Susie Jolly, Andrea Cornwall & Kate Hawkins (eds.), Women, Sexuality, and the Political, Power of Pleasure  (Zed Books, 2013)

This pioneering collection explores the ways in which positive, pleasure-focused approaches to sexuality can empower women. Gender and development tends to engage with sexuality only in relation to violence and ill-health. Important as this is in challenging violence against women, this negative emphasis dovetails with conservative ideologies associating women’s sexualities with danger and fear. On the other hand, the media, the pharmaceutical industry and pornography celebrate the pleasures of sex in ways that can be just as oppressive, often implying that only certain types of people – young, heterosexual, able-bodied, HIV-negative – are eligible for sexual pleasure. Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure brings together challenges to these strictures and exclusions with examples of activism, advocacy and programming from around the world that use pleasure as an entry point for enhancing equality and empowerment for all.

Peter Aggleton, Paul Boyce, Henrietta L Moore, Richard Parker (eds.), Understanding Global Sexualities - New Frontiers  (Routledge, June 2012)

Over the course of the past thirty years, there has been an explosion of work on sexuality, both conceptually and methodologically. From a relatively limited, specialist field, the study of sexuality has expanded across a wide range of social sciences. Yet as the field has grown, it has become apparent that a number of leading edge critical issues remain.

This theory-building book explores some of the areas in which there is major and continuing debate, for example, about the relationship between sexuality and gender; about the nature and status of heterosexuality; about hetero- and homo-normativity; about the influence and intersection of class, race, age and other factors in sexual trajectories, identities and lifestyles; and about how best to understand the new forms of sexuality that are emerging in both rich world and developing world contexts.

With contributions from leading and new scholars and activists from across the globe, this book highlights tensions or ‘flash-points’ in contemporary debate, and offers some innovative ways forward in terms of thinking about sexuality – both theoretically and with respect to policy and programme development.

James Carrier & Peter Luetchford (eds.)   Ethical Consumption: Social Value and Economic Practice  (London: Berghahn Books, March 2012)

Increasingly, consumers in North America and Europe see their purchasing as a way to express to the commercial world their concerns about trade justice, the environment and similar issues. This ethical consumption has attracted growing attention in the press and among academics. Extending beyond the growing body of scholarly work on the topic in several ways, this volume focuses primarily on consumers rather than producers and commodity chains. It presents cases from a variety of European countries and is concerned with a wide range of objects and types of ethical consumption, not simply the usual tropical foodstuffs, trade justice and the system of fair trade. Contributors situate ethical consumption within different contexts, from common Western assumptions about economy and society, to the operation of ethical-consumption commerce, to the ways that people’s ethical consumption can affect and be affected by their social situation. By locating consumers and their practices in the social and economic contexts in which they exist and that their ethical consumption affects, this volume presents a compelling interrogation of the rhetoric and assumptions of ethical consumption.

Katy Gardner,  Discordant Development: Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh   (London: Pluto Press, Feb. 2012)

What happens when a vast multinational mining company operates a gas plant situated close to four densely populated villages in rural Bangladesh? How does its presence contribute to local processes of ‘development’? And what do corporate claims of ‘community engagement’ involve? Drawing from author Katy Gardner’s longstanding relationship with the area, Discordant Development reveals the complex and contradictory ways that local people attempt to connect to, and are disconnected by, foreign capital.

Everyone has a story to tell: whether of dispossession and scarcity, the success of Corporate Social Responsibility, or imperialist exploitation and corruption. Yet as Gardner argues, what really matters in the struggles over resources is which of these stories are heard, and the power of those who tell them.

Based around the discordant narratives of dispossessed land owners, urban activists, mining officials and the rural landless, Discordant Development touches on some of the most urgent economic and political questions of our time, including resource ownership and scarcity, and the impact of foreign investment and industrialisation on global development.

Ben Selwyn,  Workers, State and Development in Brazil: Powers of labour, chains of value  (Manchester University Press, Feb 2012)

How do changing class relations contribute to processes of capitalist development?

