3.9 Political Economy of Development

Noaman Ali is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. His research and teaching concerns the political economy of development. His current research examines rural class struggle, land reforms and sub national state formation in Pakistan, through a case study of the Frontier peasant movement in the former North West Frontier Province, led by the Mazdoor Kisan party in the 1970s. His work is interdisciplinary, bringing a historical and ethnographic sensibility to the study of political science. More broadly, he is interested in social movements, rural politics, state and non state power, agrarian and industrial policy, development states and political economy in general. He speaks to us about:

• interrogating power relationships and class differentiations
• decoupling development from economic growth
• redefining development as giving political power to the powerless
• structural transformations and the role of international financial institutions
• debt and capitalist logic 
• incrementalism 
• the unconscious class bias of development practitioners 
• the NGO/development agency industrial complex 
• the negative impact of green revolution technologies 
• the importance of social movements - and much more!

He joins us from Toronto, Canada.