A quarter of a century has now passed since the historic popular uprising that led to the overthrow of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. The mass movement known as the "People Power Revolution" was not only pivotal to the democratic transition within the Philippines, but it also became an inspiration for subsequent mass movements leading to further democratic transitions throughout the Third World and in the former Communist bloc in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. However, the neoliberal economic policies subsequently pursued by newly democratic governments...

This volume explores how "difference "is constructed, manifested, mobilised and obscured in socially uneven societies, particularly those fuelled by neoliberal economic growth in the recent years.

The book approaches difference as a double edged concept that allows one to make sense of the tensions that are played out between cosmopolitan convergence and multicultural diversity, between expanding middle classes and increasingly disenfranchised poor groups, between the global and the local. The chapters in this volume present a series of empirical explorations of how difference is...

This book considers how the personal and the professional dimensions are related, and how they matter for aid work. The contributions to this edited volume are based on the assumption that all actors are relevant in development, including national and international aid workers. A key question which the book explores is why the personal so often remains un-acknowledged in development studies, even though its salience for aid workers is well-documented. One possible reason is an implicit narrative of aid work as altruistic and self-sacrificing, which renders it inappropriate to devote much...

In early 2005 regional protests in Kyrgyzstan soon became national ones as protesters seized control of the country s capital, Bishkek. The country s president for fifteen years, Askar Akaev, fled the country and after a night of extensive looting, a new president, Kurmanbek Bakiev, came to power. The events quickly earned the epithet Tulip Revolution and were interpreted as the third of the colour revolutions in the post-Soviet space, following Ukraine and Georgia. But did the events in Kyrgyzstan amount to a revolution ? How much change followed and with what academic and policy...

As the 15-year Millennium Development Goals approach their conclusion, we can now measure their larger successes and failures in more than snapshot fashion; and we can begin to consider how best to shape the international development agenda for the coming decades based on what we have learned. But the performance and outlook for the MDGs can neither be reduced to the sum of its eight goals, nor be divorced from international dynamics - the hard interests of states and other actors, and the global dynamics that impact on both. For that reason, this volume balances contextual analysis, the...

Development discourses and academic development knowledge reflect to a large extent the interests of the North . The Antipodes Australia and New Zealand - share an ambivalent location as countries of the North' in wealth, development and dominant intellectual genealogies but South' in latitude and history. Approaches to development have been shaped by the colonial dispossession of indigenous peoples, paternalist development relationships with impoverished and marginalised neighbours, and concerns with national security. In the 21st century they find themselves located at the edge of a...