ABSTRACT
The final chapter distils the main conclusions from the book and sets of a number of research priorities for advancing the future study of the geopolitics–development nexus. The chapter reviews the current shape of international development as an arena of theory and practice and makes a case for re-engaging and reworking post-development theory in understanding both the power and politics of development and its contestation. The chapter also returns to the Cold War geopolitics of modernisation, to the recent rediscovery of poverty and underdevelopment as “dangerous” in the context of the global War on Terror and to the scripting of Africa’s “failed states” and “ungoverned spaces”, in seeking to argue the case for understanding development as a form of pacification. Finally, the chapter revisits South–South development cooperation and the changing dynamics of development diplomacy in the twenty-first century along with the complex and shifting spatialities of development that this is producing.
