ARTICLES
Geographies of Development: New Maps, New Visions?∗
James D. Sidaway
University of Amsterdam
Downloaded by [AAG ] at 20:39 23 January 2012
The use of categories (such as developing world or Third World) to demarcate world regions on the basis
of their levels of development is increasingly disputed. Moreover, in the last few years, references have
proliferated to the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China), or sometimes BRICA (adding the Arab states of the
Gulf), as hyperlinks to future-oriented investment in the world economy. These new labels rest on more than
two decades of discourse about “emerging markets” and are embodiments of and agents in the decomposition
of the Third World as denoting a meaningful geopolitical and epistemological category. Where are and
what then remains of the geography of development and the Third World? In addressing such questions,
nuanced maps will be needed. This article sketches some alternatives. Key Words: BRICs, development,
geopolitics, mapping, Third World.
El uso de categorı́as (como paı́ses en desarrollo o del Tercer Mundo) para delimitar a las regiones del
mundo sobre la base de sus niveles de desarrollo es cada vez más disputada. Más aún, en los últimos años
han proliferado las referencias a los BRICs (Brasil, Rusia, India, China), o a veces BRICA (añadiendo a los
Estados Árabes del Golfo), como hipervı́nculos para inversiones orientadas al futuro en la economı́a mundial.
Estas nuevas etiquetas se basan en más de dos décadas de debate sobre los “mercados emergentes” y son las
personificaciones y agentes en la descomposición del Tercer Mundo, denotando una significativa categorı́a
geopolı́tica y epistemológica. ¿Dónde están y qué queda entonces de la geografı́a del desarrollo y del Tercer
Mundo? Para atender tales preguntas se necesitarán los mapas de matices. Este artı́culo esboza algunas
alternativas. Palabras claves: BRICs, desarrollo, geopolı́tica, mapeo, Tercer Mundo.
Alternative nomenclature should be used consistently within a paper according to the author’s demonstrated preferences. For example: Third World/developing world/two-thirds
world.
—Style sheet for The Professional Geographer
(http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/societyimages/
annals/PG%20Style%20Sheet%2040105.pdf
[last accessed August 2009]
T
oday, how useful is it to talk about the
geography of development or of developing countries? Where are and what remains
of the geography of development and of the
Third World? Amidst a proliferation of relational terms, what are the consequences of
adopting such alternative nomenclature as “the
South” and those listed by this journal’s style
sheet? New texts, hundreds of instructors, and
∗I wish to thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments and the editor, Sharmishtha Bagchi-Sen, for her encouragement. In addition,
this article has benefited from the suggestions of Manuel Aalbers, Isa Baud, Niels Beerepoot, Andrew McGregor, Mario Novelli, Marcus Power,
and Elvin Wyly. A series of presentations also afforded an opportunity to rehearse and fine-tune the arguments: at the East Asian Regional
Conference in Alternative Geography (Seoul), to the Geographies of Globalizations group at the University of Amsterdam, at the Institute of
Social Studies (The Hague), Kings College, London, the University of Oxford and the RGS-IBG Annual Conference (London). It is dedicated
to Jasmin Leila and her moves across worlds: See http://www.rgs.org/JasminLeilaAward.
C Copyright 2012 by Association of American Geographers.
The Professional Geographer, 64(1) 2012, pages 49–62 Initial submission, October 2009; revised submission, March 2010; final acceptance, May 2010.
Published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Downloaded by [AAG ] at 20:39 23 January 2012
50 Volume 64, Number 1, February 2012
many more students and researchers annually
wrestle with these terms. This article reconsiders them in the light of the preceding questions,
sketching some tentative answers in the context
of wider geopolitical and geoeconomic shifts,
and building on Vanolo (2010). This is done
first through revisiting the categories of global
development that, after 1945, were shaped by
the Cold War, American power, and recompositions of “race.”1 The article then focuses on a
subset of these, namely, the category of emerging markets, which to some extent has displaced the terms Third World or middle-income
countries, and so on, that were formulated in
those Cold War and continuing postcolonial
contexts.
Critical examination of geopolitics (and associated narratives about world order, security,
and identity) as discourses have been the subject of several decades of scholarship (Dalby
2010). This has been applied to understandings
of development (Slater 1993, 1994; Ó Tuathail
1994). It is evident that the meta- and geocategories of the West, East, Third World (and
yet other alternatives, such as South) thus carry
distinctive sets of meanings and are dynamic
and frequently contested. In an interview, the
sociologist and author of a landmark essay on
Southern Theory, Raewyn Connell (2009) remarks how:
The geographer’s “South” is not exactly the
same as the “South” in UN trade debates,
or the “third world,” or the “less developed
countries,” or the economists’ “periphery,” or
the cultural theorists’ “post-colonial” world, or
the biologists’ “southern world,” or the geologists’ former Gondwana—though there is some
overlapping along this spectrum. I mainly talk of
“metropole” and “periphery,” but there is enormous social diversity within each; recognizing
the polarity is only the beginning of analysis,
not the end.
Terms such as the two-thirds world (as on
The Professional Geographer style sheet) or majority world embody something of the radical
spirit that the Third World as a space of national struggles, revolution, and liberation has
also signified. The variety of terms has emerged
from different fields. One set has to do with development politics; the others are more related
to investors’ analyses of economies. How one
has come to partly displace the other and shifts
the focus of attention in relation to richer and
poorer countries is considered later. Thus, the
next section considers the rise and decline of the
category Third World. As an entrée, debates
about the status and direction of the United
States serve to illustrate how the category of
Third World has evolved and who, what, and
where are redefined by it. Noting its decline
and blurring (despite the arrival of the associated term The Global South) sets the agenda for
an account in the subsequent section of how
the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) label
came about, before the conclusions return to
the question of what still remains of the geography of development and what alternative
critical maps might now be useful.