Within development studies the importance of class relations is usually relegated to lesser status than the roles of states and markets in generating and allocating resources. This book argues that the changing class relations are central to different patterns of capitalist development and that processes and outcomes of class struggle co-determine the form that development takes.

Workers, state and development in Brazil illuminates these claims through a detailed empirical investigation of class dynamics and capitalist development in North East Brazil’s São Francisco valley. It details how workers in the valley’s export grape sector have won significant concessions from employers, contributing to a progressive pattern of regional capitalist development.

Dinah Rajak,  In Good Company - An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility  (Stanford University Press, 2011)

Under the banner of corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporations have become increasingly important players in international development. These days, CSR's union of economics and ethics is virtually unquestioned as an antidote to harsh neoliberal reforms and the delinquency of the state, but nothing is straightforward about this apparently win-win formula. Chronicling transnational mining corporation Anglo American's pursuit of CSR, In Good Company explores what lies behind the movement's marriage of moral imperative and market discipline.

From the company's global headquarters to its mineshafts in South Africa, Rajak reveals how CSR enables the corporation to accumulate and exercise power. Interested in CSR's vision of social improvement, Rajak highlights the dependency that the practice generates. This close examination of Africa's largest private sector employer not only brings critical attention to the dangers of corporate dominance, but also provides a lens through which to reflect on the wider global CSR movement.

Russell King and Julie Vullnetari, Remittances, Gender and Development: Albania's Society and Economy in Transition  (I.B.Tauris, July 2011).

Migration in the modern world, rather than being seen as a symptom or result of underdevelopment, is now understood more as a route towards development and a strategy for alleviating poverty. This study of Albania is particularly significant in this new debate on migration and development as, since the fall of communism, remittances have been a major supporter of the Albanian economy, sustaining many Albanian families, especially in rural areas. The authors thus focus on the socio-cultural context of remittances, and explore how gender emerges as a powerful facet in the processes of development. It will therefore be of interest to scholars and students in Migration Studies, Development Studies, Gender Studies, Geography and Anthropology, as well as offering vital analysis for policy-makers, donors and civil society activists engaged in development planning and migration management.

Maya Unnithan-Kumar and Soraya Tremayne (eds), Fatness and the Maternal Body: Women's Experiences of Corporeality and the Shaping of Social Policy (Berghahn, July 2011).

Obesity is a rising global health problem. On the one hand, a clearly defined medical condition, it is at the same time a corporeal state embedded in the social and cultural perception of fatness and body shape and size. Focusing specifically on the maternal body, contributors to the volume examine how the language and notions of obesity connect with, or stand apart from, wider societal values and moralities to do with the body, fatness, reproduction, and what is considered “natural.” A focus on fatness in the context of human reproduction and motherhood offers instructive insights into the global circulation and authority of biomedical facts on fatness (as "risky" anti-fit, for example). As with other social and cultural studies critical of health policy discourse, this volume challenges the spontaneous connection being made in scientific and popular understanding between fatness and ill health.

Andrea Cornwall, The Participation Reader (Zed Books, May 2011).

Calls for greater participation of those affected by development interventions have a long history. This expert reader explores the conceptual and methodological dimensions of participatory research and the politics and practice of participation in development. Through excerpts from the texts that have inspired contemporary advocates of participation, accounts of the principles of participatory research and empirical studies that show some of the complexities of participation in practice, it offers a range of reflections on participation that will be of interest to those new to the field and experienced practitioners alike. Bringing together for the first time classic and contemporary writings from a literature that spans a century, it offers a unique perspective on the possibilities and dilemmas that face those seeking to enable those affected by development projects, programmes and policies.

Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor,  Moving Histories of Class and Community. Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England (Palgrove, March 2011).

White working class areas are often seen as entrenched and immobile, threatened by the arrival of 'outsiders'. This major new study of class and place since 1930 challenges accepted wisdom, demonstrating how emigration as well as shorter distance moves out of such areas can be as suffused with emotion as moving into them. Both influence people's sense of belonging to the place they live in.

