Our Aims and Objectives
We are the UK association for all those who research, study and teach global development issues
Find Out MoreThe conference theme is detailed below. However, the conference is also open to submissions outside the conference theme of relevance to current development theory and practice, or topics covered by DSA Study Groups, even if these are not strongly aligned to the theme.
Theme summary:
When a tech billionaire in the orbit of the US President set about ‘feeding USAID into the woodchipper’ in early 2025, the consequences for the Western development industry were immediate and far-reaching. Partnerships were ruptured, frontline NGO workers lost their jobs, water and sanitation projects were suspended, and lives were lost. Feminist approaches to development, efforts to queer development, and support for racial justice have been subjected to particular hostility as part of an anti-‘woke’ agenda. Aid budgets have been cut with the express intention of increasing military expenditure.
We invite submissions that:
The conference also invites papers that extend beyond the central theme, addressing key concerns in development studies.
At the time of Sussex’s founding, many scholars and students were involved in national liberation movements, and articulations of a ‘New International Economic Order.’ Today, the defunding of multilateral organisations, US-led tariff regimes and proliferating sanctions, combined with overt failures of the ‘rules based order’ during the genocide in Gaza, are just some of the factors contributing to new experimentations with ‘active non alignment,’ calls for new multilateral institutions, and Global South-led demands for reparatory justice within the UN system.
We invite submissions that look to youth movements which have swept through Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Madagascar and Kenya (to name just a few) as articulations of a critique of prevailing models of development, and asreservoirs of hope. But we also encourage papers and panels that find hope not only in critiques of hegemonic approaches to development, but in Global South leadership on climate politics, trade and investment reform, and solidarity and coalition building among social struggles.
There is a diversity of approaches to development at Sussex which cuts across the Centre for International Education, Economics Department, Institute for Development Studies, Science Policy Research Unit, and School of Global Studies. As such we encourage panels and papers to be framed by explicitly trans- and interdisciplinary approaches to the challenge of building just, equitable, sustainable, anti-racist and anti-imperialist futures, adequate to the contemporary moment.