What could Development Studies be?

Over the past 10–15 years there has been an expansion of interest in the subject of Development Studies (DS). There are now significantly more taught courses focused on DS, and research funds are booming. However, over the same period, DS has faced sustained critiques about its essential nature. This has led us to ask: what is Development Studies? And what could or should it be?     

Revisiting the Meaning of Development: A Multidimensional Taxonomy of Developing Countries

Many have challenged the use of income per capita as the primary proxy for measuring development since Seers’s seminal works. This article continues this tradition with a more recent twist. We use cluster analysis to build a multidimensional taxonomy of developing countries using a set of indicators covering four conceptual frames on ‘development’. The value-added of the article is not to suggest that our classification is the end in itself, but – more modestly – to demonstrate that more work on taxonomies is required in light of the weakness of classifications based solely on income and the changing distribution of global poverty.     

The Double Standard in the English Divorce Laws, 1857–1923

The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 included a double standard in its provisions. While a wife's adultery was sufficient cause to end a marriage, a woman could divorce her husband only if his adultery had been compounded by another matrimonial offense. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923 granted a wife the right to divorce her husband for adultery alone and thus removed the double standard with respect to the grounds for divorce born English statutes. Although the 1923 act was contemporaneous with other reforms extending the legal rights of women, an analysis of the public debates regarding divorce reform indicates that the statute was not based solely on a desire to provide equitable matrimonial relief for husbands and wives. The belief that male adultery contributed to such sod problems as prostitution, illegitimacy, and the spread of venereal disease was as significant in the passage of the 1923 act as the demand for equal access to divorce for men and women.     

From Africa and Back

This paper intends to continue the work of the late Cheik Anta Diop and to bring it into modern times, limiting myself to the case of Ethiopia and of its philosophical literature expressed in g ‘ < ‘ z language. Cheik Anta Diop claimed that the source of Greek philosophy is the cosmogony of ancient pharaonic Egypt. This paper would like to show that the philosophy which had such a remarkable development in the Greek-speaking world (Ionia, Magna Graecia, continental Greece) came back to its place of origin, to Africa, to Egypt during the late Hellenistic period. It travelled from Egypt to Abyssinia first with works written in Egypt, by Ethiopian scholars living in the Skete monastery, and translated from Greek to g ‘ < ‘ z then with works like The Book of the Philosophers and The Life and Maxims of Sk ‘ nd ‘ s , g ‘ < ‘ z works translated and adapted from the Greek via Arabic. This cultural impact comes to an end as far as g ‘ < ‘ z philosophical literature in concerned with the Treatise of Wäldä 0 ‘ ywåt in the early 18th century.     

Epistemology and ‘evidence’ in development studies: a review of Dollar and Kraay

This paper examines the constraints on state policy autonomy engendered by globalisation. It evaluates the three major competing hypotheses on the decline in the state's inability to bargain with multinational corporations for the purpose of promoting economic development in light of two case studies of state – firm bargaining. The case studies are drawn from the mining sectors in Argentina and Chile in the late 1990s.     

Race,crime and hegemony: A review essay

Crime, Law and Social Change -     

What is Development Studies?

This article is concerned with some initial reflections on the distinctive features of Development Studies (DS). The aim is to trigger further debate, rather than attempt ‘closure’. Discussion of the nature of DS is timely because of the expansion of taught courses at various levels during the previous decade; because of sustained critiques of DS in recent years; and because DS has entered a period of introspection – illustrated by several journal special issues and events – to identify its defining characteristics. The author argues that DS is a worthwhile endeavour (how could a concern with reducing global poverty not be?), but the field of enquiry needs to think about how it addresses heterogeneity in the ‘Third World(s)’ and how it opens space for alternative ‘voices’.     

Sexual victimization against transgender women in prison: Consent and coercion in context

In this article, we conjoin two long‐standing lines of inquiry in criminology—the study of prison life and the study of sexual assault—by using original qualitative and quantitative data from 315 transgender women incarcerated in 27 California men's prisons. In so doing, we advance an analysis of the factors and processes that shape their experience of sexual victimization in prison. The results of qualitative analysis of 198 reported incidents of sexual victimization exhibit a range of types of sexual victimization experienced by transgender women in prison and reveal the centrality of relationships to their experiences of victimization. Findings from logistic regression models buttress the qualitative results, highlighting a factor that consistently and powerfully indicates vulnerability to sexual victimization is involvement in consensual sexual relationships with male prisoners. Together, the data demonstrate the prominence of intimate partner violence in prison, complicate the distinction between consent and unwanted sexual experiences in the lives of transgender women in prisons for men, and shine a light on the workings of gender in a total institution that privileges heteronormativity at the expense of the safety of transgender women in prisons for men. We discuss the implications of our findings in light of timely policy concerns.