The department is a lively community that is recognised internationally as one of the top centres for research and teaching in development studies.

Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Usurping land and driving communities off it has been at the heart of state-driven ‘development’ processes in India since its independence from British colonial rule. Post-independence India has seen large-scale land dispossession for the grand ideological purpose of ‘nation-building’ through dams, industries, mines and ports. The conversion of rural farmland, commons, and forests has gone hand in hand with dispossession and displacement. The purpose of this project is to make concrete how land is driven out of agriculture for late industrialisation and with what implications for state-society relations in neoliberal India.
Using an empirical case of ‘ideal-type’ industrialisation – planned industrial area with manufacturing units – in Western India, the project explores: (1) the set of structural and political variables that facilitate land dispossession without stiff opposition; (2) how different rural classes negotiate with the ‘non-farm’ economy spawned by manufacturing industries over time, and (3) the political actions of landlosers over time.