Abstract
Reviewed by: John Cameron (john.cameron@dal.ca ), Department of International Development Studies, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada
Full disclosure: I don’t like textbooks. The benefits of comprehensive survey coverage seem almost impossible to combine with engaging writing, while the uniformity of organization and writing style fails to expose students to different forms of writing for different audiences and purposes. I can also never seem to find textbooks that perfectly fit my particular ways of organizing courses, so I prefer to create my own reading packages that include academic articles, book chapters, NGO and government reports, media articles, op-eds, short stories, video clips, and films. With so much online material easily available, and copyright regulations that make it possible to provide most of this material at no extra cost to students, I find it hard to advocate for textbooks.
My personal biases aside, the new textbook edited by Mahmoud Masaeli and Lauchlan Munro, Canada and the Challenges of International Development and Globalization, offers an important alternative to previously published texts. International development is often taught in Canada and other “developed” countries as something that happens “over there”—in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—that has little to do with the daily lives of Canadian students. This approach typically focuses on the key issues of international development, such as gender, health, poverty, inequality, rural development, urbanization, et cetera, but not on the ways in which these issues are connected to students’ daily lives. Conceptually, international development remains far away, and students are cast as innocent bystanders.
An alternative approach is to connect the challenges of international development to the daily lives of students so that the key issues are framed around connections to students through their roles as consumers, citizens, taxpayers, and investors. For example, through use of a mobile phone, students are connected to conflicts over the extraction of natural resources, often involving Canadian companies; to worker suicides in tech factories in China; and to e-waste dumping and its impacts on human health around the world. Similarly, a cotton T-shirt connects them to the global water crisis, child labour in cotton harvesting in Uzbekistan, dangerous working conditions in garment factories in Bangladesh, and the dumping of used clothes into textile markets throughout Africa. Any student who has ever received a paycheque has made contributions to the Canada Pension Plan, which connects them to the global investment industry and debates about responsible investing. From this perspective, international development and poverty are not issues that happen “over there”; they are intimately connected to almost every aspect of our existence. Moreover, students are not innocent bystanders, but are rather potentially implicated—if only indirectly—in patterns of global poverty, inequality, injustice, and conflict. I believe that this approach offers a more compelling and engaging way to introduce students to international development, as it involves powerful ethical questions about our collective complicity in creating and reproducing global poverty and inequality.
Masaeli and Munro’s edited text, Canada and the Challenges of International Development and Globalization, offers the first comprehensive introductory resource available to instructors of International Development Studies in Canada who want to teach international development through a focus on connections to Canada and the daily lives of Canadians. As textbooks go, this one is well organized, clearly written, and includes engaging examples that bring life and Canadian connections to the analysis of international development issues on other continents. Many of the chapters are written by leading academics and scholar-practitioners in their specific fields, such as the chapters on Canadian aid (chapters 4 and 12) and Canadian civil society organizations (chapter 7). The book is divided into 14 chapters with 11 additional short case studies, so could easily be used as the framework for a one-semester introductory course. While the text focuses on Canadian connections to international development issues, it also includes more general chapters on the history of international development and globalization (chapter 2), development theory (chapter 3), debates about international trade and aid (chapter 14), and development ethics (chapter 15). The text also analyzes the history of Canada from an international development perspective, including the history of economic and political change in Canada (chapter 1), and Canada’s long history of internal colonialism (chapter 10), as well as struggles to decolonize development—drawing on perspectives from First Nations in Canada (chapter 9).
There are also some important gaps. Most notable is the absence of any specific chapters on gender and the impacts of Canadian government policies, civil society initiatives, and private-sector activity on gender relations in other parts of the world. This gap is especially surprising given the launch of the “Feminist International Assistance Policy” 2 in 2017 as the guiding framework for Canadian international development assistance, and the important history of the gender unit within the Canadian International Development Agency (now Global Affairs Canada) dating back to the 1980s.
Also, while this textbook emphasizes the specifically Canadian connections to international development and globalization, it doesn’t quite connect the issues “over there” to the daily lives of the students for whom the book was written. The Canadian connections focus primarily on Canadian government policies, civil society organizations, and private businesses—not on the ways in which students themselves (and other Canadian citizens and residents) are connected to global poverty and inequality through their roles as consumers, citizens, taxpayers, and investors. So, the text bridges much of the conceptual divide between international development “over there” and life back in Canada, but it doesn’t quite tap in to the immediate, material ways in which students are connected to international development and globalization. Nevertheless, this text does still offer a (mostly) comprehensive introduction to international development, and clear connections back to Canadian policies and interventions in a format and style that is likely to engage students in connecting their own experience in Canada to pressing global issues.
