What Is Development For? Rethinking Aid as Reparation
Professor Andrea Cornwall delivers the Maxine Molyneux Annual Lecture in International Development
What Is Development For? Rethinking Aid as Reparation
14 May 2026, 17:30
This lecture asks a simple but urgent question: what is international development for? At a moment of deepening inequality, climate crisis and global instability, the dominant model of development appears increasingly unable to deliver on its promises. Rather than a project of assistance from ‘richer’ to ‘poorer’ countries, this lecture argues that international development should be rethought as a project of reparation that addresses the historical and ongoing injustices of slavery, colonialism and racial capitalism that have shaped today’s global inequalities. Reframing development in these terms shifts the emphasis from charity to redress, and from assistance to repair.
A social anthropologist by training, Andrea Cornwall works on questions of rights and justice in relation to gender, sexuality, participation, democracy and development.
Further information
Cost
Free
Other events in this series
UCL Americas Public Seminar Series: Promised Land - The Worlds of American Zionism since 1948
Join Professor Doug Rossinow (Metro State University, USA) for the first seminar of the 2024/25 series.
UCL Americas Public Seminar Series: The Opportunities and Costs Posed by Overseas Americans
Join Professor Sarah Snyder from the American University, Washington D.C., for the second seminar of the 2024/25 series.
UCL Americas Public Seminar Series: Colombia Revisited
Join Lina Britto (Northwestern, USA) and Ricardo Lopez‐Pedreros (Western Washington University, USA) for the third seminar of the 2024/25 series.