The Struggle for Development, SOAS University of London

This Development studies Seminar titled “The Struggle for Development” was given by Dr Benjamin Selwyn at SOAS University of London on 1 November 2016

You can find out more about this event at https://goo.gl/VigB4c
Find out more about Development Studies at SOAS at https://www.soas.ac.uk/development/

Mainstream development thinking – whether (neo) liberal, statist and some Marxist variants – is founded upon a fundamental paradox. It advocates the oppression and exploitation of the poor in the name of helping the poor. It is authoritarian while proclaiming its love for democracy. It claims that for the poor to be free in the future they have to be unfree in the present. In this lecture Benjamin Selwynex poses the anti-poor sentiments that underpin development thinking. He argues for a radical alternative which he labels labour-led development. Here the poor - the world’s labouring classes -are the agents of their own development. Through their collective actions they oppose and resist the authoritarian imperatives of top-down development and bring about real improvements to their and their communities’ conditions. Selwyn provides contemporary empirical examples of labour-led development. He also speculates about what a non-exploitative form of development might look like.

Ben Selwyn is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the School of Global Studies, International Development, at the University of Sussex. His research interests include the formation, functioning and transformation of global value chains and their impacts on, and emergence out of, historical and contemporary processes of global development. He has authored the books Workers, State and Development in Brazil: Powers of Labour, Chains of Value (2012, Manchester University Press),which was shortlisted for the 2013 BISA International Political Economy Group book prize, and The Global Development Crisis (2014, Polity) which addresses the central paradox of our times - the simultaneous presence of wealth on an unprecedented scale, and mass poverty. The book advances the concept of 'Labour-Centred Development' as a means of overcoming this paradox. His research interests include the formation, functioning and transformation of global value chains and their impacts on, and emergence out of, historical and contemporary processes of global development.

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