Corsi di Studio del Dipartimento di Culture, Politica e Società

The course aims at analyzing the place of development practices and narratives in contemporary African societies, North and South of the Sahara.

• First, it intends to provide theoretical and methodological instruments to analyze the interwoven sociopolitical, economic and cultural dynamics implied by development actions, emphasizing the articulations between the dynamics of the “above” and the “below”, the past and the present, the global and the local. By this approach, the course aims at making students aware of the plurality and complexity of the social processes underpinning development actions in practice.
• Second the course will develop a critical perspective on development discourses and practices, which naturalize universal teleological representations of economic and social progress, and interpret African societies as exceptions. It will show that the institutional and expert perspectives may be fruitful objects to analyze the exercise of power. Using a historicized and comparative perspective, it will also help problematizing the changes of development policies and ideas and their effect.

At the end of the course students are expected to:

• be familiar with a methodological perspective combining a series of complementary tools to analyze development discourses and practices, taken from historical sociology of politics, anthropology of development, public policy analysis, international political sociology;
• be able to critically analyze development processes, whose expertise, frameworks of thought and rationalities often generate tensions and power struggles when they are employed in real
  political contexts;
• be capable to accurately construct analytical arguments, in a variety of written and oral formats, problematizing African political societies beyond normative representation of development and of Africa as a monolithic political space, naturally incline to underdevelopment.

The course consists in 30 hours of lectures taught by Visiting Professor and 6 hours of seminars coordinated by Irene Bono. Students will  be actively engaged in learning, and will be asked to apply and contextualize the theoretical concepts acquired in specific case studies.

Assessment will be based on two formats:

- an oral presentation during the course, starting from the reading lists provided by the teachers. The bibliographic material will be presented and discussed with the class and with the teachers to verify the argumentative abilities of the students. The oral presentation will be evaluated with a maximum score of 12.

- a written essay to be delivered at the end of the course, answering a question that will be previously illustrated and discussed with the class. The written test aims to assess the familiarity gained with the theoretical and methodological debates addressed during the course. The written test will be evaluated with a maximum score of 20.

The evaluation of the two tests will take into consideration: the student's ability to analyze and critically examine the topic proposed through the tools acquired during the course; the student's ability to refer to the various documents studied during the teaching; the student's ability to critically use the different concepts and terminologies addressed during the teaching; the coherence and logic of the analysis.

The final grade will be expressed in thirtieths and will correspond to the algebraic sum of the scores obtained in the two tests.

Questioning the notions of "Africa" and "development" will be the starting point for approaching concrete political situations in historical perspective. Standing on a wide range of empirical examples from both Northern, Sub-Saharan and Southern Africa, its main aim will be to explore political processes and development practices by outlining the core actors in these processes and the roles that they can play. Particular attention will be devoted to the process of State formation and transformation in Africa and to the interplays between national political processes and international development aid, humanitarian actions, conflict management. Particular attention will also be given to the changing conceptions of development over time. The teaching module taught by Visiting Professor will be organized in 15 sessions of 2 hours. The thematic outline will be as follows :

1. & 2. Introduction to some social sciences tools liable to study development from a political perspective (3h)

• Development policies are the product of situated historical situations, and are co-produced by a variety of actors, from Africa and outside
• Methods liable to study development situations include anthropology of development, historical sociology of politics, sociology of public policies, international political sociology

Indicative bibliography :

• Cooper et R. M. Packard, “Introduction”, in F. Cooper et R. M. Packard (dir.), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997, pp. 1­41.
• M. Hodge, « Writing the History of Development (Part 2: Longer, Deeper, Wider) », Humanity, Spring 2016, p. 125-174

2. & 3. Development paradigms in History (3h)

• The succession of paradigms since late colonialism
• Development discourse as hegemony
• Uncertainty and plurality in the shift between development paradigms

Indicative bibliography :

• M. Hodge, « Writing the History of Development (Part 1 : The First Wave) », Humanity, vol. 6, n° 3, 2015 p. 429-463
• Moore, « Development Discourse as Hegemony : Towards an Intellectual History », in D. Moore et G. Schmitz (dir.), Debating Development Discourse: Institutionnal and Popular Perspectives, New York/Londres, St Martin Press/MacMillan, 1995.
• John Ravenhill « Adjustment with Growth : A Fragile Consensus », The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 26, n° 2, 1988, p. 179-210 ; et « A Second Decade of Adjustment: Greater Uncertainty, Greater Complexity», in T. Callaghy et J. Ravenhill (dir.), Hemmed In: Responses to Africa’s Economic Decline, New York, Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 18-53.
• Aram Ziai, « The Millennium Development Goals: back to the future? », Third World Quarterly, 32:1, 2011,  27-43.

4. Delegation, privatization, ngo-ization (2h)

• Ideological roots of privatization and liberalization
• Privatization and ngo-ization as reconfigurations of the State and modes of government

Indicative bibliography :

• Béatrice Hibou. Privatizing the State. Hurst & Co, 2004
• Elyachar, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo, Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., 2005.
• Mann, From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: the Road to Nongovernmentality, Cambridge University Press, 2015

5. Economic technocracy as social and political process (2h)

• How to make the analysis of economic management tools an (interesting) entry point to study sociopolitical relations?
• Historical, anthropological and political perspectives

Indicative bibliography :

• Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, Expanded Edition, London: Zed Books, 2003
• Harper. « The social organization of the IMF’s Mission work. An examination of international Auditing. », in M. Strathern, (dir.) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, Routledge, Londres, 2000, pp.21-53.
• Mitchell, « Fixing The Economy », Cultural Studies, vol. 12, n° 1, 1998, p. 82-101.
• Jerven, Poor numbers: how we are misled by African development statistics and what to do about it, Ithaca (N.Y.), 2013.
• Samuel, “Studying Africa’s large numbers”, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, vol. 71st year, no. 4, 2016, pp. 897-922.

