Routledge Critical Development Studies
About the Book Series
The global crisis, coming at the end of three decades of uneven capitalist development and neoliberal globalization that have devastated the economies and societies of people across the world, especially in the developing societies of the global south, cries out for a more critical, proactive approach to the study of international development. The challenge of creating and disseminating such an approach, to provide the study of international development with a critical edge, is the project of a global network of activist development scholars concerned and engaged in using their research and writings to help effect transformative social change that might lead to a better world.
This series will provide a forum and outlet for the publication of books in the broad interdisciplinary field of critical development studies—to generate new knowledge that can be used to promote transformative change and alternative development.
The editors of the series welcome the submission of original manuscripts that focus on issues of concern to the growing worldwide community of activist scholars in this field.
To submit proposals, please contact the Development Studies Editor, Helena Hurd ([email protected]).
Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work: When Workers Take Over
1st Edition
By Dario Azzellini, Marcelo Vieta
August 28, 2025
This book investigates the return of workers’ self-management in recent decades as responses to recurring neoliberal crises. In particular, the book homes in on worker-recuperated enterprises (WREs), a promising form of workers’ self-organization whereby workers restart troubled, bankrupt, or ...
Contesting Colonial Capitalism in the Americas, Africa, and Asia
1st Edition
Edited
By Dip Kapoor
March 20, 2025
This book is a critical excavation of capitalist development that is being driven by the Global North in the modern (neo)colonial era, with a related focus on the anticolonial and anticapitalist resistance by Indigenous Peoples, peasants, and migrant workers in Africa, Asia/Middle East, and the ...
Rethinking Illicit Economies in Opium and Cocaine: Policy Responses to Drug Crops in the Global South
1st Edition
By Eric D. U. Gutierrez
March 13, 2025
This book investigates the cross-border trade in illicit drug crops in the global south. It exposes an important paradox: despite all the dangers and negative consequences of these criminal networks, in many cases, they also provide marginalised and excluded communities with important private ...
Global Futures: Key Concepts for Social Transformation
1st Edition
By Ronaldo Munck
February 27, 2025
Global Futures: Key Concepts for Social Transformation provokes us to rethink some of the key words and concepts which define the current global order. Prompted by crises around the world, it seeks to re-energise our desire for a better future. The book takes seven key concepts from the new global ...
Neoextractivism and Territorial Disputes in Latin America: Social-ecological Conflict and Resistance on the Front Lines
1st Edition
Edited
By Penelope Anthias, Pabel C. López Flores
January 30, 2025
This book reflects on the continuing expansion of extractive forms of capitalist development into new territories in Latin America, and the resistance movements that are trying to combat the ecological and social destruction that follows. Latin American development models continue to prioritise ...
Underdevelopment in Peru: A Profile of Peripheral Capitalism
1st Edition
By Jan Lust
December 18, 2024
At a time when Peru continues to reel from the impact of Covid-19 and the eruption of corruption scandals involving five former presidents, this book analyzes the persistence and the structural underpinnings of underdevelopment in Peru. During the commodities boom of 2004–2011, Peru experienced ...
From Extractivism to Sustainability: Scenarios and Lessons from Latin America
1st Edition
Edited
By Henry Veltmeyer, Arturo Ezquerro-Cañete
August 26, 2024
This book investigates how extractive capitalism has developed over the past three decades, what dynamics of resistance have been deployed to combat it, and whether extractivism can ever be transformed into being a part of a progressive development path. It was not until the 20th century that the ...
Collective Empowerment in Latin America: Indigenous Peasant Movements and Political Transformation
1st Edition
By Gerardo Otero, Efe Can Gürcan
June 20, 2024
This book develops a theory of collective empowerment that looks for change both from the bottom up, in civil society, and from the top down, from state interventions responding to such pressure. Reflecting on the advancement of Indigenous and peasant movements in Latin America since the neoliberal...
Revolutions in Learning and Education from India: Pathways towards the Pluriverse
1st Edition
By Christoph Neusiedl
May 27, 2024
This book offers an important critique of the ways in which mainstream education contributes to perpetuate an inherently unjust and exploitative Development model. Instead, the book proposes a new anarchistic, postdevelopmental framework that goes beyond Development and schooling to ask what really...
Extractivism and Labour in the Caribbean
1st Edition
Edited
By Dennis C. Canterbury
December 01, 2023
This book explores the impact of resource extraction and the dynamics of great powers competing for natural resources in the Caribbean. The book analyzes labour–capital relations between China, the United States, the European Union, and Russia in the Caribbean, as competition increases with the ...
Deconstructing Human Development: From the Washington Consensus to the 2030 Agenda
1st Edition
By Juan Telleria
September 25, 2023
This book provides a critical deconstruction of the human development framework promoted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) since 1990. Taking the Human Development Reports of the UNDP as its starting point for reflection, this book investigates the construction of this framework as...
Buen Vivir and the Challenges to Capitalism in Latin America
1st Edition
Edited
By Henry Veltmeyer, Edgar Lau
May 31, 2023
This book explores the battleground between neoliberal capitalist development processes in Latin America and the challenges to these systems that can be found through innovative community-driven buen vivir/vivir bien initiatives. In the current climate of worldwide capitalist development, ...