Department of International Development

Study at the number one-ranked university in the world for Development Studies (QS World Universities Rankings by Subject 2025) and one of the longest-established centres of international development expertise.

In the Department of International Development, our staff and students engage with key global issues and seek to achieve greater social and environmental justice. We critically analyse colonial and institutional legacies, explore contemporary struggles and work towards real social change.

Across the University of Sussex, we challenge dominant understandings of what development is, who it is for and who it is done by. Moving beyond simplistic ideas of ‘North’ and ‘South’, we examine the complexities of how issues affect people around the world in different ways, engaging with critical questions about where we are, how we got here and where we are going.

Studying International Development

As an International Development student or researcher at Sussex, you’ll learn from world-leading academics who are committed to social justice and challenging global inequality, marginalisation and exclusion.

We believe that learning shouldn’t only happen in a lecture hall and that understanding the world requires engagement with it. We bring International Development issues to life in how we teach and research, whether that be through working in close collaboration with those we study or in how we organise our learning spaces. This means that our teaching and research are collaborative, opening up the university as a space for critical thinking and community building.

As an International Development student at Sussex, you will:

engage with activists, policymakers and practitioners who work directly on issues of social and environmental justice
tackle practical and skill-based tasks in and outside of the classroom that give you a taste of different kinds of work
be supported in your own research on the issues that you care most about.

Undergraduate study

As an undergraduate student of International Development at Sussex, you can focus exclusively on International Development in our core BA, study it as a joint honours degree with Geography, International Relations, Anthropology, Economics or Sociology, or combine it with a language.

We also offer the UK’s first degree for Climate Justice, Sustainability and Development.

Whichever degree you choose, you will be able to develop a pathway that matches your interests and passions. We will support you every step of the way – from succeeding in the classroom to gaining practical experience for your future career.

See our undergraduate International Development courses.

Postgraduate study

We offer both Masters courses and PhD degrees for postgraduate students. You will join a vibrant postgraduate community in the School of Global Studies and can take advantage of our research and postgraduate teaching links with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit (SPRU), the Centre for International Education (CIE) and the School of Business, Management and Economics.

We offer a wide range of Masters courses, from Social Development to Environment, Development and Policy or Gender, Violence and Conflict, alongside a wide range of interdisciplinary options. Our courses are flexible and designed to be tailored to your interests - and can be studied part-time allowing you to fit your studies around your work and life commitments.

See our postgraduate International Development courses.

Global careers

Studying International Development at Sussex gives you a pathway into a number of development-focused organisations, but you will also gain a range of skills and knowledge to both find what you want to do in the world and help you get there.

We will equip you to engage with the debates and spaces where development happens. You will develop the knowledge, skills and confidence to change the world for the better, whether you choose to become a policymaker, NGO worker, activist, or wherever you find yourself in your future career.

First in the world for Development Studies

We’re ranked first in the world for Development Studies, in partnership with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) based on the Sussex campus.

Some research projects

Postcolonial library legacies and new transnational maps of learning (2023-2026)

Sussex International Development Leverhulme Early Career Fellow Alice Corble

Since 2015, when the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ student-led movement erupted at the University of Cape Town, calls to decolonise universities have gained traction internationally. Yet there have been few tangible outcomes for British universities, with widespread misunderstanding and controversy about what ‘decolonising’ means in academic contexts. A recent Higher Education Policy Institute report underlines this and calls for urgent action to address a ‘silent crisis’. This project addresses this problem by evidencing two key overlooked dimensions that underpin it: (i) the historical geopolitical dynamics of international university development between Britain and the rest of the world, and (ii) the crucial role of libraries and archives in shaping and mediating the colonial roots and legacies of global knowledge production and education.

