Organisation profile

Development Studies, and the field of development, is transforming rapidly as conventional understandings of development and geographical boundaries are challenged. In the International Development Research Group (IDRG) we use an empirically based, multidisciplinary approach to grapple with these changes to generate new understandings and explanations, and advance critical development theory. The research group is rooted in the International Development Studies Program at Roskilde University that was established in 1985. It is the oldest and one of the largest programs of its kind in Scandinavia.

IDRG scholars investigate development trends, challenges, and achievements in contexts of local, national and global interconnectedness and new processes of inequality. IDRG draws upon and develops contextual analysis for empirically grounded theorization, thereby contributing to developmental policy debates and solutions. IDRG scholars have expertise in anthropology, area studies, cultural studies, development economics, gender studies, geography, history, international political economy, political science, and sociology. Our research currently deals with a wide range of topics including natural resource contestations, global aid flows, processes of neo- and post colonialism, urban development, green transitions, and youth mobilization. Much of this work, while drawing on local and national dynamics, is also concerned with global entanglements. This includes a focus on the proliferation of new actors and technologies in development, their impact on traditional power hierarchies, and the reconstituting of North-South relations. Related, the group focuses on agents and institutions that challenge existing hegemonic norms and orders, and deep-seated inequalities of power, ethnicity, race, gender, and class. In recent years, research councils as diverse as the Danish Council for Independent Research, Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (FFU), Horizon 2020, the Dutch Research Council, the Carlsberg Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have financed projects led by IDRG researchers.

Our current research foci are as follows:

• Policies and practices of international aid flows
• Natural resources, climate change, sustainable development, resource conflicts and environmental politics
• Poverty, economic development and industrial policy
• Dynamic local, national and transnational configurations of state, conflict and citizenship
• Social movements, civil society and radicalism
• Labour markets, informal worker organizations and social protection
• Processes of economic redistribution and global flows
• Human security and humanitarianism
• The complex interrelationships between local actors and global discourses
• Health and the politics of food and nutrition
• Remapping gendered and racial identities
• Impacts of migration and diasporas on the political, economic, social and cultural dynamics of both sending and receiving societies
• Policies and practices in rural and urban development, informality and illegal trade
• South-South development and new actors in development