity building and organizational development.
We aim to work:
* with students - to support, learn from, and increase their understanding and skills, theoretical and practical, to help them become stronger interpreters and negotiators of their own positions and ideals, with up-to-date knowledge of rapidly evolving global and national conditions and challenges and about processes and options in policy-making and policy-management
* with partners - to develop new understandings together, to counteract stereotypes and overgeneralizations and to promote innovative situation-specific investigation, including by drawing on and complementing local and practitioner knowledge, and to support corresponding styles of public action.
