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.”
A new article by Associate Professor Ruben Andersson and David Keen of the LSE compares the security paradigms for combating terrorism, drugs and irregular migration and argues that while these have largely failed on their own terms, they have also proven rather successful for the actors shaping them.
Through a spatial political economy analysis of systems of intervention, the paper shows how vested interests have helped perpetuate counterproductive approaches, while risks (including that of human suffering) have routinely been ‘exported’ into geographical ‘buffer zones’.
In analysing the stakes in such systems, the authors deploy the metaphor of games. This term allows them to highlight divergences between ‘official’ goals, such as ‘winning the war,’ and unstated aims, such as perpetuating security investments, relocating risk or stoking fear for political gain. Equally important, game terminology helps highlight the spatial and social dynamics of collaboration, conflict and rule-manipulation within the system.
In exploring these dynamics, the paper puts a focus empirically on the complex collaborations between Western states instigating intervention and poorer ‘partner states,’ showing how a skewed geopolitical distribution of risk may tilt security interventions in the instigators' favour while maintaining ‘skin in the game’ for less powerful actors.
The article formed the basis of a keynote address delivered by Professor Andersson at a public seminar on the 'The Governance of the International Mobility of People' at Tampere University, Finland, on 22 October.
David Keen and Ruben Andersson (2018) 'Double games: Success, failure and the relocation of risk in fighting terror, drugs and migration', Political Geography, DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.09.008