IA STD 1

Development

A broad measure of how socially, economically, and technologically advanced a country is. In the course slides, development includes economic well-being, education, social equality, health, and nutrition, with the broader goal of expanding people’s life chances and choices.

Uneven development

The large gap between the world’s most developed and least developed countries. The course asks us to explain why some countries are rich and others poor rather than treating those differences as natural.

Neoliberalism

An economic approach emphasizing free trade, free markets, smaller government, reduced welfare spending, and individualism. The course notes that neoliberal policies accelerated globalization but also created new winners and losers.

Inequality

A relative concept: the unequal distribution of resources, opportunities, or privileges among people or groups. It can be social, categorical, or economic.

Poverty

An absolute concept referring to not having enough resources to meet basic needs. Unlike inequality, poverty does not depend on how much other people have.

Equity

Whether rules, opportunities, and processes are fair. Equity does not require everyone to end with the same outcome.

Gini coefficient

A measure of income or wealth inequality across a population. 0 = perfect equality; 1 = perfect inequality. A higher Gini means greater inequality.

Birdsall — main argument

Inequality matters because of its consequences. It can inhibit economic growth and poverty reduction, distort politics and public policy, and weaken civic and social life, potentially allowing inequality to reproduce itself.

Inequality — example

The course uses Brazil and South Africa as examples: the richest 20% of households earn more than 25 times what the poorest 20% earn. Birdsall also contrasts lower-inequality, faster-growing East Asian economies with higher-inequality, slower-growing Latin American economies.

Unequal equilibrium trap

Birdsall’s idea that inequality can become socially accepted and self-reinforcing. As people become accustomed to unequal outcomes, redistribution becomes harder, which can allow inequality of opportunity and poverty to persist.

Chang, Thing 1 — main argument

There is no such thing as a completely free market. Every market operates through rules and restrictions; a market only looks 'free' when its existing rules are so familiar that people stop noticing them.

Free market

A market with relatively limited government restrictions. Chang’s point is that no market is literally free because all markets depend on laws and rules about who can participate, what can be sold, contracts, property, labor, and other boundaries.

Free market — example

Child-labor laws show Chang’s point: banning child labor restricts who may participate in the labor market, yet people still describe that labor market as 'free.' The example shows that what counts as acceptable market regulation is political rather than natural.

Chang, Thing 7 — main argument

Free-market policies rarely make poor countries rich. Chang argues that many developing countries grew faster under protectionism and government intervention than after liberalization, and that today’s rich countries also used substantial government protection and intervention while developing.

Protectionism

Government policies that protect domestic industries from foreign competition, such as tariffs, import restrictions, subsidies, or other support. Chang argues these policies can help developing industries become competitive.

Free-market development — example

Chang contrasts free-market claims with cases such as the United States during its earlier development and modern China: both used extensive state intervention and protection rather than pure free-market policies while achieving major growth.

Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs)

Economic policy packages associated with the IMF and World Bank that required indebted countries to adopt policies such as deregulation, privatization, currency devaluation, trade liberalization, reduced protections, and cuts to government/social spending.

Chang, Thing 11 — main argument

Africa is not destined for underdevelopment because of climate, geography, resources, ethnicity, institutions, or culture. Chang argues that these factors cannot explain the timing of Africa’s economic stagnation; the shift toward free-market and structural-adjustment policies around the 1980s is more important.

Structural adjustment — example

Sub-Saharan Africa grew at about 1.6% per capita in the 1960s–70s while its supposed structural disadvantages were already present. Growth collapsed after the shift toward SAPs in the 1980s, alongside industrial decline, greater dependence on primary commodities, and government spending cuts.

Geography is not destiny — example

Chang points to rich landlocked countries such as Switzerland and Austria. Their success shows that being landlocked can create difficulties, but institutions, technology, infrastructure, and policy can overcome geographical disadvantages.

Hickel — main argument

The standard development story is backwards. Rich and poor countries are not separate units moving along the same natural path; their histories are interconnected through colonialism, extraction, unequal economic relations, and later policies. Aid can distract attention from these structural relationships.

Development delusion

The belief that poor countries are simply at an earlier stage of the same natural development path followed by rich countries, rather than considering how historical extraction and exploitation helped create the divide.

Methodological nationalism

The analytical mistake of treating countries as separate, self-contained units instead of examining the historical and transnational relationships connecting them.

Aid paradigm

A way of framing global poverty in which rich countries are presented primarily as helpers giving aid to poor countries. Hickel argues this can obscure larger flows of wealth and resources from the Global South to the Global North.

Aid paradigm — example

The lecture notes that in 2012 developing countries received about $2 trillion in aid, investment, and income from abroad but experienced about $5 trillion in outflows, for a net loss of roughly $3 trillion. The professor cautions that the exact figures are debated and should be used mainly to illustrate the broader pattern.

Development narrative — example

Truman’s 1949 Point Four speech framed poor countries as 'underdeveloped' and in need of Western knowledge and assistance. The course uses it to show how development stories can make inequality seem natural and erase the history connecting rich and poor countries.

War — mainstream definition

War is commonly understood as sustained, coordinated, large-scale, organized, reciprocal violence involving states, non-state actors, or groups within states, usually treated as a distinct period in time and space.

Barkawi — main argument

Conventional war studies are Eurocentric because European interstate wars became the model for 'real' war. Barkawi argues that colonial Small Wars reveal a broader picture in which force is an ordinary part of politics, war is often transnational and hierarchical, and war and society shape one another.

Eurocentrism

Treating European histories, categories, and experiences as the universal standard for understanding the world.

Small War

Colonial or imperial conflicts often classified as insurgencies, uprisings, emergencies, interventions, or police actions rather than 'real' war. Barkawi uses them to challenge conventional definitions of war.

War/peace binary

The assumption that war and peace are opposites: war is exceptional, large-scale, and confined to wartime, while peace is the normal and nonviolent condition.

Battle/repression schema

Barkawi’s alternative to the war/peace binary. Battle means reciprocal armed resistance or fighting; repression means coercion by police, colonizers, security forces, spies, death squads, or the threat of force.

Permanent war

Barkawi’s idea that, from a postcolonial perspective, force and repression can be continuous parts of political order rather than rare interruptions of peace.

War periodization — example

The Russia–Ukraine conflict shows why wars are hard to confine to one clean beginning and end: the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, but the conflict also includes Crimea and the Donbas beginning in 2014, plus cyberwarfare, irregular fighters, and political coercion.