Professor Rita Abrahamsen co-authors new book on development and world order
Professor Rita Abrahamsen, Chair of African Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA), has co-authored a new book examining the central role of development in the emergence, maintenance and transformation of world order.
Developing Hegemony: World Order and the Transnational Field of Development, co-authored with Michael C. Williams, Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, traces the history of development as a field of struggle from 1945 to the present.
At a time of multiple challenges to the liberal international order, development has become one of the most contentious areas of world politics. Dominant powers have reduced their assistance and increasingly fused development with national and security interests, while rising powers such as China have become major donors promoting new models and norms.
Placing development in the context of contemporary transformations in world order, the book draws on Pierre Bourdieu to develop an innovative theoretical approach to world politics as competition between fields (delete: argues that development is central to the emergence, maintenance and transformation of global order.) The authors show how development can convert economic and military power into the symbolic power that is crucial for international hegemony.
In the current geopolitical context, the book argues that the ability of development to produce this symbolic power is dissolving and transforming. This makes development a crucial arena in which attempts to build an alternative global order are emerging and will be historically tested.
Professor Abrahamsen’s research focuses on African politics and international relations, particularly the intersections between the local and the global and Africa’s place in the international system.
Co-author Professor Michael C. Williams was a Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, last year and will return to Oxford in 2027.
Developing Hegemony: World Order and the Transnational Field of Development is co-authored by Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams and published by Stanford University Press.
