MA Politics, Development & the Global South

This module considers some of the most important topics in contemporary development studies, including: 

• Is development another name for “modernity”? 
• What are the differing (and sometimes opposing) definitions of development? 
• Development and the politics of knowledge 
• The developmental state 
• Development and global civil society: NGOs, celebrities and the power of philanthropy 
• Sustainability and democracy 
• Entrepreneurs from below 
• Ecological concerns 
• Gender questions 
• Post development and de-growth 

This module aims to raise questions about whether the concepts and categories through which we usually study the ’international' or ’global' are adequate to the task. It critically examines categories of the social sciences and humanities that are usually simply presupposed and ’applied', and which, despite their Western or European origins, are assumed to be ’universal'. It does this by closely examining some of the most important theoretical writings of the post-WWII period, focusing upon books and debates which had repercussions far beyond their immediate disciplinary boundaries, including books by Kuhn, MacIntyre, Foucault, Said, and others.

Students explore the claim(s) that far from being objective and universal, our knowledge is shaped by culture, history and politics. In seminars we ask, can different ’conceptual schemes', ’paradigms' or ’traditions' be compared to see which one is better, or are they incommensurable? Do theories and explanations triumph over rival theories because they are ’better'- or for other reasons? Does knowledge serve to unmask power, or is it always caught up with and complicit with power?

This module requires students not simply to advance their knowledge of politics, but to explore the politics of knowledge, and to do so, in particular, by enquiring into whether the categories and concepts of the social sciences are genuinely  international and universal, or merely modern/Western and parochial.

You will complete a 10,000 word dissertation

There is nothing new to the concept that space is infused and structured according to dominant forms of power in society - be they nationalism, neo-liberalism, the state, or patriarchy - and that such articulations have corresponding representational forms in maps, charts, surveys, and censuses.

Far from being the neutral scientific endeavour it is often claimed to be, cartography has always tended to reinforce and replicate dominant spatial logics, erasing indigenous claims to land, ostracising minorities from the political landscape, and setting racial, gender and class hierarchies (quite literally) in stone, brick and asphalt. Increasingly, however, we are seeing a growing number of both artists and social movements coming to an awareness that our representations of space carry with them an intendant politics. Intent on redressing this imbalance, counter-mapping is the still somewhat speculative practice of harnessing dominant representational strategies in an effort to invert, subvert, and make clear what has been erased in an effort to seek political change.

From feminist re-mappings of the city according to safe and dangerous places, to indigenous narratives of ancestral wanderings; from students co-opting google maps to avoid police tactics of ‘kettling’, to artist Janet Cardiff’s memory walks; from local anarchist groups revealing locations of CCTV cameras in Camberwell Green, to W.G. Sebald’s literary re-mapping of East Anglia; this module not only studies emerging forms of counter-mapping, but encourages students to engage in their own practice of re-mapping, re-walking, and re-appropriating the cityscape.

This MA level module explores the contemporary politics of human rights. Drawing on political philosophy, legal theory and international relations approaches, the module will examine the complex issues raised by human rights, and some of the difficulties and challenges in applying human rights in the contemporary world – the violence and human rights violations committed by state and non-state actors, wars and conflicts around the world, and the current global refugee crisis. It will also explore some of the important critiques of human rights from Marxist and postcolonial perspectives.

Students will be introduced to the major theoretical frameworks for understanding state compliance with human rights obligations using both historical and comparative approaches to the topic. We will focus on particular case examples and general cross-national comparisons in the effort to understand why states commit violations.

The module will explore the influence of political and economic conditions such as regime type, conflict, economic development in the protection or violation of human rights, the impact of human agency and decisions and the role of states, international legal instruments and NGOs in the promotion of human rights. Finally, it will examine questions of intervention, the development of accountability mechanisms and the management of the blame for human rights violations. 

This module will provide a critical grounding in contemporary debates around Islam and the political as well as delineate the plural and agonistic nature of Muslim political ideologies and practices over the course of the last century. Is Islam an inherently political religion as many Orientalists have contended? Why has this question been repeatedly posed through to the present? Is there such a thing as a “Muslim politics”? How has Muslim political activism found itself Othered and stigmatised in recent decades and why has such activism provoked questions over the legitimacy of political engagement by Muslims? How have Muslims been historically racialised and what connections can be drawn between the legacy of Orientalism, colonial racisms and contemporary Islamophobia? Furthermore, how might we complicate mainstream understandings of “fundamentalism” and “Islamic law” and the relationship between Muslim political practices, liberal citizenship, secularism, resistance and the impact of Western colonialism and/or imperialism in the Islamicate world?

