Reframing development theory: the significance of the idea of uneven and combined development

Abstract

This article spells out the significance for Development Theory of the idea of Buneven and combined development.^It argues that the impasse that afflicted materialist theories of international capitalist development in the 1980s was rooted in two fundamental problems: a misreading of Marx's categories as directly historical; and the lack of an orienting method for deploying those categories to interpret a world of multiple and interacting societies. After reviewing the impact of these problems on the evolution of the main postwar approaches to development, the article undertakes the task of reconstruction in three steps. First, it sets out Marx's understanding of capitalist modernity, showing how this calls for but does not explicitly provide a historical conceptualization of capitalist development. Second, it shows how Trotsky's idea of Buneven and combined development^offers such a conceptualization, and how it thereby historicizes the phenomenon of development itself. Finally, it considers the limits of Trotsky's own formulation of the idea, and suggests how a version released from these limits could better explain the complex spatio-temporality of capitalist development and constructively engage the most consequential challenges posed by ascendant cultural approaches in the field.

Results and prospects: an introduction to the CRIA special issue on UCD

“…And his sentences suggest a subterranean influence of UCD even during the Cold War, when Trotsky's name was anathema on both the right and the (Stalinist) left. 5 For examples, see respectively: IPE (Germann 2018), Development Studies (Makki 2015), World History (Buzan and Lawson 2015), Comparative Literature (WReC 2015), Law (Brophy 2017), Geography (Dunford and Liu 2016), Anthropology (Kasmir and Gill 2018), Archeology (Steel 2010) and Historical Sociology (Anievas and Matin 2016).…”

“12th Street is Dead”: Techno-Heritage and Neoliberal Contestation in the Maya Riviera

“…These points of contestation must be understood as taking place in a capitalist economic order defined by its unevenness (Gill and Kasmir 2016). Under this framing, capitalism does not follow a linear historical progression inclusive of all under its domain but is instead an ever-shifting topography in which development in one area of the world occurs at the detriment, exclusion, or exploitation of another (Tsing 2005(Tsing , 2015Makki 2015;Howard 2018). The staying power of capitalist systems of value extraction are as indeterminate as their imagined benefit, since such systems can deteriorate over time due to localized resistance (Cornet 2015), the emergence of new zones of extraction (Mitchell 2013), or through the strains and externalities created by the exhaustion of an area's resources (Holleman 2017).…”

A Spatial Perspective of Innovation and Development: Innovation Hubs in Zambia and the UK

“…Then dependency theory highlights the issue in this model that economic and political power are heavily concentrated and centralised in the industrialised countries, creating a dependence of poorer countries on the advanced economies for domestic accumulation and economic growth. Such a dependency dominates the path of development and presents only one direction for progression [13]. Therefore, development is seen as a single path for all countries and the difference between rich and poor countries is only temporal.…”