The United States as “Third World”
After World War II, the project of development was configured through the rise of the
United States as a superpower in which American know-how would be brought to bear in
transforming the Third World and delivering (Western-led) development. Much of the
recent critical material on development takes
this as a point of departure. This is especially
evident in the “postdevelopment” literature,
which condemns much of what has been done
in the name of development, designating it as a
Western apparatus of power and profit (such as
Sachs 1992; Escobar 1995). In McVety’s (2008,
379) terms, therefore, the commitment (first set
out as official policy by the Truman administration) to “development” was
the natural culmination of America’s historic
faith in the inherent value of technology to produce “progress,” which most people had long
understood to be a universal term. Forced not
only to look, but also to act, outward in the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. government
essentially turned the American belief, again in
de Tocqueville’s terms, in the “long track humanity must follow” into the foundation of a
new diplomatic initiative.
The status and direction of the United States
in recent decades is a mirror to many of the
debates about the changing global geography
of and terminology relating to development,
however. In a dispatch from what he described
as a “former boomtown” in south Florida
but now a locale severely hit by fallout from
Geographies of Development: New Maps, New Visions? 51
Downloaded by [AAG ] at 20:39 23 January 2012
the “subprime crisis” and blighted by foreclosures and abandoned housing, a visiting journalist reports on the critical reflections of its
residents:
Around the corner, standing outside his threebedroom home, notionally worth $780,000 . . .
“Jim Robinson”—he refuses to give his real
name—smokes a cigar and admits that if he
wanted to sell, he would have to drop the price
to about $600,000. But he sees the economic
collapse as extending far wider than housing:
“This country is no longer an industrial power.
We don’t even manufacture steel, the Saudis
own 30% of Wall Street and Dubai had to
bail out Citibank.” With his dense tattoos and
tales of gunfights in the Sudan, Robinson is
an ex-mercenary who has travelled widely in
the developing world, in conditions of drought,
starvation and war. Now he sees those same
chaotic conditions engulfing [America]. . . .
“These people are so clueless about what is
happening beyond their compact little world,
they are absolutely clueless as to what the potential [for economic meltdown] could be. You
shut down the grocery store for a day and they
panic. Look at what happens when we have a
hurricane! People go to stores and fight over a
loaf of bread. (Franklin 2008, 12)
“Jim Robinson” is not alone in making such
a designation. When scenes of bodies in the
streets and people stranded and awaiting aid
in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina were beamed around the world in
September 2005, media commentators made
comparisons with disasters and chaos in poor
Third World countries. Nearly two decades
ago, the way that Los Angeles had become
an epicenter of globalization, and fragmented
by class and race, led Reiff (1991) to describe it as “capital of the Third World.”
Since then, a scholarly edited collection (Sawhney 2002) has traced such juxtapositions and
fractures under the title of Unmasking LA:
Third Worlds and the City. More recently, the
criteria first used to map the Third World
via a series of “human development” reports (that sought to include data for standards of living, life expectancy, and social
achievement that cannot be tabulated by crude
measures of gross national product alone2)
have been applied to the United States. The
results (Burd-Sharps, Lewis, and Martins 2008)
chart a striking mixture of freedom and opportunity, deprivation, and exclusions. Amidst the
expanding economic turmoil since 2008, as fi-
nancial crisis3 in most Western economies led
to new phases of restructuring and recession,
the British Broadcasting Corporation’s business editor Robert Peston noted in a press interview (Edemariam 2008, 31) how the crisis
contained and expressed a number of shifts:
There are a number of huge trends here. Look.
The moral authority, that America can lecture
the world on the best way to run their economy, has been shot to pieces. . . . [Moreover]
all that wealth that has accumulated in China,
in the Middle East and Russia—that shifts the
balance of financial power massively in their
direction. . . . If the Chinese got their act together, and they wanted to, they could actually
at this moment, buy the entire US banking system. . . . Which is an extraordinary thing—it’s
something that none of us could have predicted
a few years ago.
Peston’s observations reflect a wider sense
of epochal shifts and a further dwindling of
U.S. hegemony. This echoes comments from
the New York–based economist and former
U.S. Treasury advisor Nouriel Roubini, who
has become well known for his early warnings
of the global collapse in real estate prices and
worldwide recession. A recent media feature on
Roubini noted how:
what first tipped him off were similarities he noticed between developing parts of the world and
the behaviour of the US economy. To his astonishment, he saw a pattern of economic movement in the US that by 2005 made it look like
‘an emerging market economy,’ with the same
‘irrational exuberance.’ (Testa 2009, 25)
Nonetheless, the designation of the United
States as bearing characteristics of a developing
or Third World country is not unproblematic.
First, as Flusty (2003, 102) noted in a review
of the edited volume Unmasking LA, there is
reason to express:
dissatisfaction with the all-too-common use of
“Third World” exclusively as a metaphor that
signifies sites of colonially inflicted poverty,
corruption and chaos. How soon we seem to
have forgotten the Third, nonaligned world
of the Bandung conference, the aspiration towards an explicitly articulated and empowering alternative to the imperial plutocracy of the
First World and the imperial bureaucracy of the
Second.
I return to such aspirations and connotations
later. It is important first, however, to record
52 Volume 64, Number 1, February 2012
another, related objection to the use of the
designation “Third World” in what hitherto
were customarily seen as “First World” or developed countries. For as Slater (1994, 237) reminded us:
Downloaded by [AAG ] at 20:39 23 January 2012
“Third World” implies more than “poverty,”
“income disparities” and “lack.” . . . if certain
regions of the developed world are being subject
to a process of “Third Worldization,” this must
mean that these regions have been colonized
by an external power, their native populations
set to work on plantations and down mines and
their indigenous culture despised.
Arguably, many Native Americans and other
folk historically on the margins in the United
States might find aspects of their collective
history that embody such processes. Leaving
aside, for the moment, the questions about
the extent to which the term Third World remains meaningful and exactly where or what
it usefully depicts, it is notable that in the
subdivisions and subdisciplines of geographical
scholarship (in both teaching and research), development and its geographies still occupy a
key niche, which in turn is part of a wider multidisciplinary program of research and teaching in development studies (Desai and Potter
2008). It is now widely acknowledged across
such scholarship that the category of the Third
World and understandings of development first
emerged in the aftermath of World War II
and as such were profoundly shaped by the
combination of decolonization and the Cold
War. Recent social/cultural, intellectual, and
literary histories have done much to excavate
this.4 Yet, as has also been noted, the Third
World acquired a wide variety of meanings, especially as it was claimed by movements of national liberation and revolution—and was also
the subject of a voluminous literature (see note
1). Indeed, for a while, the idea that the destiny of humanity would be set by the course of
revolution in the Third World became influential, for example, in the writings of Franz
Fanon or couched in terms of freedom and
decolonization. Geertz (2005, 2) characterized
this as “istiqlal, merdeka, uhuru, swaraj, and
the rest,” citing the mobilizing slogans from
Arabic, Malay, Swahili, and Hindi. Thus, as
Prashad (2007, xv) has argued:
The Third World was not a place. It was a
project. During the seemingly interminable bat-
tles against colonialism, the peoples of Africa,
Asia and Latin America dreamed of a new world.
. . . They assembled their grievances and aspirations into various kinds of organizations, where
their leadership then formulated a platform of
demands. . . . The “Third World” comprised
these hopes and the institutions produced to
carry them forward.
Nonetheless, as Prashad (2007) carefully
documented, this ideological project unfolded
through a variety of nodes and sites: It could be
mapped. At the start of the 1980s, for example,
the Independent Commission for International
Development Issues (under the chair of the former Social Democrat chancellor of then West
Germany, Willy Brandt) published its reports
with a cover demarcating a global (North and)
South by a line running through parts of the
map of the world. Through the 1980s, however,
the potency of that revolutionary moment that
had engendered the idea of the South/Third
World and an array of associated perspectives
(dependency and Third Worldism) was in decline. Moreover, the emergence of the newly
industrialized countries and economies (notably Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea,
and Taiwan) characterized a sense of growing
economic diversity within the so-called Third
World. Reflecting this, in the mid-1980s, Harris (1986) could write of The End of the Third
World: Newly Industrializing Countries and the
Decline of an Ideology, amidst debates about “how
many worlds” might be needed to characterize increasingly diverse spaces of development.
The blurb to Harris’s book claimed that “It
was high time we stopped making facile generalizations about ‘the Third World’; instead
. . . we must tease out the factors which have
left some countries desperately backward while
others are catching up with us fast.”
At the same time, the Global South was increasingly being used as an alternative term for
the residual “non-Western world”—contra the
competitive market players. Taylor et al. (2009,
836–37) thus noted:
In the last decade the term “Global South”
has become a new favoured term to describe
the poorer countries of the world. Widely used
across academia—for instance, in environmental studies . . . in political science . . . in economics . . . and in geography . . . —it has been
adopted by UN agencies . . . making the term in
some sense “official.”
Downloaded by [AAG ] at 20:39 23 January 2012
Geographies of Development: New Maps, New Visions? 53
They also described it as a “chaotic concept,” as it is unable to capture the range of
economies and polities that it claims to signify with one label. Indeed, the eclipse of the
Cold War and the ensuing new geographies of
globalization and commerce embodied deeper
shifts. For through the 1990s, with the “Second World” gone and rescripted as “transition economies,” the place of a collective Third
World or South was even more fundamentally in question. Thus, at the end of that
decade, Thérien (1999) charted the limits to a
North–South framework and the emergence of
alternative narratives. More recently, Kreutzmann (2008) has mapped the proliferation of
ways in which the world is conceptually ordered and divided, from the height of the first-,
second-, and third-world era of the middle
twentieth century to a range of post–Cold War
narratives framed in the context of globalization. It is in such a context of attention to
the significance of discursive frames and with
the decline of the Third World as a credible signifier that critical debate has turned on
the category of “emerging markets” formulated in corporate discourse. Embodying neoliberalism and reworking prior categories, the
designation of emerging markets began with
a section of the World Bank and was soon
embraced by fund managers, traders, and the
financial media in the early 1990s. During
the ensuing long boom (through “turbulence,”
such as the Asian financial crisis of the late
1990s), the category was finessed and subdivided. The following considers the range and
impacts of these reworkings.
Emerging Markets to BRICs
Since the term emerging markets entered circulation, cycles of boom and bust have led to
modifications in the range of countries it labels.
Geographers have registered such shifts, noting, in the words of Lai (2006, 627), “the intriguing geographical ‘imagineering’ that goes
into the construction and maintenance of
‘emerging markets’ (EMs) as a category, and
the roles played by fund managers, brokers and
analysts.”
The term was first established in the second
half of the 1980s within a unit of the World
Bank, to designate equity investments in se-
lected countries within what was then more
usually called the Third World (Sidaway and
Pryke 2000). In the last few years, corporate analysts have further reworked the emerging markets designation. Since 2001, they have come to
talk of the BRICs, a subset of giant economies
set to become the world’s largest. The term
was popularized via a series of widely disseminated global investment research reports
produced by analysts at the investment bank
Goldman Sachs (2003, 2005, 2007). The most
recent turmoil in financial markets is being read
in a range of ways, sometimes against but more
often as confirmation of the thesis (set out in
those successive Goldman Sachs reports) that
China and India will dominate production of
goods and many services and Brazil and Russia
serve as key markets and raw materials suppliers. Other economies are frequently presented
as parts of this subset, notably those of the
Arab Sultanates of the Persian Gulf coast and
other developmental states in Asia (e.g., South
Korea or Taiwan), but the scale and population of the BRICs are seen to confer a special role as the leading non-Western economies
and as future motors of global accumulation.
In this narrative, the scale of the BRICs means
that their aggregate wealth (even at considerably lower than Western or Japanese per capita
levels) will exceed that of the Organization
for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) economies.
The diversity of the components and many
of the assumptions made about the roles of the
BRICs are questionable. Nonetheless, over the
nine years or so since Goldman Sachs’s invention of the category—and the sense of epochal
transformations that it invoked—it has captured the imaginations of corporate and business media. Symptomatic of this are the two
consecutive Newsweek magazine covers (for the
Asian edition of this magazine) that were published in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere in the summer of 2007 that featured
“The New Middle East” (subtitled “The Remarkable Rise of the Gulf Could Transform the
Region and the World”) and “Beijing Rising”
(subtitled “The Olympics Face-Lift Is the Most
Dramatic Reconstruction of a World Capital,
Ever”). Both covers showed visions of spectacular new urban landscapes. In the case of
the image of Beijing, an architect’s model of a
cityscape of new skyscrapers was shown. In the
Downloaded by [AAG ] at 20:39 23 January 2012
54 Volume 64, Number 1, February 2012
Figure 1 Rendering of the Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Center by Zaha-Hadid Architects used on the
front cover of Newsweek (Asia edition) 6 August 2007. Image supplied and copyright permission granted
by Zaha-Hadid Architects. (Color figure available online.)
case of the feature on the Gulf, the Newsweek
cover bore an image of an architect’s computer
rendering of the contracted Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Center (Figure 1). The impact
of such international English-language news
magazines (in tandem with other print media)
as distillations of wider geopolitical discourses
has occasionally been the subject of critical
scrutiny. For example, thirty years ago, the
roles of Time magazine in scripting the Persian
Gulf as a key American strategic arena were evident. In tandem with statements from key military figures and politicians, Time thus presented
the Gulf as vital to America’s security (Sidaway
1998). More recently, Campbell (2007) has examined how Darfur became a space demanding
humanitarian action (in the context of many
other sites of violence that have not been privileged as such) by exploring the visual economy
and visual field of the print media in this process. Representations of hunger, poverty, and
violence (as signs of underdevelopment) endure
and retain a deep hold in such media. These
are now also refracted through concerns about
security and “failed states” (think of Somalia
or Yemen) in the context of the war on terror (Roberts, Secor, and Sparke 2003). Thus,
the taxonomy of states and sites meriting development assistance from Washington, DC,
has recently been reworked by the U.S. Agency
for International Development (Essex 2008).
Yet the successive Newsweek cover stories embody a different narrative of excess, modernity,
and influence. In other words, selected parts
of what was the Third World are now being
represented as more dynamic and modern than
the West. In parallel terms, a story three years
later in The Economist (“Rethinking the “third
world”: Seeing the world differently” 2010), reproduced a cartogram indicating how the world
economy is expected to be configured by 2015,
whereby parts of Asia evidently loom large
(Figure 2), noting how:
Trade between developing countries, and between them and the BRICS, is rising twice
as fast as world trade. Even more strikingly,
while growth has headed south, debt has headed
north, the opposite of what happened in the
1970s and 1980s, when poor countries ran up
vast debts. Gross public debt in the rich countries is rising, from about 75% of GDP at the
start of the crisis in 2007 to a forecast 110%
by 2015, says the IMF. Public debt in emerging
markets is below 40% of GDP and flat. (69)
Although bullish about the prospects for
BRICs and imperative about seeing the world
differently, the range of terminology used in the
article indicates the endurance of older terms
Downloaded by [AAG ] at 20:39 23 January 2012
Geographies of Development: New Maps, New Visions? 55
Figure 2 The projected structure of the world economy in 2015, with country size adjusted in line with
projected gross domestic products. Used in The Economist (2010). © Copyright SASI Group (University
of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan). (Color figure available online.)
(poor and developing) amidst emerging markets and BRICs. Even the Third World is not
thoroughly passé: “Whatever you call it, the
category still matters . . . for trade, to nongovernmental organisations and in the United
Nations” (68).
At the same time, in policy and academic
literatures, a substantial strand of work has
emerged on the role of (to use the favored
term) “Asian drivers,” primarily a term for
China and India and a “cluster of other countries in the Asian region” (Kaplinsky and Messner 2008) in setting agendas elsewhere in Asia,
Africa, and the Americas (Gu, Humphrey,
and Messner 2008; Ravallion 2009). On a
related track, a key report copublished by
the World Bank and Singapore’s Institute for
Policy Studies entitled Dancing with Giants:
China, India and the Global Economy seeks to
chart “China’s and India’s interactions with
the global trading and financial systems and
their impact on the global commons, particularly with regard to climate” (Bourguignon,
Devarajan, and Kharas 2007, viii). The growing role of China, India, and other Asian and
Gulf states as aid donors (McCormick 2008)
and investors (Helleiner 2009) also reconfigures the north–south framework in which
development has been conceived during the
twentieth century. Six (2009, 1103) went as
far as arguing that “The rise of new state
donors such as China or India questions
not only the established modes of development co-operation but also the development paradigm as a whole.” For Six, the
Western framing of development is now
fading in the context of a series of economic and political shifts. Six probably overstated the extent of the shifts (see Ho-Fung
2009 for a more circumspect interpretation of
China’s role), but the transformations are also
being registered in the architecture of international governance. At the September 2009
meeting of the group of the twenty largest
economies (G20), The Economist (“The role of
emerging markets: Cosmetic surgery” 2009)
joined other media in noting how
The G20 meeting in Pittsburgh secured the
place of emerging markets at the top table
of global economic policy. “Bretton Woods is
being overhauled before our eyes,” declared
Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank. The
G20 leaders agreed to shift voting power substantially within the IMF towards “dynamic
emerging markets and developing countries,”
and endorsed similar reform at the World Bank.
It is now widely perceived that the recession following the credit crunch has accelerated the movement. Claims that, as the
Downloaded by [AAG ] at 20:39 23 January 2012
56 Volume 64, Number 1, February 2012
London-based Sunday Times newspaper put it,
“Goldman [Sachs] has dodged the creditcrunch bullet and is emerging from the crisis
stronger than ever” (Arlidge 2009, 24), have
also reinforced the authority of their BRICs
label.
Accompanying such shifts is a growing
awareness that modernity cannot be defined primarily by reference to First World
(Western and then Japanese) cities, as has
customarily been the case in the nineteenth
and twentieth century. Agendas of what it
means to be modern5 are increasingly shaped
by places such as the cities of the Pearl River
Delta in south China (Simpson 2008) or the
petro-dollar-saturated sultanates (cities such
as Doha or Dubai) on the Gulf coast of the
Arabian Peninsula (Elsheshtawy 2010). Recent
financial turbulence has now halted some
construction projects there, but Dubai already
had the world’s tallest skyscrapers and largest
malls and most of the dozen next biggest are
in China, Malaysia, or Taiwan. In the light of
these transformations, it is worth returning to
the opening questions in this article about how
useful is it to talk now about the geographies
of development or developing countries. In
turn, that question takes us back to an older
one: What does development mean? The
conclusions reconsider these.
Conclusions
Although the classification of national
economies in tables of development fails to
capture the nuances of uneven development
(and arguably masks many transnational
trends), this remains profoundly influential,
bolstered by an apparatus of surveillance and
data collection (tabulated by the World Bank
and other UN agencies) that articulate, with
corporate practices. Although long mindful of
these, the geography of development (since
its emergence from tropical, commercial,
and economic geography6) has always been
both caught up in and a reflection of wider
reconfigurations and transformations.
Today, although profound geopolitical and
geo-economic shifts are evident, arguably what
particularly merits geographical scrutiny is the
way that these are represented. Such representations are complicit in the processes they seek
to describe. Put simply, ideas such as BRICS are
more than merely descriptive labels. They become means of making mental maps and claiming the future. Interviewed in 2010, the veteran
Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (2010) answered that among the key trends since the
publication of his landmark Age of Extremes
(1991) was the emergence of a new entity, “the
BRICS.” And the capital markets editor of the
Financial Times set out how:
in the past decade, Bric has become a nearubiquitous financial term, shaping how a generation of investors, financiers and policy makers
view the emerging markets. . . . Financial institutions now run Bric funds; business schools
have launched Bric courses. . . . Bric . . . has
redrawn powerbrokers’ cognitive map, helping
them to articulate a fundamental shift of influence away from the western world. (Tett 2010,
1)
In turn, the label is being adopted by those
it designates. In July 2009, the four heads of
state met in the Russian city (over 800 miles
east of Moscow) of Yekaterinburg. Dubbing
themselves the first BRIC summit, their joint
statement called for measures “to advance the
reform of international financial institutions,
so as to reflect changes in the global economy”
(President of Russia 2009). The Financial
Times correspondent was surely right to go on
and claim that “When the cognitive map is
redrawn . . . even in the world of marketing
and investment bank ‘spin’—it tends not to be
erased so much as appropriated” (Tett 2010, 2).
Indeed, as this article has sketched, the rise and
circulation of BRICs also rests on two decades
of emerging market discourse and are embodiments of and agents in the decomposition of
the Third World as denoting a meaningful
category. Third World is now more likely
to be invoked for its historical resonances,
rather like the term Soviet Bloc. Or it might
be used to describe a site of poverty, decay, or
disorder that could be anywhere. Thus, New
Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or the conditions for patients in some badly run public
(although thoroughly corporatized) hospitals
in Britain are sometimes described by media
as being Third World scenes. What, then, of
geography of development? Where and what
remains of the geography of development? In
addressing such questions, nuanced maps will
be needed.
Downloaded by [AAG ] at 20:39 23 January 2012
Geographies of Development: New Maps, New Visions? 57
One path is to examine the proliferation
of landscapes of enclosure (see the typology
by Vasudevan, McFarlane, and Jeffrey 2008)
and enclave spaces that are bound up with the
wider transformations in the global division
of labor. Arguably therefore, “prior metageographical demarcations: the categories
such as ‘Developed’ and ‘Third World’ (which
emerged in the years after the Second World
War and long provided key points of reference,
commitment, analysis and mobilization) have
shattered and re-converged around enclaves”
(Sidaway 2007a, 336). The past three decades,
coinciding with the other global shifts charted
earlier, have therefore witnessed a proliferation
of export processing/malquiladoras, tourist,
financial, residential, and extractive mining
(and similarly demarcated and often fenced)
zones. Like the plantations of old, these can be
partially disembedded from their immediate
surroundings at the same time as they become
integrated into the global economy. Indeed,
they are often gated, but they are linked to
each other and to other nodes of power.
The residential and consumption expressions
of these (epitomized in the artificial islands
being constructed in the Persian Gulf and
gated communities in China, Indonesia, etc.)
have been described as “dreamworlds of
neoliberalism” (Davis and Monk 2003).
The relationships of these sites and zones
with states, workers, residents, and markets and
to the macrolevel transformations that labels
such as BRIC seek to capture and shape constitutes a broad research agenda. Intersections of
enclosure and enclavization with macroshifts in
the geography of accumulation demand careful scrutiny (Benjamin 2000; Sidaway 2007b;
Jackson and della Dora 2009; Sheller 2009).
Although the comparative specification of how
these intersect and what this means for workers, residents, and consumers requires further
detailed work, one example and a broader theoretical and political challenge must suffice as
a close to this article.
Taking the political direction first, it is instructive to ask how established categories
of citizenship (with rights and political allegiances) might better be captured by the term
“denizen” (derived from the sense of a dweller
within a demarcated zone) to denote the range
of and limits to expectations and obligations of
individuals who live, labor, or play within or
across such spaces (Shearing and Wood 2003).
Consider, for example, what citizenship means
and how it is thus reconfigured for a young
woman worker in an East Asian export processing zone, whose rights to reside therein
are partly governed by a contract of employment with a transnational corporation. Or for a
young male who has a four-year contract (subject to clauses about conduct and good health)
to live and work in a tourist enclave in Indonesia
hundreds of miles from his “home” community.
Consider how residence and citizenship shifts
for wealthy Lebanese, Dutch, Cuban, Egyptian, or British-born executives or celebrities,
who spend months each year in (gated) real estate that they have purchased as homes for family and friends in Persian Gulf or Caribbean
jurisdictions. They might no longer be resident for tax purposes in, say, London, Miami,
Mumbai, Amsterdam, or Frankfurt (where they
previously lived and still own property and have
extended family connections and some business interests). These political and theoretical
questions articulate with wider debates about
subjectivity and sovereignty, but it is another example that raises other questions of
historical-geographical parallels.