The University of Sussex and its Library and Archive are key nodes in transnational networks of postcolonial HE development, based on Sussex’s position as the first of Britain’s ‘new universities’ established in 1961 with a local and global mission to draw ‘a new map of learning’ in contexts of shifting race relations via development of Commonwealth states and new patterns of immigration. The PI’s previous AHRC-RLUK-funded research (University of Sussex Library, 2021-22) has demonstrated significant legacy connections between Sussex and the University of the West Indies and various South African universities, libraries, and scholar-activist movements. The present project builds on these findings via a multi-sited ethnographic study of these transnational field sites, exploring past and present politics and material conditions of education and knowledge production.

This path-breaking project bridges disciplinary gaps and makes the case for HE institutions to take their colonial histories seriously by understanding the integral role of libraries and communities in both mediating, shaping and repairing these legacies. The project outputs will include publications and open educational resources co-produced with research participants in Caribbean and South African academic, archival and activist communities. These outputs will combine to form new global maps of learning that make visible and audible cartographies of knowledge and power that trace both epistemically violent pasts and reparative, fertile futures.
Protracted displacement economies (2020-2023)

Sussex International Development Researchers: Anne-Meike Fechter and Priya Deshingkar.

Around the world refugees and displaced people remain in limbo, unable to return home, unwanted where they are living and facing increasing difficulties to go anywhere else. The majority of refugees in the world have been in these situations for more than five years, a threshold usually referred to as ‘protracted’. As crises become prolonged, the limitations of the humanitarian response have long been recognised as insufficient and inadequate. Refugees and Internally Displaced People caught up in these protracted situations often speak of watching their lives ‘draining away’. The model of support offered to displaced people is known by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) as ‘care and maintenance’ but perhaps more accurately by advocates of a radical change to this policy as the ‘warehousing’ of refugees. Global policy interest is shifting from short term humanitarianism to longer term development focused responses to protracted displacement. This was most recently indicated by the Global Compact on Refugees, in December 2018. The Refugee Compact introduces positive language around the long-term self reliance of refugees. This project responds to this renewed political will to find new solutions to protracted displacement and builds on a large body of research and advocacy work in this area. The project investigates the replacement of the care and maintenance model with a new approach: the protracted displacement economy. The protracted displacement economy introduces two key innovations that will contribute to this original analysis as well the potential for impact. First, it is a whole of society approach. The focus is not just on displaced people but the ‘displacement affected community’, that includes the heterogeneous ‘host’ population, amongst others. The second key innovation is a fundamental shift in the understanding of the transactions that drive the protracted displacement economy. Financial transactions are the stuff of most economic analysis, yet key human interactions and exchanges or gifts, collective organisation, care work and mutual aid are largely non-financial.
Analysing the transnational provisioning of healthcare in England, China and India (2019-2022)

Sussex International Development Researchers: Paul Gilbert

The guests of honour at the 2019 PricewaterhouseCooper Annual International Development Conference were the Chair of the Select Committee on International Development, and the Permanent Secretary to the Department for International Development (DFID). The presence of these luminaries reflects the increasing prominence of management consulting companies working within the aid and development sector. A glance at McKinsey’s ‘International Development’ website indicates why they would be interested in such an industry event. It promises fresh perspectives, analytical rigour and innovative solutions to bear on the world’s most urgent and complex issues. Tangible results are to be delivered quickly. These claims are persuasive – in March 2020, for example, DFID appointed McKinsey to administer the £70 million Invest Africa project. This represents just a small slice of the ODA budget directed to the for-profit development sector. Development consultants and development contractors now permeate all aspects of the global development sector, and are increasingly the partners of choice against the backdrop of a wider ‘private sector’ turn. Our principal objective in this project is to explore the growing roles played within the UK's development landscape by: (a) management consultancy firms with international development interests; and (b) development contractors – firms for whom winning and implementing development contracts is their core business. This will involve both quantitative and qualitative exploration of aid flows; focus groups, Q sorts and interviews with contractors, consultants and policy makers; and case studies of projects involving consultants and contractors in Uuanda, Kenya, Tanzania, India, South Africa, Brazil, and Bangladesh.