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Paper short abstract:

Many of the classical insights from development studies provide crucial lenses into the deep systemic crisis currently facing large parts of the Global South. Recent calls to remake the field risk abetting a politics of obfuscation in the face of aggressive reassertions of Northern dominance.

Paper long abstract:

The suggestion that development studies is no longer fit for purpose given changes in the world order is poorly timed with the deep systemic crisis currently facing large parts of the Global South. Rather, many of the foundational insights from early development economics, for instance, provide crucial lenses to understand the structures underlying the current crisis. Even if the global context has in many ways changed, certain underlying principles are as relevant as ever, even if obscured by moments of exuberance, such during gluts of international liquidity. One of the most central, which has reasserted itself with an aggressive if not violent vengeance, is the principle of external constraints that was central to structuralist thought in early development economics. Insights from structuralism and dependency theory also remain extremely relevant today with the increasing depth and extensiveness of foreign ownership in the Global South, and how this, combined with external constraints, structures the economies of these countries and drives particular forms of polarization and inequality. Lessons from the 1980s are also vital as many countries are being thrown back into similar situations of severe austerity and the revival of structural adjustment programmes in all but name, which many had myopically thought dead only a decade ago. These issues will be examined theoretically and empirically from the perspective of the current crisis, with the suggestion that recent calls to contest and remake the field risk abetting a politics of distraction and obfuscation in the face of aggressive reassertions of Northern dominance.