This post first appeared at Small Precautions.   What would a fully integrated “global” history of development entail? It would require Considering all actors in the development process: from the subaltern “objects” of development at one end of the spectrum, to various NGOs and IFIs and transnational corporations in the middle layers, to state elites in the North at the other end – recognizing the politically negotiated nature of each project Looking across all geographies in which development has been deployed: including not just the Continue reading →

There's a very important new paper out in Nature entitled "Approaching a state shift in the Earth's biosphere." Exec summary:

There have been not a few commentators, from the bleeding hearts on the liberal left to the usual suspects on the neocon right, who have been celebrating the raining down of Tomahawk missiles on Libya as a wonderful return of morality to foreign policy.

Brief note on the 2011 World Development Report of the World Bank.

It strikes me that one of the purposes of the elision is to facilitate the extension of (yes, biomedical, but perhaps not just biomedical) surveillance technologies of the Global North into the Global South, for reasons that primarily benefit the Global North, but that come cloaked with the moral aura of benefiting the South (even though, as you point out, it's not so clear that these surveillances really do help the South much).

For a good sense of what "development" today is and isn't, you can do worse than to read this excellent if troubling New York Times article on Chinese business practices in Zambia: