F1GD 4425 - Emerging economies & Dev. strategies in the Global South from:BRICS to global interdependence(s)

***UPDATED for 2025/26***

This course departs from a simple question: what is development today? What is being developed and how the meaning of economic and social progress has evolved in recent decades across a vast array of countries, departing from ideological laden templates moving towards pragmatic trajectories of material accumulation. Looking at the changes implicitly announced in these questions, this course adopts the perspective of countries belonging to the Global South, the formerly called developing world, and seeks to explain how these countries, highly dissimilar look to bring forth structural changes to the international world order. Since the end of the Cold War we have seen a major realignment of large emerging countries that have articulated common response patterns to the challenge of globalization, regional integration, but also an increasingly dislocated IPE. In a short period of two decades, several of these national units and regional blocks were able to overcome significant institutional and systemic barriers, to find new consensus agreements and were able to coordinate collective responses at the international level. This course will explore the main drivers of this change, while at the same time providing a robust conceptual and contextual framework, allowing the students to situate these trajectories and narratives of economic progress within specific ideational transformations (post-colonialism, socialism, post-neoliberalism) while addressing through middle range analytical tools, specific transnational dynamics at work that have challenged the coherence of policy responses (financial disruption, international-value chains, new digital platforms)

Learning Outcomes

• An understanding of the transformations in the current world order, and in particular of novel multilateral organizations, technical cooperation vehicles and public policy frameworks driving investment flows towards emerging markets(AIIB, NDB)
• The acquisition of a strong foundation of development theory and studies as per its current transformations

3.The understanding of processes of economic integration and cooperation, and the evolution of free trade agreement under WTO+ disciplines

Professional Skills

• Drafting of policy memos
• Multi-level policy analysis
• Official data processing and sorting

Macroeconomics, Public Policy Analysis and general IR theory, while not a prerequisite are recommended for a better comprehension of the general class content

Students will be provided with feedback in a week time for each one of the assignments via the grading section on their Moodle page. Comments will be issued for each assignment.

2 Oral Presentation 60%

Final Paper 30 %,

Class Participation throughout the term 10%,

• In Class Presence: 2 hours a week / 24 hours a semester
• Online learning activities: 1 hours a week
• Reading and Preparation for Class: 4 hours a week / 4 hours a semester
• Research and Preparation for Group Work: 4 hours a week /48 hours a semester
• Research and Writing for Individual Assessments: 6 hours a week / 72 hours a semester