modernization theory

This episode is unusual, more like part of a mini-lecture series. I was asked to give a talk recently on inequality, development, and IR theory for an audience that skews quite young. I’ve chopped it up to just bring out the highlights, but we hit many topics that might be of interest:

—Why IR paradigms are not especially useful for making sense of inequality.

—Why it sucks to be poor, no matter what flag you live under.

—Capitalism v. Marxism, and by proxy, modernization theory v. dependency theory.

—Why the East Asian development model is at its end.

—Why it can be useful to think of political economy as a capitalist world system.

—Why redistribution is the only alternative to revolution if you want to reduce inequality.

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With many path-breaking books, James C. Scott has for long been a key figure in Southeast Asian Studies and in the comparative study of agrarian societies, peasant politics and resistance studies.  His hugely influential scholarship crosses disciplines, shaping political science, anthropology, and history.

In this conversation, we focus on a selection of Prof. Scott's books, including Seeing Like a State, which is a magisterial critique of top-down social planning, The Art of Not Being Governed, which highlights the crucial functions of “places of refuge from the state”, and his latest, Against the Grain – which provides a deep history of the earliest states. He is currently writing a new book on the Irrawaddy River – in which he argues that engineering and damming show how humans work, violate Nature’s traffic and how humans shape land.

James C. Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and professor of anthropology at Yale University where he also co-directs the Agrarian Studies Program. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations, and anarchism. He is the recipient of the 2020 Albert O. Hirschman Prize, the Social Science Research Council’s highest honour, in recognition of his wide-ranging and influential scholarship.

Jim encourages you to support the fight for democracy in Myanmar by donating to www.mutualaidmyanmar.org

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Professor Dan Banik (@danbanik @GlobalDevPod)

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