Annual Conference 2025

Where: Hosted by Trinity College Dublin

When:  15-16 December 2025

Conference Theme

Development in the interregnum: Past, present, and future(s)

International development is at an inflection point with the current conjuncture defined by a conflation of interacting destructive forces, disruptions, uncertainties, and opportunities for change.   Geopolitical tectonic plates are shifting with new actors and institutions now influencing the postwar development cooperation regime. Multilateralism and the liberal international order are crumbling while the rise of China and South-South development cooperation is influencing a profound shift in development thinking. This coincides with a renewed role for the state, state interventionism and the increasing influence of state capitalism in development cooperation. Political convulsions in some of the longest-standing democracies are birthing discourses that actively undermine fundamental democratic principles, commitments to global cooperation and universal values, instead seeing a rise of isolationism and withdrawal from international institutions. As the impacts of climate change unfold, a series of sharp intersecting inequalities fuelled by uneven and combined development continues to accelerate. These interacting, intersecting events and transformations hold profound implications for international development cooperation governance and practices. 

This conference examines how, why, and in what ways the contemporary conjuncture can be understood, and what possibilities and future pathways exist for development cooperation. It explores discursive framings, structural features, and agent-based possibilities and mechanisms embedded within the current order that could shift the focus from conflict, crisis, and competition, toward cooperation, consensus, and community.

We welcome scholars from development studies, international and global studies, geography, political sciences, sociology, anthropology, social sciences and cognate disciplines.