Heloise Weber on Global Development Inequalities & Injustices

In this edition of our Meet the Editor’s series, we speak with TWQ Academic Editor Heloise Weber.  She currently works in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. Her research is animated by an interest in the historical and contemporary politics of inequalities in global development. Heloise says her research approach is self-confessedly ‘nerdy’, as she enjoys delving into the small print, as well as questioning the methodologies and metrics of development frameworks and strategies.

What is your role at the School of Political Science and International Studies at The University of Queensland?

I’m currently a Senior Lecturer teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses in politics of development and inequality, especially in areas such as security and development, the politics of development, International Political Economy and the politics of development and resistance.  I’m really excited that I was able to teach an Honours Masters class this year on Decolonial Thought and Politics.

Your research interests include exploring the historical and contemporary politics of inequalities and injustices in the organisation of development globally. Could you elaborate what this means?

When we think about development, it is often associated with the Global South or the ‘Third World’ as it was previously termed. However, this is a rather incomplete picture that does not account for unequally connected histories. While the project of international development originated in the post-1945 context, it is so deeply connected to colonialism and its legacies. We therefore cannot understand wealth and affluence in the Global North without understanding how this is connected to both the conditions and degree of suffering, but also increasingly to patterns of affluence in regions within the Global South. I would say that my research is based on a critical historical relational analysis.

Could you tell us about your research into critiquing international organisations such as the IMF and their development strategies?

I’ve always been interested in the impact of international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the United Nations. The IMF and World Bank have been crucial institutions that mediated relations between the Global North and South in ways that sustained and reproduced hierarchy. I have been particularly interested in how austerity was advanced through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) as they have had such detrimental impacts for communities in the Global South.

I’m currently working on a monograph on the politics of targeted poverty interventions in the Global South known as micro credit schemes. There is a lot of research ongoing that has confirmed that their impact has been adverse, for example it has increased debt dependency and violence. I’m linking this community level experience to a broader analysis of the post-1945 origins of the ‘development project’ and how struggles of the Global South were undermined through SAPs.

You co-authored an article in 2022 for the journal Review of International Studies. Poverty is not ‘another culture’: Against a right of children to work to live. Could you tell us a little about this particular publication?

I actually wrote this article with one of my former PhD students, Aliya Abbasi, whose PhD project was on children in street contexts in Pakistan analysed in relation to the UN Convention on the Rights of The Child. In our article, we critique perspectives that advocate for child labour and look at Bolivia as a case study, a country which lowered the legal age for child labour, only to eventually retract their decision later. We argued that it is only poor children who are compelled to work to live, so calling for a right of children to work to live, is tantamount to normalising poverty. Since the 1980s, we know that there has been a rapid increase in the number of children working in order to live. We also examine how poverty should not be seen as something outside of development, but as an outcome of the development processes.

We watched a thought-provoking interview you gave for Think Development Out Loud (Warwick University) on the politics of method, methodological choices and analytics in development theory. Why are our methods of analysis so important? And how do you define development with a broader perspective?

This is a really important aspect of critical development studies. We know that the representation of the Global North and the Global South as being either ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ is based on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and aligns with Modernization Theory. This theory is based on conceptualising development in terms of a linear process (from developing to developed) and takes formal units (states) as ‘objects of development’ – I am quoting the political theorist Timothy Mitchell here. The theory also rests on viewing all states as being unconnected in time and space. However, we know that many countries, for example India, emerged at independence in debt. Due to colonial exploitation, a lot of wealth was extracted from the Global South benefitting the Global North to become more affluent. Using GDP as the core measure of development and taking the state as the formal unit of analysis therefore does not give us the full picture of how inequalities in world politics came about and are sustained. 

If we take a critical historical approach, we can still account for the fact that these state units exist, but show how these countries are unequally connected and the conditions of that connection are rooted in colonialism and imperialism. There is the idea of comparing and benchmarking these ‘developing’ states ‘having to catch up’, but this is not the full story as it is explicable in terms of structural inequalities, rooted in colonialism and its legacies. I wrote a paper on this in 2007 in Globalizations entitled ‘A political analysis of a formal comparative method: Historicizing the globalization and development debate’. 

I also have a chapter on ‘development’ forthcoming in the new edition of Concepts of World Politics edited by Felix Berenskoetter (of King’s College London), I think readers would find this quite useful as I’m connecting the ‘international’ and ‘development’. The chapters on Race and Colonialism are also particularly interesting. 

You have a long-standing interest in ‘Third Worldism’. Can you explain this term briefly? Do you think that the radical political aspirations it aroused are still capable of projecting humane alternatives in the new Global South?

I believe the term ‘Third-Worldism’ was actually coined by Vijay Prashad in his book, Darker Nations.  As Prashad put it, ‘Third World’ is not a place, but it was a project that he links to justice, peace and dignity. The term ‘Third-Worldism’ comes out of that understanding of the struggle for justice. 

