Duffield

Bio: Duffield is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Global governance & New wars. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 1091 citations.

Is Good Policy Unimplementable? Reflections on the Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice

Abstract: Despite the enormous energy devoted to generating the right policy models in development, strangely little attention is given to the relationship between these models and the practices and events that they are expected to generate or legitimize. Focusing on the unfolding activities of a development project over more than ten years as it falls under different policy regimes, this article challenges the assumption that development practice is driven by policy, suggesting that the things that make for ‘good policy’ — policy which legitimizes and mobilizes political support — in reality make it rather unimplementable within its chosen institutions and regions. But although development practice is driven by a multi-layered complex of relationships and the culture of organizations rather than policy, development actors work hardest of all to maintain coherent representations of their actions as instances of authorized policy, because it is always in their interest to do so. The article places these observations within the wider context of the anthropology of development and reflects on the place, method and contribution of development ethnography.

Towards a Sociology of Forced Migration and Social Transformation

Abstract: Forced migration - including refugee flows, asylum seekers, internal displacement and development-induced displacement - has increased considerably in volume and political significance since the end of the Cold War. It has become an integral part of North-South relationships and is closely linked to current processes of global social transformation. This makes it as important for sociologists to develop empirical research and analysis on forced migration as it is to include it in their theoretical understandings of contemporary society. The study of forced migration is linked to research on economic migration, but has its own specific research topics, methodological problems and conceptual issues. Forced migration needs to be analysed as a social process in which human agency and social networks play a major part. It gives rise to fears of loss of state control, especially in the context of recent concerns about migration and security. In this context, it is essential to question earlier sociological appr...

Language and Globalization

Abstract: There are six sections in this article. In section 1, I summarize views on discourse as a facet of globalization in the academic literature, and then introduce an approach based upon a version of 'critical discourse analysis' (CDA) and 'cultural political economy.' In section 2, I discuss different strategies of globalization (and regionalization) emanating from governmental and non-governmental agencies, and the different discourses that constitute elements of these strategies. In section 3, I discuss how processes of globalization impact upon specific spatial 'entities' (nation-states, cities, regions, etc. ) in terms of the idea of 're-scaling,' i.e., changing relations in processes, relationships, practices, and so forth between local, national, and international (including 'global') scales. I focus here upon the national scale in its relation to the global scale and the scale of international regions (in particular, the process of 'European integration'). In section 4, I deal with the media and mediation. In section 5, I discuss people's ordinary experience of globalization, and its implications for and effects upon their lives. Section 6 deals with war and terrorism.

Inequality and Social Conflict Over Land in Africa

Abstract: The paper proposes that reports of pervasive competition and conflict over land in sub-Saharan Africa belie a current image of negotiable and adaptive customary systems of landholding and land use but, instead, reveal processes of exclusion, deepening social divisions and class formation. Cases of ambiguous and indeterminate outcomes among claimants over land do occur, but the instances of intensifying conflict over land, deepening social rifts and expropriation of land beg for closer attention. More emphasis needs to be placed by analysts on who benefits and who loses from instances of ‘negotiability’ in access to land, an analysis that, in turn, needs to be situated in broader political economic and social changes taking place, particularly during the past thirty or so years. This requires a theoretical move away from privileging contingency, flexibility and negotiability that, willy-nilly, ends by suggesting an open field, to one that is able to identify those situations and processes (including commodification, structural adjustment, market liberalization and globalization) that limit or end negotiation and flexibility for certain social groups or categories.