Using oral histories from residents of three social housing estates in Norwich, England, the book also tells stories of the appropriation of and resistance to state discoruses of community; and of ambivalent, complex and shifting class relations and identities. Material poverty has been a constant in the area, but not for all residents, and being classed as 'poor' is an identity that some actively resist.

This paperback edition includes a Preface by Lynsey Hanley, author of Estates: An Intimate History, and a new Conclusion by the authors.

Anne-Meike Fechter and Heather Hindman (eds),  Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers: The Challenges and Futures of Aidland  (Kumarian, March 2011).

Much and warranted attention is paid to aid recipients, including their livelihoods, saving habits, or gender relations. It is held that a key to measuring the effectiveness of aid is contained in such details. Rarely, however, is the lens turned on the lives of aid workers themselves. Yet the seemingly impersonal network of agencies and donors that formulate and implement policy are composed of real people with complex motivations and experiences that might also provide important lessons about development’s failures and successes.  Anne-Meike Fechter and Heather Hindman break new ground by illuminating the social and cultural world of the aid agency, a world that is neglected in most discussions of aid policy. They examine how aid workers’ moral beliefs interlink and conflict with their initial motivations, how they relate to aid beneficiaries, their local NGO counterparts, and other aid workers, their views on race and sexuality, the effect of transient lifestyles and insider language, and the security and family issues that come with choosing such a career. Ultimately, they arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of development processes that acknowledges a rich web of relationships at all levels of the system

Russell King, Richard Black, Michael Collyer, Anthony Fielding and Ronald Skeldon, The Atlas of Human Migration: Global Patterns of People on the Move  (Routledge, July 2010).

Migration has provided millions with an escape route from poverty or oppression, ensuring the survival, even prosperity, of individuals and their families. New currents of human migration, triggered by ethnic cleansing or climate change or economic need, are appearing all the time and immigration has become one of today's most contested issues.

This compelling new atlas maps contemporary migration against its crucial economic, social, cultural and demographic contexts. Drawing on data from one of the largest concentrations of migration research, the atlas traces the story of migration from its historical roots through the economic and conflict imperatives of the last 50 years to the causes and effects of flight today.  Issues covered include: Refugees and asylum seekers; Diasporas; Remittances; The 'brain drain'; Trafficking; Student, retirement and return migration.

Anna Stavrianakis’ Taking Aim at the Arms Trade  (Zed Books, June 2010)

This book takes a critical look at the ways in which non-governmental organisations (NGOs) portray the arms trade as a problem of international politics and the strategies they use to effect change. The book analyses the tensions inherent in NGOs' engagement with the arms trade and argues for a re-examination of dominant assumptions about NGOs as global civil society actors.

Andrea Cornwall and Deborah Eade (eds),  Deconstructing Development Discourse: Buzzwords and Fuzzwords  (Practical Action Publishing, 2010).

Writing from diverse locations, the contributors to this volume examine some of the key terms in current development discourse. Why should language matter to those who are doing development? Surely, there are more urgent things to do than sit around mulling over semantics? But language does matter. Whether emptied of their original meaning, essentially vacuous, or hotly contested, the language of development not only shapes our imagined worlds, but also justifies interventions in real people’s lives. If development buzzwords

Pamela Kea, Land, Labour and Entrustment: West African Female Farmers and the Politics of Difference (Brill 2010).

Diverse contractual arrangements and forms of exchange established between smallholder farmers, their households and community work groups, are important to our understanding of processes of agrarian transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, little has been written in this area. Challenging portrayals of West African female farmers as a homogenous group, the present study provides an ethnographic account of the contractual relations established between female hosts and migrants, in the exchange of land and labour for agrarian production in a Gambian community. Further, it demonstrates the way in which, despite the liberalization of the economy, local cultural practices, such as that of entrustment, continue to be of significance in affecting the nature and particular character of agrarian transformation and postcolonial capitalist development.

Richard Black, Godfried Engbersen, Marek Oklski, Cristina Pantru (eds), A Continent Moving West? (Amsterdam University Press, 2010).