In late 2008, Daewoo logistics announced
that it planned to pay nothing for a concession
of agricultural land in Madagascar (to be
used for palm oil and maize cultivation), one
of a number of such new phases of agricultural concession and enclosure being made
around the world. The land would—it was
claimed—be granted rent-free; the benefit
to Madagascar—once led by an avowedly
Marxist regime (see Covell 1987)—was the
employment possibilities for an impoverished
population. Maps (from which Figure 3 is derived) appeared in the press indicating the vast
areas at stake. The deal did work out as originally envisaged and there have been subsequent
clarifications from Daewoo and political turmoil in Madagascar. The expectation or
prospect of a free lease is possibly unprecedented in the region, however, since the
colonial epoch when, across the Mozambique Channel, prazos (extended leases) were
granted in the Zambezi Valley of what would
become Mozambique (Isaacman 1972). The
sites in Madagascar (and others around the
world—see Figure 4) lead to the question of
how, in Moore’s (2008, 258) terms, geobodies
Downloaded by [AAG ] at 20:39 23 January 2012
58 Volume 64, Number 1, February 2012
Figure 3 Concessions sought by Daewoo in Madagascar in late 2008. Drawn by the Cartographic
Resources Unit at the University of Plymouth, UK. Compiled by the author from a range of media
sources.
Figure 4 Transnational investment in agricultural mega-projects, 2008. Drawn by the Cartographic
Resources Unit at the University of Plymouth, UK. Compiled by the author from a range of media
sources.
Geographies of Development: New Maps, New Visions? 59
become “entangled with the striations of
racialized dispossession from previous histories
of sovereignty, violence and subjection.”
A testing and profoundly geographical
agenda returns: charting these contests and
their relations to the past, present, and aspirations of development.
Downloaded by [AAG ] at 20:39 23 January 2012
Postscript
How will the issues in this article and their
interpretation look in two decades—or more?
Further BRIC summits have already taken
place, including one at which South Africa was
formally admitted to the group; henceforth to
be the BRICS. The Economist (“A More Hopeful
Continent” 2011, 67) reports that Africa’s ‘lion
economies are earning a place alongside Asia’s
tigers’, noting how since the millennium, six
of the worlds ten fastest growing economies
are in Africa. And since this article was accepted for publication in May 2010, a series of
high profile intergovernmental and corporate
reports have reinforced impressions of a shifting global economic geography that reconfigures maps of development/underdevelopment.
Constraints on space preclude me from citing more than two of these here (The World
Bank 2011; Ward 2011). Comprising several
genres, such as corporate and intergovernmental reports, extensive media discussions, blogs
(http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/) and so on,
a discourse is in the air. This is a particular way of seeing, interpreting, and enacting
what critical work in geography has conceptualized as uneven development. That critical work
also reminds us that perceptions of epochal
change are not in themselves new and an
historical—geographical moment should not
be known simply by its own consciousness.
Hence, ongoing geographical research must
foreground accompanying struggles, contradictions, and counter-discourses. Other ways
of knowing the world are possible. Notes
1
Over the last decade, the historiography of this period has become much richer in excavating such intersections. Key works are Bair (2009), Borstelmann
(2001), Engerman et al. (2003), Latham (2000), Plehwe (2009), Reynolds (2008), and a recent set of
papers published in the journal Diplomatic History
(2009, Vol. 33, No. 3). Among many other sources,
the radical responses from the Third World form
the subject of Prashad’s (2007) volume and a set of
papers on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Third World Quarterly (Berger 2004). See
also Simon (2009) for another line of enquiry into
the moment “when development was all new, the
world was full of optimism and the prospects for
development and poverty alleviation were unquestioned” (881).
2 See Thirlwall (2008) and White (2008) for more on
the Human Development Index and other indexes.
See Power (2006) for some useful background on its
creation and the key role of the Pakistani economist
Mahbub Ul Haq (1934–1998) in establishing the
index as a widely used measure, via the United
National Development Program’s Human Development Report series. See Morse (2008) and Rigg
(2008) for other critical reflections on development
indexes.
3 The naming of the crisis merits reflection. As noted
in Sidaway (2008, 197): “the media don’t usually call
this a predatory lending crisis, let alone an American
crisis. Arguably however, such alterative labels shift
the ways that the crisis is interpreted.”
4 In addition to the U.S.-focused literature cited earlier, see Kothari (2005) on the British role and case.
For a case study of a site of development that was,
like many others in the Caribbean, shaped by first
British and then American power, see Wainwright
(2008).
5 This has evolved in tandem with a deconstruction
of the claim that the experience of the West is the
chief arbiter of modernity. In other words, it recognizes that there are multiple (geographical and
historical) experiences of and modes of modernity
(Eisenstadt 2000). In turn, these relate to wider debates about Eurocentrism and the long term of the
world system. The literatures on these are vast, but
for an interpretation of what he termed the reorientation to an Asia-centered world system, from a writer
whose earlier work on development and underdevelopment was briefly influential, see Gunder Frank
(1998).
6 This past of development geography is a complex story connecting narratives about commerce
and “race,” with imperialism and physical geography, in the form of environmental determinism
(Barnes 2000; Power and Sidaway 2004). With respect to the latter, Poon and Yeung (2009, 3) noted
how “These debates have been particularly revitalized among scholars, policy makers and the popular media since the publication of Jeffrey Sachs’
(2005) The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for
Our Time linking economic underdevelopment to
environmental and locational constraints (‘bad geography’). Do geographic factors account for differences in growth and development . . . as Sachs
so forcefully argues?” As another paper (in the set
that Poon and Yeung assembled) addressing Sachs
Downloaded by [AAG ] at 20:39 23 January 2012
60 Volume 64, Number 1, February 2012
argued, asking this “is perhaps less important than
asking how political economic and policy processes
convert these geographic conditions into factors
that do have material implications” (Bebbington
2009, 11). The mirror image of Sachs’s advocacy
of aid for and stress on environmental constraints
on development is Moyo’s (2009) Dead Aid: Why
Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way
for Africa, emphasizing economic and political mismanagement, although both also advocate marketled strategies. Both are also in a long tradition of
diagnoses (and self-diagnoses) of the African condition. As a counter to either, Rodney (1972) or
Chabal and Dalosz (1999) is rewarding. According
to her Web site, Moyo once worked for Goldman
Sachs and is now writing a sequel about how the
BRICs and selected Middle East countries are set
to become dominant players in the twenty-first century.
