Research

I study the politics of development. My research explores the political ideas, identities and practices that underpin development, understood broadly as processes of social change. Such explorations illustrate the role of new actors as well as new directions in development, thereby disrupting the binary assumptions between ‘developing’ countries and ‘developed’ countries that continue to shape the discipline. By focusing on themes hitherto marginalised in the literature on development politics, I reflect on a formidable challenge of our time: the possibilities of global development in a world where political ideas, identities and practices depart from the Liberal normativity.

To enable such disruptions, I stage exciting conversations between emerging literatures on: (1) Political subjectivities that underpin the politics of development; (2) Development challenges posed by growing informality and widening social exclusion shared by the Global North and Global South; and (3) The state-society complexes that animate the Rising Powers and global futures of development. Thus, three distinct but interrelated strands underpin my research and teaching.

Research strand 1: Political subjectivities of the poor

One strand of my research troubles the widely held assumption that poor people are too focused on their livelihoods to hold any ideas about development. This strand builds on the cross-cultural conversations between Partha Chatterjee, James Holston, Asef Bayat and AbuMalik Simone on the multiple ways in which impoverished populations advance their notions of development, broadly understood as social change. In my monograph titled Politics of the poor: Negotiating democracy in contemporary India, the culmination of research initiated during my doctoral dissertation, I analyse the ‘political spaces’ that both enable and constrain poor people’s politics. Research papers under this strand of my research investigate the ways in which members of historically oppressed communities interrogates domination, inequality and hierarchy, and interpret ideas of pluralism, emancipation, equality, utopia and transformation.

Under this research strand, I have further investigated the ways in which such generalised welfare policies as India’s flagship National Rural Employment Guarantee Program enable poor people’s assertions for dignified life while targeted approaches to identifying ‘below-poverty-line’ populations exacerbate the divisions among the poor. Ongoing work includes contributing a chapter on ‘portable rights’ to the India Exclusion Report. An early paper, which won the Sanjaya Lall Prize for the best student contribution, explored the ways in which ideas of development enmeshed with ideas of dignity in the Indian State of Bihar. I am further developing the insights from that paper to develop a fuller account of the way in which “dignified development” deepened democracy in Bihar after 1990.

My just-concluded ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellowship investigates the political subjectivities of circular labour migrants in the context of democratic deepening and social change in India. Snapshots of this research are available on my project website and have been discussed in the print and other popular media. Drawing on this work, I am currently developing my second monograph Fragmented transitions: mobility, development and democracy in a Rising Power.

Emerging work on this theme entails comparative and collaborative research on the hopes harboured by socially excluded people who live and work in conditions of informality. Funding from the EU-India Platform for the Social Sciences has facilitated collaborative research (of which I am the Principle Investigator) on socially excluded people’s imaginations of citizenship in London, Paris and Mumbai.

Research strand 2: Development challenges shared by the Global North and the Global South

My emerging research dislodges the assumption that development challenges are faced only by the Global South. This research explores people’s imaginations of citizenship in the context of increasing informality and widening social exclusion that are not only a feature of the allegedly ‘developing countries’ of the Global South but also of the so-called ‘developed countries’ of the Global North. The comparative dimension of the research is significantly enriched through collaborations with Simon Parker and Nicole Lindstrom at the University of York, Carole Gayet at CNRS- Paris and Suryakant Waghmore at Indian Institute of Technology- Bombay. We are working together to develop a co-authored monograph provisionally titled Citizenship futures: The politics of hope in Mumbai, Paris and London.

This strand of my research elaborates the challenges of development shared by populations across the Global North and Global South, a theme almost totally ignored in the development politics literature. It draws on emerging scholarship that insists on blurring the dichotomies between these two spaces (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012; Roy and Crane, 2015) as well as my own just-published paper on global poverty, in which I explore the patterns of wealth, poverty and inequality across the Global South as well Global North, thereby building on Branco Milanovic’s thesis that inequalities within countries are increasingly more salient than inequalities between them.

Going forward, I am steering collaborations with colleagues to extend our research on citizenship futures to other global cities. Together with Paul Gready at York’s Centre for Applied Human Rights, I collaborate with colleagues from within and beyond academia to design a larger collaborative and comparative project on the politics of hope under contemporary conditions of social exclusion and urban informality. Academic collaborations extend to UK-based colleagues at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sheffield, University of Leeds and University of Edinburgh as well as overseas colleagues at University of Toronto (Ontario, Canada), Centre for Policy Research (Delhi, India), Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP, Sao Paulo, Brazil), Osun State University (Osogbo, Nigeria), New York University (New York, USA) and University of Western Cape (Cape Town, South Africa). Practitioner collaborations include with colleagues at Action Aid, Christian Aid and Overseas Development Institute. To meditate further on possible comparisons that disrupt the binaries between Global North and Global South, I co-convene the biennial Liberating Comparisons workshop series with Sarah-Jane Cooper Knock at the University of Edinburgh.

Research strand 3: State-society complexes animate the Rising Powers and global development futures

Informed by my research on themes that disrupt prevailing binaries between “developed” and “developing” countries, a third strand of research intervenes in the emerging debates on the implications for the emergence of the Rising Powers for global trajectories of development. Research under this strand is still nascent, as I develop collaborations with scholars from across the UK and beyond to explore the state-society complexes that underpin the emergence of the Rising Powers as central actors in global development.

One network, funded by the Political Studies Association’s Pushing the Boundaries Grant, meditates on the social basis of China’s emergence as a European power by exploring the state-business-labour relations that bolster Chinese investments in Europe, directing attention to the rapidly changing directions of development. Together with colleagues in academia (London School of Economics, King’s College London, Universit of Leeds and University of St Andrews) and beyond (International Institute of Strategic Studies), we are presently assembling an edited volume on this theme.

Another collaboration, supported by the Business Boost Fund of the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account, explores the connectivity corridors being spearheaded by the Rising Powers. I work with colleagues in the UK (Polar Connection) and overseas (CEBRAP, Brazil and OP Jindal School of Government, India) to examine state-business relations in the context of connectivity corridors in Eurasia and Latin America.

Emerging collaborations reflect on the global futures of democracy and development beyond prevailing Liberal accounts. Such reflections build on my own work on the disjunctions between liberalism and democracy. I am assembling a volume on the tensions between development and democracy in the Indian context, as emblematized in the political passions aroused during the 2019 General Elections in India. As a member of the APSA’s RC51 on International Political Economy, I am embedded in networks of scholars who explore similar themes in the context of the Rising Powers. Proposed work on this theme entails comparative process tracing and comparative ethnographies of economic and political change in the Rising Powers and other emerging market economies to develop an empirically-informed account of the emerging alternatives to Liberal models of democracy and development.