ABSTRACT
In the years that have elapsed since the previous DARG series on regional development, writing an introduction to a volume on South Asia has become a more problematic task. Since the late 1980s, changes in the global economy have been dramatic. The collapse of the Soviet Union has heralded a period of unbridled neo-liberalism, which has survived both the South-East Asian crash of 1997/8 and the collapse of the Seattle Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in December 1999 relatively unscathed. We are repeatedly told that we live in an era of ‘globalisation’, where technology is eroding the importance of distance and the distinctiveness of place, producing new opportunities and risks. 1 The resultant realities of ‘development’ over the last decade or so have been very mixed for people living in the global South: while some have seen standards of living improve rapidly, others have experienced growing economic and ecological instability and even dramatic collapses in life expectancy. 2 The academic changes within development geography and development studies through this period have been no less dramatic. Although ‘development’ has always been a contested term, the rise of ‘anti-development’ and (somewhat belatedly) postmodern thinking has raised new criticisms of the objects and practices of development that are important for practitioners and academics alike. Together, these academic and geopolitical shifts have destroyed many of the certainties that underpinned geographical imaginations of development in the mid-twentieth century, from a faith in modernisation to the idea of the ‘Third World’ itself.
