ABSTRACT
Race fundamentally structures the modern world and shapes the lived experiences of so-called Global North and South actors. Yet, the nexus between race and development is insufficiently addressed in critical development studies. This chapter analyses how development scholarship, policy, and practice are fundamentally raced, using a broad range of disciplinary conventions from philosophy, critical race studies, literary criticism, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and so on. It explores development over the longue durée, assessing how its historical antecedents—slavery, colonialism, imperialism—and its contemporary manifestations—globalisation, neoliberalism—have produced racialised ‘phenotypic others’ and hierarchies of race and place. In the chapter, I explore critical race theories and how they graft on to concepts of development; examine key historical and contemporary moments in which race has been deployed implicitly or explicitly to justify development interventions; demonstrate how race intersects with other social qualifiers such as gender, class, caste, and ethnicity to influence development outcomes in the so-called Global North and South; and provide readers with the tools to repeatedly speak and write race into development. I also assert that critical development studies has much to learn from critical race studies and that the two fields of scholarly inquiry must be in conversation with one another in order to address inequalities within and between countries.