A Continent Moving West? explores the expansion of migration from countries in Eastern Europe following their accession to the European Union. Fifteen expertly authored chapters address head-on what the consequences of large-scale migration have been since 2007. The analysis is conducted for both origin countries, notably Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, and destination countries, including the UK, the Netherlands and Norway. Particular attention is given to labour market impacts, while also discussing migration policies emerging throughout the continent. Overall, this book testifies to how many of the migration patterns so far generated are temporary, circular or seasonal, thus warranting the label 'incomplete' or 'liquid'. Yet, the fluid nature of such movements is expected to continue, making forecasts for future migration - and its repercussions - highly unreliable. One thing is clear. Conventional notions of migration as a one-way, permanent or long-term process are increasingly becoming wide of the mark. Authors Marta Anacka, Richard Black, Venelin Boshnakov, Krisztina Csedo, Jan de Boom, Stephen Drinkwater, John Eade, Godfried Engbersen, Jon Horgen Friberg, Michal Garapich, Izabela Grabowska-Lusinska, Pawel Kaczmarczyk, Eugenia Markova, Vesselin Mintchev, Joanna Napierala, Krzysztof Nowaczek, Wolfgang Ochel, Marek Oklski, Cristina Pantru, Swanie Potot, Dumitru Sandu, Erik Snel, Paulina Trevena.

This book is available to read and download, free of charge, as an electronic version

Kees van der Pijl, The Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion, (Pluto Press, March 2010)

The Foreign Encounter In Myth And Religion is the second volume of Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, a three-volume project which is changing the way we think about international relations. In this volume Kees van der Pijl traces the key characteristics of 'foreign encounters' over time, showing that myth, religion and ethical philosophies have always informed the way that societies have interacted with outsiders. This points us towards the future state of international relations.

Geert De Neve, Peter Luetchford, Jeff Pratt and Donald Wood (eds), Hidden Hands in the Market: Ethnographies of Fair Trade, Ethical Consumption and Corporate Social Responsibility (Emerald Sept 2008). 

In much of the world's economy, production, exchange and consumption are regulated by the Market, which is widely believed to be based on economic rationality and driven by a desire to consume. But there are different views of how the Market operates, or ought to operate. This edited volume engages with urgent contemporary questions about morality and the economy, the creation and circulation of value, and, ultimately, the possibility of making alternatives work. In doing so, the contributors reveal the many fields of power at work within the Market as well as within the movements advocating more ethical economic relationships.

Andrea Cornwall, Elizabeth Harrison and Ann Whitehead (eds), Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: The Struggle for Interpretive Power in Gender and Development (Wiley, March 2008).

Over the last 30 years, ‘gender’ has gained both official status within development institutions and become a recognised field of research and scholarly enquiry. This book explores how bowdlerised and impoverished representations of gender relations have simultaneously come to be embedded in development policy and practice. ‘Gender myths’ and ‘feminist fables’ abound: women are more likely to care for the environment; are better at working together; are less corrupt; have a seemingly infinite capacity to survive. In tracing the ways in which language and images of development are related to practice, the papers in this collection provide a nuanced account of the politics of knowledge production. They also interrogate the implications for feminist engagement with development, arguing that struggles for interpretive power are not only important for their own sake, but also for the implications they have for women’s lives worldwide.

Kees van der Pijl, Nomads, Empires, States, (Pluto Press, Oct 2007)

Kees van der Pijl argues in this book that by making the "nation-state" the focus of international relations, the discipline has become Euro-centric and a-historical. Theories of imperialism and historic civilisations, and their relation to world order, have been discarded. With more than half the world's population living in cities, with unprecedented levels of migration, global politics is present on every street corner. The "international" is no longer only a balance of power among states, but includes tribal relations making a comeback in various ways.

Kevin Gray’s book Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalisation  (Routledge, July 2007) engages with recent attempts to bring labour into the study of International Relations. The book engages with arguments that democratisation, the end of the Cold War, and the spread of neoliberal globalisation have helped to create an environment in which organised labour might transform itself into a potential counter-globalisation movement. Through a case study of the Korean labour movement, the book argues that it is necessary to pay greater attention to the dual transition towards democracy and neoliberalism in much of the Third World has led to the increased institutionalisation and bureaucratisation of labour.

