Reference no: EM133256833

Assignment:

I add some articles below about it, it just for a discussion board

1. Just to be clear, Africa is a large continent that encompasses 54-56 distinct countries and hundreds, if not thousands of distinct cultures. While this may be old news for many of you, the way the media and even educational systems still often talk about Africa as a homogenous whole leads to mis-categorizing it as a single, monolithic country. For perspective, there are over 200 language and ethnic groups with the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone.

2. "third world," "global south," "developing", and "non-industrialized countries" are not necessarily interchangable, though they are often used this way. Each has a specific reference and meaning, as the NPR article begins to lay out. All are problematic in different ways. To expand upon the NPR article, consider why we feel drawn to constructing binary categories to begin with. What are the implicit assumptions when we create binary categories for complex nations? How do we consider countries that don't neatly fit this binary? China, for example, has a functionally capitalist economy that is growing by leaps and bounds, and yet still has a wide variation of "human development" concerns such as inequality and poverty.

India is considered the world's largest democracy and has technological (particularly medical) developments on par with leading "western" nations, and yet also grapples with pervasive human development concerns. The US is often framed as the standard and the implicit metric other countries are measured against in the binaries, but the rates of inequality and other human development metrics such as maternal mortality, incarceration rates, racial divides, and wealth gaps raise valid questions about the utility of these binaries. Use this topic's materials as an opportunity to open up the categories and shorthands we often used to refer to enormously complex identities of states and practice sitting with the ambiguity that comes from abandoning such terms. What happens? What are the concerns? What are the benefits?

Articles

• Read - Dados & Connell (2012) The Global South (PDF below) to understand what we are referring to and a brief history of the term
• Read NPR (2015) If You Shouldn't Call It The Third World, What Should You Call It?

Second - Development

1. Grindle, M. (2000) Ready or not: The Developing World and Globalization

2. Watch Rosling (2006) The best stats you've ever seen (embedded below)

3. Browse short sub-topics on development (read at least 1 fully)

• Quirk (2021) Why and how the National Security Strategy should address fragile states (Brookings Institute Blog)
• Witts et. al (2020) Stabilization and human development in a disordered Middle East and North Africa: Lessons from a joint Brookings-World Bank project
• Ilori & Killander (2020) Internet shutdowns in Africa threaten democracy and development.