6. Indicators and rankings in neoliberal Africa (2h)

• Historical genesis of development rankings and scales
• The use and abuse of indicators in development

Indicative bibliography :

• Desrosières, A. (2015). Retroaction: How indicators feed back onto quantified actors. In R. Rottenburg, S. Merry, S. Park, & J. Mugler (Eds.), The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society, pp. 329-353). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Park, S. (2015). ‘Nobody is going to die’: An ethnography of hope, indicators and improvizations in HIV treatment programmes in Uganda. In R. Rottenburg, S. Merry, S. Park, & J. Mugler (Eds.), The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society, pp. 188-219). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316091265.008
• In French : Boris SAMUEL « L’Education Pour Tous au Burkina Faso. Une production bureaucratique du réel. », in B. Hibou (dir.), La bureaucratisation néolibérale, La Découverte, 2013, pp. 263-290.

7. & 8. Towards new social states? (3h)

• The shift towards social transfers targeted to populations identified as “poor”
• The new technologies of persons identification
• Practical difficulties and political economy of these new technologies

Indicative bibliography :

• Ferguson, « What Comes After the Social? Historicizing the Future of Social Assistance and Identity Registration in Africa », in in K. Breckenridge et S. Szreter (dir.), Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History, Londres, British Academy, 2012, pp. 495
• Rossi, « Dependence, Unfreedom and Slavery in Africa : Toward an Integrated Analysis », Africa, vol. 86, n° 3, 2016, p. 517-590.
• Breckenridge, The Biometric State. The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present, Cambridge University Press, 2014 (chap. 6) pp. 164-195
• J.P. Olivier de Sardan & E. Piccoli “Cash Transfers and the Revenge of Contexts. An Introduction”, in J.P. Olivier de Sardan & E. Piccoli  (eds) Cash Transfers in Context. An Anthropological Perspective, London, Berghahn, 2018

8. & 9. Financializing development (3h)

• Since the 2000s, a new set of legitimate actors in development
• Indebtment as a social and political relation
• The ambivalence of financial inclusion

Indicative bibliography :

• DUCASTEL A., ANSEEUW, W. (2017). The assetization of South African farmland. The role of finance and farmland brokers. In Finance at work, Valérie Boussard, Routeledge.
• Breckenridge, « Biometric Capitalism: Infrastructures of Identification and Credit Risk on the African Continent in the 21st Century », Truth measures conference, Berlin April 2016 (https://www.hkw.de/en/app/mediathek/video/50469)
• Guérin I. (2014) Juggling with debt, social ties and values, Current Anthropology, vol. LV, no 9, 2014, p. S40-S50.

10. Governance in/of/through conflict (2h)

• The social construction of conflicts by international organizations
• Development policies and technocratic governance in conflict situations
• Are emergency or crisis situations, opportunities for African States?

Indicative bibliography :

• Didier Péclard Delphine Mechoulan “Rebel Governance and the Politics of Civil War”, Swisspeace Working Paper, 1 / 2015 In L. Goetschel (Ed.), The Politics of Peace: From Ideology to Pragmatism?, Münster: LIT Verlag, 95-106
• François Enten, FOOD AID AND THE POLITICS OF NUMBERS IN ETHIOPIA (2002-2004), November 2008 - CRASH/Fondation - Médecins Sans Frontières

11. The enlighted elites of development (2h)

• Emerging Africa’s enlighted despots and visionaries
• Are African administrative elites responsible of post-colonial domination relations?

Indicative bibliography :

• Alden Young « African Bureaucrats and the Exhaustion of the Developmental State: Lessons from the Pages of Sudanese Economist », Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2017, pp. 49-75
• Mamadou Diouf, “Senegalese development: From Mass Mobilization to Technocratic Elitism.”, in Frederick COOPER et Randall M. PACKARD (dir.), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997
• Laura Mann & Marie Berry, « Understanding the Political Motivations That Shape Rwanda's Emergent Developmental State », New Political Economy, 21:1, 2016 119-144

12. The enlighted subalterns of development (2h)

• Development and popular economies
• The demand for social inclusion and modernization of the State
• When development institutions support social movements

Indicative bibliography :

• Goldstone et J. Obarrio (dir.), African Futures: Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Prince Ruth J., « ‘Tarmacking’ in the Millenium City: Spatial and Temporal Trajectories of Empowerment and Development in Kisumu, Kenya », Africa, n° 83, (4), 2013, p.582-605.

• Roitman, Fiscal desobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004 (introduction)
• Guyer, An African Niche Economy: Farming to Feed Ibadan, 1968-88, Edinburgh/Londres, Edinburgh University Press/ the International African Institute, 1997.

13. & 14. Democratization and development (3h)

• history of democratization since independence
• New types of mobilizations since the 2000s

Bibliography to be announced.

14. & 15. Conclusion : the new development orthodoxies and their social and political dimension (3h)

• Norms and transgressions
• Hegemonic development discourses
• Knowledge production about development

Bibliography to be announced.

The reading list for attending students is indicated in the detailed outline of the program (English version).

Non-attending students will have to contact the teacher by e-mail who will assign them a specific program.