Andrea Cornwall, Elizabeth Harrison and Ann Whitehead (eds), Feminisms in Development: Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges (Zed, Dec 2006).

This collection of essays by leading feminist thinkers from North and South constitutes a major new attempt to reposition feminism within development studies. Feminism’s emphasis on social transformation makes it fundamental to development studies. Yet the relationship between the two disciplines has frequently been a troubled one. At present, the way in which many development institutions function often undermines feminist intent through bureaucratic structures and unequal power quotients. Moreover, the seeming intractability of inequalities and injustice in developing countries have presented feminists with some enormous challenges. Here, emphasizing the importance of a plurality of approaches, the authors argue for the importance of what ‘feminisms’ have to say to development. Confronting the enormous challenges for feminisms in development studies, this book provides real hope for dialogue and exchange between feminisms and development. 

David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds.), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, Nov 2006).

This volume uses a series of portraits of 'imperial lives' in order to rethink the history of the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It tells the stories of men and women who dwelt for extended periods in one colonial space before moving on to dwell in others, developing 'imperial careers'. These men and women consist of four colonial governors, two governors' wives, two missionaries, a nurse/entrepreneur, a poet/civil servant and a mercenary. Leading scholars of colonialism guide the reader through the ways that these individuals made the British Empire, and the ways that the empire made them. Their life histories constituted meaningful connections across the empire that facilitated the continual reformulation of imperial discourses, practices and cultures. Together, their stories help us to re-imagine the geographies of the British Empire and to destabilize the categories of metropole and colony.

Maya Unnithan-Kumar (ed.), Reproductive Agency, Medicine and the State: Cultural Transformations in Childbearing (Berghahn, 2005).

Recent years have seen many changes in human reproduction resulting from state and medical interventions in childbearing processes. Based on empirical work in a variety of societies and countries, this volume considers the relationship between reproductive processes (of fertility, pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period) on the one hand and attitudes, medical technologies and state health policies in diverse cultural contexts on the other.

Nigel Eltringham, Accounting For Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda (Pluto Press, Jan 2004).

The 1994 Rwandan genocide was a monumental atrocity in which at least 500,000 Tutsi and tens of thousands of Hutu were murdered in less than four months. Since 1994, members of the Rwandan political class who recognise those events as genocide have struggled to account for it and bring coherence to what is often perceived as irrational, primordial savagery. Most people agree on the factors that contributed to the genocide -- colonialism, ethnicity, the struggle to control the state. However, many still disagree over the way these factors evolved, and the relationship between them. This continuing disagreement raises questions about how we come to understand historical events -- understandings that underpin the possibility of sustainable peace. Drawing on extensive research among Rwandese in Rwanda and Europe, and on his work with a conflict resolution NGO in post-genocide Rwanda, Nigel Eltringham argues that conventional modes of historical representation are inadequate in a case like Rwanda. Single, absolutist narratives and representations of genocide actually reinforce the modes of thinking that fuelled the genocide in the first place. Eltringham maintains that if we are to understand the genocide, we must explore the relationship between multiple explanations of what happened and interrogate how - and why - different groups within Rwandan society talk about the genocide in different ways.

Jan Selby’s book Global Governance, Conflict and Resistance (co-edited with Feargal Cochrane and Rosaleen Duffy; Palgrave Nov 2003) provides a wide-ranging series of analyses of resistance to the liberal project of global governance. Including case studies on peace processes in Bosnia, Northern Ireland and the Middle East, on the anti-globalization movement and the global regulation of finance, information and the environment, Global Governance, Conflict and Resistance paints a vivid and original picture of the nature, power and limitations of contemporary global governance.

Jan Selby’s book Water, Power and Politics in the Middle East  (Tauris, Oct 2003) provides an original analysis of the Middle East water problems through a multi-layered account of the nature and causes of the conflict and the Pealestinian water crisis. Each chapter addresses a particular aspect of the Israeli-Palestine water conflict and the author uses these to illustrate both the broader nature of Israeli-Palestinian relations and factors that the existing water literature underplays or simply gets wrong.