Short Abstract

Despite its centrality to development post-1945, great power competition has largely disappeared from development scholarship. Amid today's ratcheting US-China tensions, we invite papers which seek to reengage with the renewed salience of geopolitical rivalry for 21st century development.

Description

Cold War rivalry was central to the original post-WWII foundations of development as an international agenda, with the US and Soviet Union presenting rival visions of modernisation to the decolonising world. Since the 1990s and until recently, however, the salience of great power competition has disappeared from view in a development landscape shaped under US hegemony.

Today, considerable concern exists as to the implications for the South arising from intensifying geopolitical competition between China, the United States and other major powers, alongside hope that some states might parlay this struggle for markets, production inputs, infrastructure corridors, and political allies to their own developmental advantage.

In this context, this panel invites papers which seek to once again integrate a concern for great power relationships into analyses of contemporary development. Topics may include (but are not limited to):

- Historical comparisons between contemporary development dynamics and those of previous eras, most obviously with the Cold War, but potentially extending back to prior periods;

- Attempts to conceptualise relationships between geopolitics, great power contestation and development in the present as well as historically;

- Changing development cooperation strategies of various powers (e.g. the US, China, EU, Japan, India, Brazil etc) amid the breakdown of the liberal world order;

- Developmental consequences of geopolitically-inflected shifts in the global division of labour (e.g. ‘friendshoring’, securitisation of global value chains)

- National development strategies in light of renewed great power competition (e.g. efforts to leverage strategic mineral resources, connector countries).

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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