I would like to say that we can find more humane and just alternatives in practice, but I do think it is now far more complicated. I think the radical statement expressed at Bandung conference (1955) or in the form of the call for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) is around, but it is currently not happening at the level of state representatives. We can see it in movement politics, as well as in the intersectional politics of race, class, and gender. We can see alliances between the North and the South in the food sovereignty movement or in the landless movement in Brazil. There is a lot of solidarity emerging among those who are subjected to dispossession and poverty and injustices, but I do not see a similar concerted justice oriented project at the international level being articulated by the former coalition of ‘Third World’ states. I would like to think that it is still possible, although it is challenging under current geopolitical conditions.

You wrote ‘Rethinking the Third World’ 10 years ago. With this year’s expansion of the BRICS are you able to offer any thoughts on future developments?

It is great seeing BRICS come together with important international interventions, for example what happened this year with South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. However, it would be fantastic if they could potentially couple these interventions with similar strategies at home, such as redistribution based on providing public services for their citizens.

However, we must also recognise that the interventions from the World Bank and the IMF with structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s undermined the efforts of post-colonial states to provide welfare in terms of public services to their citizens. It is therefore really difficult to see a political project in the same sentiments as ‘Third Worldism’, but it is not impossible. I think the way we talk about which countries are ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ is part of the problem right now. States can justify acts such as possession of land rights, for example, on the basis of developing their county. So, I think the post-1945 structure of development that we inherited is problematic.

Where do you see the most exciting debates/research happening in your field?

For me, what’s really important now is the emerging research in critical decolonial thought and politics, especially the steps towards restorative justice, repair and repatriations. The field is pushing back on the colonial narrative about justice and normative questions about who is ‘civilised’ and who is ‘backward’.

We recently published a paper in the European Journal of International Relations for their 25th special anniversary issue on Colonialism, genocide and International Relations: the Namibian–German case and struggles for restorative relations. The international architecture rests on what we argued in that paper to be a normative inversion. Those are the interesting debates that are flipping conventional approaches and analytics. We are calling into question politically sustained institutional structures of injustice, but also the epistemic dimension about how these have been historically justified.

I also think that as scholars we should not neglect the political economy of development and poverty, because that is the materiality of lived experience of suffering. I think both things have to go together.

We need the bigger historical decolonial thought and practise against domination, exploitation and dispossession, but we also need to look at the contemporary picture and the political economy of development, in order to redress injustices.

What does decolonising academia mean to you?

‘To decolonise’ is a catch all term at the moment. But to be truly meaningful, it really has to be about critiquing power and knowledge, exploring how power is constituted in knowledge, and how that enables structures of domination to be upheld. This is where identity politics is important, and race and racism is central. Problematically, there are rising narratives for instance about ‘replacement theory’,  so it is vital that critical analysis is advanced without losing sight of intersectionality, race, gender, class and the political economy of rights and justice.

What changes do you hope to see in the field of Global South Studies in the next ten years?

Global South Studies is not actually a term that is well used even in academia. However, I would still defend the use of the concept of the Global South as it helps us look at the structural injustice. So, if you are looking at the Global South, you must always examine how it came to be and its connections to the Global North. 

I also see the field building up from a revival of post-colonial and decolonial thought. I see critical scholars from the Global South developing critiques of the Global South. You definitely see more of this research taking place, for example I’ve seen work from scholars in Sri Lanka and India critiquing government policy.

There is also a need to recognise the global alliances against injustices, such as the World Social Forum. There are still primary resources in the Global South, and there continues to be conflict around resource extraction. The World Cities Report 2022 has predicted that poverty and urbanisation will rise rapidly. The question is as the climate changes, and temperatures rise, how will poorer people cope in this context? The concept of resilience has been emerging, which is really just about survival. I think for all humanity we need to think about development outside of colonial capitalism, so factoring in structural injustice and recognising that we have only one planet is crucial.

If you could spend a day with another professional in your area or someone you respect (outside your field), who would it be and why? It can be someone from history.

It is difficult to narrow it down. I would say someone who stands out for me is Robbie Shilliam, who also recently wrote Decolonizing Politics, which is a very important and accessible book. I strongly recommend it! I’d like to spend time with Vandana Shiva, who is an Indian scientist, political economist and activist. She has done a lot of critical work around the Green Revolution and wrote a book on Monocultures of the Mind. If they were still alive today, I would also have liked to spend time with Wangari Mathai. She was a social and environmental activist in the Greenbelt movement in Kenya.

What books (academic or non-academic) have had a big impact on you?

I’ve recently co-authored a book with the sociologist, Philip D. McMichael, called Development and Social Change. We are reworking the 8th edition this year. This has been a big inspiration for students but it is also used for critical research.

A book that has had a profound impact on me is How the Other Half Dies by Susan George. I read it as an undergraduate. I have been influenced by Caroline Thomas’ In Search of Security: Third World in International Relations, and I really love the book, A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth which I read it a long time ago. I would also highly recommend Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.