Islam, Revolution & Empire will also introduce students to manifold contemporary political discourses and practices in the Islamicate world – from the seemingly interminable debate over Islamic feminism, women’s agency and the veil, to anti-colonial Islam(s), Islamic liberation theology and black internationalism, Kurdish anarchism and democratic confederalism and Arab and Iranian socialisms. The module aims to help students rethink the relationship between “Islam” and the political, as well as how Islam has been marshalled as a political category, and found itself challenged and critiqued for disparate ends, and thereby nuance their understanding of the relationship between politics, revolution and religion in the “Muslim world” and the imperial metropole itself. The module will problematize such categories as “fundamentalism”, “political Islam”, “extremist versus moderate”, the figure of “the radical”, and a wider lexicon which has proliferated in the wake of September 11, 2001 and the inauguration of the “War on Terror”; a lexicon and hegemonic “common sense” that continues to dominate politicians and media discussions of Muslims and politics at both home and the broader Islamicate world.

This module seeks to introduce the main approaches, methods and debates in the emerging sub-discipline of comparative political thought. It explores central intellectual discussions over the nature of both ‘comparison’ and ‘thought’, whilst striving to develop an original and innovative approach to the field, moving towards a truly ‘global’ political thought. The module is designed for students who are interested in deepening their understanding of relevant non-Western canons and assess key areas of tension with Western political and legal thinking.

The first part of the module provides an introduction to key methodological and theoretical approaches to comparative political thought. This will be done by exploring relevant debates in this newly established discipline (e.g., Mignolo, Isin, Santos, etc.). We will then pursue a specialist insight in the non-West, looking at a variety of intellectual/philosophical canons. This part of the course highlights the practical relevance of non-Western texts and traditions for present-day issues and contemporary struggles across the globe, whilst addressing the emergence of new political imaginaries and conceptual tools that challenge conventional concepts in international law and politics.

The central goal of this module is to examine and reflect upon the nature, function and operation of art and popular culture in times of war and conflict. Focusing largely on contemporary and 20th century visual production, the module draws on a selection of artworks and visual examples to critically address the following key questions:

1. What is the role of the artist/artwork in times of war and crisis?
2. Can war and terror be thought of as ‘aesthetic’ or even ‘sublime’?
3. What political, cultural and moral implications are at stake in the representation and mediation of suffering?
4. ‘War art’ or ‘war porn’?
5. What is the nature of the relationship between art, terror and terrorism?
6. What role do art and images play in the relay of historical violence and in a broader politics of memory?
7. Can the experience of pain be woven into the fabric of the image?
8. What do images have to do, if anything with bare life?
9. How is the status of the ‘real’ affected by its documentation?
10. How do art, images and monuments of war and conflict, shape as well as preserve memories of war and conflict?

Looking at key contemporary and ‘historical’ artworks and events, this module cuts across historical trajectories in order to examine both the representation of violence and the violence of representation. It investigates the various roles of art and visual culture in relation to the two World Wars, the Cold War, the cultural and ideological battles of the 1960s and 70s, the ‘armchair’ wars, the so-called ‘war on terror’ and many other conflicts in recent years. Using Agamben, Baudrillard, Virilio, Butler and others, it considers the impact of military surveillance techniques on culture, both in terms of art practices and more broadly, as experienced in everyday culture. It reflects on artists’ enduring fascination with war and terror and shows how art can be understood as a form of politics, knowledge and experience.

Economic policy and regulation are shaped by experts and cultures of expertise. This has been true at an international level for over a century, never more so than with the design of the Bretton Woods system of international monetary regulation. Today, the question of technocratic government in contexts such as the European Union is a divisive and urgent one. This module turns critical, empirical and theoretical attention on the role of experts in economies, in national, international and neo-colonial contexts. It combines history of economics and philosophy with political sociology of institutions and policy, to consider how knowledge and expertise are crucial to the governance, regulation and representation of economic activity and economic space.

Topics to be addressed include: the political "boundary work" of economics as a discipline, and its consequences; the neo-colonial power of economists in the global political economy; neoliberal expertise and technocracy; the politics of international measures and standards; and resistance to economic expertise and populism.

Students will be introduced to some key ideas on the politics of knowledge from Marion Fourcade, Anne-Marie Djelic, Michel Foucault, Philip Mirowski, Timothy Mitchell, Michel Callon, and Steven Shapin, among others.

The workings of power, authority and freedom have implications as much for our subjective, or psychic, organisation as they do for institutions and programmes of government. Psychoanalytic theory looks to the unconscious motivations of human behaviour and the strange, often perverse effects these can have on social relations. Ideas of leadership, cultural identity or personal choice, for example, involve identifications that often distort one’s sense of self and delimit its autonomy. Secret desires for subjugation to the powerful or the willful denial of suffering (in oneself or in others) are central themes of psychoanalysis. 

‘Psychopolitics’ thus comprises the fantasies, obsessions, obscene desires and precarious repressions that structure political reality and supply it objects for intimate investment. This module explores how we study politics from a psychoanalytical perspective. It focuses primarily on key texts by Freud and Lacan – as well as by other thinkers – to develop a vocabulary of psychopolitical analysis to apply to the study of contemporary events.

This module combines a variety of approaches from history, sociology, and political economy in the study of the global political economy. Its focus will be on the connection between global economic integration and domestic socio-economic transformation in the making of the contemporary world order. Further, we will examine how theories have shaped policies in the context of increasing integration of the global economy.

