The central focus of this required graduate seminar and advanced undergraduate course will be to engage social-science debates about politics, institutions, and development. An important question guiding this seminar will be: what are the conditions under which subordinate groups, communities and classes can push socioeconomic and political development toward a societal democracy in the age of neoliberal globalization to reduce or eliminate inequalities? First, we will read texts by or about some of the most classical theorists of economic development like Albert O. Hirschman, Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado. One common feature of their work is that they paid attention to cultural and political determinants of economic development. We will then read on changes brought about by neoliberal globalism since the 1980s, including financialization, land grabbing, the challenges for indigenous peoples, populism, social movements and the neoliberal food regime. Next, we will read Thomas Piketty’s 2022 book, A Brief History of Equality. It is based on his Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), the most influential study about inequality in capitalism. Piketty’s 2014 book became a historical academic bestseller and provoked numerous scholarly and policy debates which continue into the 2020s. Finally, we will try to decipher what are the conditions for societal transformation both from below (civil society organizations) and from above (institutions of the state or political society). The institutions of the state, therefore, are not seen as monolithic structures that always function to reproduce dominant power; they are also penetrated by social contradictions and can be used by organized forces of the dominated to push for progressive social change.

The course will provide students the opportunity to read extensively about development and inequality. Students will finish the course with an intermediate-to-advanced level of knowledge of the main theoretical and critical perspectives from several disciplines in the social sciences about issues confronting developing countries. They will acquire a broad range of conceptual and analytical tools for examining the politics, institutions and development across a diverse range of countries, primarily but not only of the Global South.