Development, Resources & Justice: The Political Economy of Human Rights and Social Justice

Global climate change, the increase in authoritarian government worldwide, disruptions of global supply chains, and growing problems of debt have fallen with particular ferocity on the postcolonial Global South. In countries with poor public health infrastructures and millions of people already vulnerable and insecure at or below the poverty line, the pandemic has set back many of the improvements in human development of the previous decade. In addition to loss of life, millions have been thrown into abject poverty. This course addresses these and related questions of poverty in the Global South from the particular vantage point of social justice and human rights. The course is built around a set of substantive issues - what one can describe as struggles over systems of livelihood associated with access to control over key resources such as land, forests, minerals, water, food - drawing upon case studies from Latin America, South Asia and sub Saharan Africa in particular. This course seeks to understand the sorts of conflicts and struggles over these sorts of resources in postcolonial settings against a wider backdrop of the political economy of contemporary development