In the first segment of the module, we will examine some of the major scholarly contributions to political and economic theory and thought. We will further develop an interdisciplinary theoretical framework incorporating political economy and world history that will greatly aid us in the subsequent analysis of the global political economy.

The second segment of the module will trace the historical development, structure, and function of the global political economy. The theoretical framework will include a brief introduction to the national income accounting and the balance of payments, the determination of exchange rates, and different exchange rate regimes. Further, we will employ this theory to better understand the historical evolution of the International Monetary System and the role of the International Financial Institutions in the global political economy.

The last segment of the module examines the origins and nature of global trade integration with a particular emphasis on the experience of developing countries in the global economy. Key topics include the debate on trade and development, trade liberalisation, the structure and function of the International Trading System, trade policies and development strategies, political economy of Foreign Direct Investment and the impact of Transnational Corporations.

This course explores a series of key contemporary issues of environment and development. We start by examining what it means to say we are living in the age of the ‘Anthropocene’. We then examine different perspectives for thinking about the environment in political economy terms of who wins, who loses, how and why. We then take this historical and conceptual grounding to the world, exploring the environmental politics of a range of key issues energy, climate change, energy food, water, waste and the uneven impacts of global environmental decay.

How can we develop critical knowledge about migration and borders? This module explores the multiple ways migration and borders are understood and experienced in different social, geographical, and political settings, as well as in different theoretical and discursive domains. Grounded in anthropological perspectives and methods, and branching out into film, literature, and art, the module aims to destabilise dominant understandings of migration and borders. In doing so, it critically unpacks core themes at the heart of contemporary debates on transnational movement – from race to belonging, from surveillance to gender. Throughout the module we will engage with a variety of theoretical, literary, and visual materials that focus on migrant lives and border crossings to develop a critical understanding of migration and the material, political, cultural, and linguistic borders that shape it.

The module offers a strong theoretical and conceptual basis for understanding critiques of race and racialisation historically and with regard to contemporary cultural contexts and political debates. In addition, our attention to media extends beyond media objects and technologies (texts, the audio-visual and new media platforms) to include how race and ethnicity are mediated and become in everyday life through complicated and changing interrelations between discourses, emotions and bodies. Attention is focused on an examination of race critical theories and related concepts that sociologists and cultural studies theorists have used to think about the formation of ethnic and racial identities in relation to social justice, specifically the social ideals of equality, valuing diversity, and the right to live in dignity. The module explores the challenges of reconciling the analytical rigour of race critical theories and practical aims of oppositional political agendas within the contemporary conjuncture. This exploration entails using a range of historical and contemporary examples to interrogate concepts and theoretical approaches. In this sense, we do not make a priori assumptions about the content and processes that are involved in racialisation, rather we investigate them in situ.

The module provides an exploration of recent themes in feminist and cultural theory. It also allows you to explore a series of case study topics within the broad fields of gender cultural studies. You will become aware of the range of theoretical resources mobilised by feminist writers to account for, or make sense of, how bodies take shape over time. You will become familiar with the feminist approaches to questions of affect and emotion.

This module revolves around contemporary debates in the anthropology of social movements. It considers the contribution of ethnographic approaches to activism and protest to the theorisation of politics, collective action and social change. The anti-globalisation movement, #occupy, the anti-corruption movement in India, the anti-foreclosures movement in Spain (PAH), the Landless Workers' Movement, right-wing extremism, feminist reproductive health activists, independent-living activism, queer movements and the Indigenous Environmental Network are some of the examples that the module will explore. Rather than 'explaining away' these movements, the pedagogical orientation of the module is based on learning from them, i.e. devising ways of conceptualising their practice, methods and transformative power. The module will also consider, as a transversal issue, the question of 'engaged' or 'militant' research - and more broadly the relationship between the production of academic and activist knowledges.

The assessment is constructed around student projects that will present, in a multimedia portfolio format, the result of research conducted about/with social movements.

This module examines the social, cultural and political history of postcolonial London, focusing in particular on the period 1945 to 2011. It explores the progress of black political movements from the first generation of ‘Windrush’ migration, through to the struggles and challenges faced by subsequent generations. It examines political contestation and unrest as well as government policy and the progressive withdrawal of the commonwealth invitation. In parallel with the social and political, the module engages very much with the cultural and looks at how migration in London has been shaped and perceived in the past through literature, poetry, film, music, religion, food and fashion.

Interdisciplinarity is a key feature and the various intersections between history and sociology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, politics, visual cultures, literary studies and music will be explored in depth. London, as a whole, is the focus but the module will look to situate a multiracial and postcolonial London in the wider historical and historiographical contexts of post-war Britain as well as looking closer to home and considering issues particularly local to Goldsmiths including the Battle of Lewisham, the New Cross Fire and the Black People’s Day of Action. Students are encouraged to utilize existing oral history sources and/or to undertake oral histories themselves (in line with the department’s Research Ethics policy). The module will also explore shifting ideas of multiculturalism, community, and identity in London.