Post-Conflict Development and Difference (GEOG20012)

Citizens of post-conflict nation states often experience a range of rapid social, economic and environmental changes. This creates new challenges and very often new conflicts. This subject provides an introduction to the sub-discipline of critical development geography and uses its concepts and perspectives to examine post-conflict development in the Asia Pacific region, focusing on East Timor and Cambodia. It asks how ideas of social and cultural difference are deployed, experienced and (re)negotiated by a range of more and less powerful actors. The subject will foreground various processes – of nation-building and humanitarian intervention, urban and rural development, memory activism, justice and accountability mechanisms, ethnicity and race relations, and environment resource contestation – across a series of case study sites.