Literature Cited
Arlidge, J. 2009. Inside the goldmine. The Sunday
Times Magazine 8 November:12–24.
Bair, J. 2009. Taking aim at the New International
Economic Order. In The road from Mont Pèlerin:
The making of the neoliberal thought collective, ed.
P. Mirowski and D. Plehwe, 347–85. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Barnes, T. J. 2000. Inventing Anglo-American economic geography, 1889–1960. In A companion to
economic geography, ed. E. Sheppard and T. J.
Barnes, 11–26. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Bebbington, A. 2009. Latin America: Contesting extraction, producing geographies. Singapore Journal
of Tropical Geography 30:7–12.
Benjamin, S. 2000. Governance, economic settings
and poverty in Bangalore. Environment and Urbanization 12 (1): 35–56.
Berger, M. T. 2004. After the Third World? History, destiny and the fate of Third Worldism. Third
World Quarterly 25:9–39.
Borstelmann, T. 2001. The Cold War and the color
line: American race relations in the global arena.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bourguignon, F., S. Devarajan, and H. Kharas. 2007.
Foreword. In Dancing with giants: China, India, and
the global economy, ed. A. L. Winters and S. Yusuf,
vii–ix. Washington, DC: World Bank, and Singapore: Institute of Policy Studies.
Burd-Sharps, S., S. K. Lewis, and E. B. Martins.
2008. The measure of America: American human development report, 2008–2009. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Campbell, D. 2007. Geopolitics and visuality:
Sighting the Darfur conflict. Political Geography
26:357–82.
Chabal, P., and Dalosz, J.-P. 1999. Africa works: Disorder as a political instrument. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Connell, R. 2009. Interview. http://www.southernperspectives.net/region/australia/interview-withraewyn-connell (last accessed 8 March 2010).
Covell, M. 1987. Madagascar: Politics, economics and
society. London: Frances Pinter.
Dalby, S. 2010. Recontextualising violence, power
and nature: The next twenty years of critical geopolitics. Political Geography 29:280–
88.
Davis, M., and D. B. Monk. 2003. Evil paradises:
Dreamlands of neoliberalism. New York: New Press.
Desai, V., and R. Potter, eds. 2008. The companion to
development studies. 2nd ed. London: Hodder
Edemariam, A. 2008. On the money: Saturday
interview series. The Guardian 4 October:31.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/04/
bbc.creditcrunch (last accessed 21 August 2009).
Eisenstadt, S. N. 2000. Multiple modernities.
Daedalus 129 (1): 1–29.
Elsheshtawy, Y. 2010. Dubai: Behind an urban spectacle.
London and New York: Routledge.
Engerman, D. C., N. Gilman, M. Haefele, and M. E.
Latham. 2003. Staging growth: Modernization, development, and the global Cold War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Escobar, A. 2005. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Essex, J. 2008. Deservedness, development, and
the state: Geographic categorization in the US
Agency for International Development’s foreign assistance framework. Geoforum 39:1625–
36.
Flusty, S. 2003. Review of Unmasking L.A.: Third
worlds and the city. The Professional Geographer
55:101–03.
Franklin, J. 2008. Hard times for Hollywood. The
Guardian 8 August. http://www.guardian.co.uk/
business/2008/aug/08/subprimecrisis.useconomy
(last accessed 21 August 2009).
Geertz, C. 2005. What was the Third World
revolution? Dissent (Winter). http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article>268 (last accessed 8
March 2010).
Goldman Sachs. 2003. Dreaming with BRICs: The
path to 2050. Global Economics Paper No. 99.
http://www2.goldmansachs.com/ideas/brics/book/
99-dreaming.pdf (last accessed 21 August 2009).
———. 2005. How solid are the BRICs?
Global Economics Paper No. 134. http://www2.
goldmansachs . com / ideas / brics / how - solid . html
(last accessed 21 August 2009).
———. 2007. BRICs and beyond. http://www2.
goldmansachs.com/ideas/brics/book/BRIC-Full
(last accessed 21 August 2009).
Downloaded by [AAG ] at 20:39 23 January 2012
Geographies of Development: New Maps, New Visions? 61
Gu, J., J. Humphrey, and D. Messner. 2008. Global
governance and developing countries: The implications of the rise of China. World Development 36
(2): 274–92.
Gunder Frank, A. 1998. ReOrient: Global economy in
the Asian age. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Harris, N. 1986. The end of the Third World: Newly
industrializing countries and the decline of an ideology.
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Helleiner, E. 2009. Special section: The geopolitics of sovereign wealth funds. The geopolitics of
sovereign wealth funds: An introduction. Geopolitics
14:37–41.
Hobsbawn, E. 1994. The age of extremes: A history of
the world, 1914–1991. New York: Vintage.
——— 2010. Interview: Global distempers. New Left
Review 61:133–50.
Ho-Fung, H. 2009. America’s head servant? The
PRC’s dilemma in the global crisis. New Left Review
60:5–25.
Isaacman, A. F. 1972. Mozambique, the Africanisation of a European institution: The Zambezi Prazos 1750–1902. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Jackson, M., and V. della Dora. 2009. “Dreams so
big only the sea can hold them”: Man-made islands as anxious spaces, cultural icons, and travelling visions. Environment and Planning A 41 (9):
2086–2104.
Kaplinsky, R., and D. Messner. 2008. Introduction:
The impact of Asian drivers on the developing
world. World Development 36 (2): 197–209.
Kothari, U., ed. 2005. A radical history of development
studies: Individuals, institutions and ideologies. London: Zed.
Kreutzmann, H. 2008. Dividing the world: Conflict and inequality in the context of growing
global tension. Third World Quarterly 29 (4): 675–
89.
Lai, K. P. Y. 2006. “Imagineering” Asian emerging
markets: Financial knowledge networks in the fund
management industry. Geoforum 37:627–42.
Latham, M. E. 2000. Modernization as ideology. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
McCormick, D. 2008. China and India as Africa’s
new donors: The impact of aid on development.
Review of African Political Economy 115:73–92.
McVety, A. 2008. Pursuing progress: Point four
in Ethiopia. Diplomatic History 32 (3): 371–
403.
