The global crisis, coming at the end of three decades of uneven capitalist development and neoliberal globalization that have devastated the economies and societies of people across the world, especially in the developing societies of the global south, cries out for a more critical, proactive approach to the study of international development. The challenge of creating and disseminating such an approach, to provide the study of international development with a critical edge, is the project of a global network of activist development scholars concerned and engaged in using their research and writings to help effect transformative social change that might lead to a better world.
This series will provide a forum and outlet for the publication of books in the broad interdisciplinary field of critical development studies—to generate new knowledge that can be used to promote transformative change and alternative development.
The editors of the series welcome the submission of original manuscripts that focus on issues of concern to the growing worldwide community of activist scholars in this field.
To submit proposals, please contact the Development Studies Editor, Helena Hurd ([email protected]).
By Gerardo Otero, Efe Can Gürcan
June 20, 2024
This book develops a theory of collective empowerment that looks for change both from the bottom up, in civil society, and from the top down, from state interventions responding to such pressure. Reflecting on the advancement of Indigenous and peasant movements in Latin America since the neoliberal...
By Christoph Neusiedl
May 27, 2024
This book offers an important critique of the ways in which mainstream education contributes to perpetuate an inherently unjust and exploitative Development model. Instead, the book proposes a new anarchistic, postdevelopmental framework that goes beyond Development and schooling to ask what really...
Edited
By Dennis C. Canterbury
December 01, 2023
This book explores the impact of resource extraction and the dynamics of great powers competing for natural resources in the Caribbean. The book analyzes labour–capital relations between China, the United States, the European Union, and Russia in the Caribbean, as competition increases with the ...
By Eric D. U. Gutierrez
November 13, 2023
This book investigates the cross-border trade in illicit drug crops in the global south. It exposes an important paradox: despite all the dangers and negative consequences of these criminal networks, in many cases, they also provide marginalised and excluded communities with important private ...
Edited
By Penelope Anthias, Pabel C. López Flores
September 27, 2023
This book reflects on the continuing expansion of extractive forms of capitalist development into new territories in Latin America, and the resistance movements that are trying to combat the ecological and social destruction that follows. Latin American development models continue to prioritise ...
By Juan Telleria
September 25, 2023
This book provides a critical deconstruction of the human development framework promoted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) since 1990. Taking the Human Development Reports of the UNDP as its starting point for reflection, this book investigates the construction of this framework as...
By Jan Lust
August 03, 2023
At a time when Peru continues to reel from the impact of Covid-19 and the eruption of corruption scandals involving five former presidents, this book analyzes the persistence and the structural underpinnings of underdevelopment in Peru. During the commodities boom of 2004–2011, Peru experienced ...
Edited
By Henry Veltmeyer, Edgar Lau
May 31, 2023
This book explores the battleground between neoliberal capitalist development processes in Latin America and the challenges to these systems that can be found through innovative community-driven buen vivir/vivir bien initiatives. In the current climate of worldwide capitalist development, ...
Edited
By Henry Veltmeyer, Arturo Ezquerro-Cañete
March 02, 2023
This book investigates how extractive capitalism has developed over the past three decades, what dynamics of resistance have been deployed to combat it, and whether extractivism can ever be transformed into being a part of a progressive development path. It was not until the 20th century that the ...
Edited
By Henry Veltmeyer, Paul Bowles
September 30, 2021
The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies provides an up-to-date and authoritative introduction to the field, challenging mainstream development discourse and the assumptions that underlie it. Critical development studies lays bare the economic, political, social, and environmental ...
Edited
By Ben M. McKay, Alberto Alonso-Fradejas, Arturo Ezquerro-Cañete
May 31, 2021
Amid the growing calls for a turn towards sustainable agriculture, this book puts forth and discusses the concept of agrarian extractivism to help us identify and expose the predatory extractivist features of dominant agricultural development models. The concept goes beyond the more apparent ...
Edited
By Ronaldo Munck, Raul Delgado Wise
October 17, 2019
Since the year 2000 Latin America has been at the forefront of a series of diverse experiments with alternative forms, pathways and models of economic development and at the cutting edge of the international theoretical and political debates that surround these experiments. Reframing Latin American...