Recognition and Redistribution ― Beyond International Development

This is an innovative and insightful approach to the global politics of development. The authors challenge conventional perspectives of, and approaches to, development and offer alternative accounts of the politics of development from the perspective of non-state centred and non-state centric approaches. The authors offer critical reinterpretations of historical experiences of development processes and together with insightful analysis of contemporary development strategies this is a genuinely new perspective on the global politics of development. Moreover, in moving beyond more ‘economistic’ approaches to development this book seeks to uncover the complexity of development in ways that account for social relations of power and identity. The authors successfully demonstrate the transdisciplinary nature of the politics of development in their respective engagement with political theory, anthropological and sociological perspectives in ways that provide an overall integrated approach to the politics of recognition and redistribution in development. In contrast to globalisation calling into question the idea and practices of international development, this study situates the question of the politics of the ‘international’ within a broader historical context of global social relations of power and dispossession, and their impact on states, regions and cultures. In framing the project as whole through the concepts of recognition and redistribution, this is a genuine effort to ‘rethink development’. It is timely in an era of global politics and globalisation wherein both issues of identity and struggles over development challenge us to re-rethink disciplinary boundaries.

Heloise Weber is Lecturer in International Relations and Development, School of Political Science and International Relations, University of Queensland.

Mark T. Berger teaches in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, California).