Moore, D. S. 2008. Sovereignty, spatiality and spectres of race. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography
29 (3): 254–61.
A more hopeful continent. The lion kings? 2011. The
Economist 8 January:66–67.
Morse, S. 2008. The geography of tyranny and despair: Development indicators and the hypothesis
of genetic inevitability of national inequality. The
Geographical Journal 174 (3): 195–206.
Moyo, D. 2009. Dead aid: Why aid is not working and
how there is a better way for Africa. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Ó Tuathail, G. 1994. Critical geopolitics and development theory: Intensifying the dialogue. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS
19:228–33.
Plehwe, D. 2009. The origins of the neoliberal
economic development discourse. In The road
from Mont Pèlerin: The making of the neoliberal
thought collective, ed. P. Mirowski and D. Plehwe, 238–79. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Poon, J. P. H., and H. W.-C. Yeung. 2009. SJTG special forum—Continental drift? Development issues in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Singapore
Journal of Tropical Geography 30:3–6.
Power, M. 2006. Mahbub Ul Haq. In Fifty key thinkers
on development, ed. D. Simon, 264–69. London and
New York: Routledge.
Power, M., and J. D. Sidaway. 2004. The degeneration of tropical geography. Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 94:585–601.
Prashad, V. 2007. The darker nations: A people’s history
of the Third World. New York: The New Press.
President of Russia. 2009. Joint statement of the
BRIC countries’ leaders. http://eng.kremlin.ru/
text/docs/2009/06/217963.shtml (last accessed 14
March 2010).
Ravallion, M. 2009. Are there lessons for Africa from
China’s success against poverty? World Development 37 (2): 303–13.
Reiff, D. 1991. Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World.
New York: Simon and Schuster.
Rethinking the “third world”: Seeing the world differently. 2010. The Economist 12 June:68–69.
Reynolds, G. 2008. Apostles of modernity: American
writers in the Age of Development. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Rigg, J. 2008. The millennium development goals. In
The companion to development studies. 2nd ed., ed. V.
Desai and R. Potter, 30–36. London: Hodder.
Roberts, S. M., A. Secor, and M. Sparke.
2003. Neoliberal geopolitics. Antipode 35:886–
97.
Rodney, W. 1972. How Europe underdeveloped Africa.
London: Bogle L’Ouveture.
The role of emerging markets: Cosmetic surgery.
2009. The Economist 3 October. http://www.
economist.com/node/14558474 (7 June 2011).
Sachs, G. 2005. The end of poverty: Economic possibilities
for our time. New York: Penguin.
Sachs, W., ed. 1992. The development dictionary: A
guide to knowledge as power. London: Zed.
Sawhney, D. N., ed. 2002. Unmasking L.A.: Third
Worlds and the city. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Downloaded by [AAG ] at 20:39 23 January 2012
62 Volume 64, Number 1, February 2012
Shearing, C., and J. Wood. 2003. Nodal governance,
democracy, and the new “denizens.” Journal of Law
and Society 30:400–419.
Sheller, M. 2009. The new Caribbean complexity:
Mobility systems, tourism and the re-scaling of development. The Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 30:189–203.
Sidaway, J. D. 1998. What is in a gulf? From the “arc
of crisis” to the Gulf War. In Rethinking geopolitics,
ed. G. Ó Tuathail and S. Dalby, 224–39. London
and New York: Routledge.
———. 2007a. Enclave space: A new metageography
of development? Area 39 (3): 331–39.
———. 2007b. Spaces of postdevelopment. Progress
in Human Geography 31 (3): 345–61.
———. 2008. Subprime crisis: American crisis or human crisis? Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 26 (2): 195–98.
Sidaway, J. D., and M. Pryke. 2000. The strange
geographies of “emerging markets.” Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers NS 25 (2):
187–201.
Simon, D. 2009. From the Holocaust to development: Reflections of surviving development pioneers. Third World Quarterly 30 (5): 849–84.
Simpson, T. 2008. Macao, capital of the 21st century? Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
26:1053–79.
Six, C. 2009. The rise of postcolonial states as donors:
A challenge to the development paradigm? Third
World Quarterly 30 (6): 1103–21.
Slater, D. 1993. The geopolitical imagination and
the enframing of development theory. Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers NS 18:419–
37.
———.1994. Reimaging the geopolitics of development: Continuing the dialogue. Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers NS 19:223–38.
Taylor, P. J., B. Derudder, C. G. Garcı́a, and F.
Witlox. 2009. From north–south to “global”
South: An investigation of a changing “South” us-
ing airline flows between cities, 1970–2005. Geography Compass 3 (2): 836–55.
Testa, A. 2009. He told us so. The Guardian Weekend
24 January:25–26.
Tett, G. 2010. The man who named the future. The
Financial Times 16 January (Life and Arts section):
1–2.
Thérien, J.-P. 1999. Beyond the North–South divide: The two tales of world poverty. Third World
Quarterly 20 (4): 723–42.
Thirlwall, A. P. 2008. Development as economic
growth. In The companion to development studies. 2nd
ed., ed. V. Desai and R. Potter, 37–40. London:
Hodder.
Vanolo, A. 2010. The border between core and periphery: Geographical representations of the world
system. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geogragrafie 101 (1): 26–36.
Vasudevan, A., C. McFarlane, and A. Jeffrey. 2008.
Spaces of enclosure. Geoforum 39:1641–46.
Wainwright, J. 2008. Decolonizing development: Colonial power and the Maya. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Ward, K. 2011. The world in 2050: Quantifying the
shift in the global economy. London: HSBC Bank.
White, H. 2008. The measurement of poverty. In
The companion to development studies. 2nd ed., ed. V.
Desai and R. Potter, 25–39. London: Hodder.
The World Bank. 2011. Global development horizons
2011. Multipolarity: The new global economy. Washington, DC: The World Bank.
JAMES D. SIDAWAY is Professor of Political and
Cultural Geography and a member of the Geographies of Globalization research program in the Department of Geography, Planning and International
Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Prinsengracht 130, Amsterdam 1018
VZ, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected].
His principal scholarly interests are geopolitics and
political geography and the history and philosophy
of geographical thought.