Today, amid White House efforts to defund the US State Department, regional instabilities from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea, and global corporations increasingly involved in issues from poverty to governance to climate change, the politics of international development could not be more urgent.
What is the role of international assistance in a world marked by imperialism and inequity? How do actors in the “global South” deal with livelihood and governance issues that crosscut economics, politics, history and tradition? How is “Development” itself changing as the United State's place in the world is increasingly unsettled?
This course uses the lens and tools of human geography to explore these questions. Examining cases from Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific Rim, this course surveys the changing terrain of international development at the dawn of the Twenty-first Century.