Development Days Conference 2025:
Development Transitions – Amidst Waste, Wars, and Maldevelopment
27-28 February 2025 | Päärakennus (Main Building), University of Helsinki
Organizers:
The Finnish Society for Development Research (FSDR), in collaboration with the Finnish University Partnership for International Development (UniPID), University of Eastern Finland, the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki, and the Inequality & Development Working Groups of the Young Scholars Initiative – Institute for New Economic Thinking (YSI-INET)
Conference update:
The Call for Papers is now closed. We sincerely thank everyone for their submissions! Notifications of accepted abstracts were sent on 2nd December by the respective Working Group Coordinators.
For any inquiries regarding the abstracts, please reach out to your Working Group Coordinators.
Conference theme:
Development is in transition as an academic discipline, a foreign policy, and a professional practice. How has this process of change unfolded over time? Is it transitioning for better or worse? What changes have occurred, and what transitions should happen? These are some of the questions that the Development Days 2025 conference (#DevDays2025) will explore.
While there may be various analyses of the historical trajectory and tendencies of the development process at the grassroots, national and international levels, there is a common understanding that strategies to transition into different visions for alternative futures are path-dependent. This means that realizing an envisioned future—whether through political-economic reforms, technological innovations, or socio-ecological transformations—must contend with the specificities of past and present local, institutional, social, and global contexts.
Some important advances in scientific knowledge and the prominence of the human rights discourse have been achieved despite—or as a result of—the longstanding dominance of the modernization paradigm as a framework for development cooperation, alongside the continuity of unequal North-South dependent relations. Yet, the fundamental problems of humankind remain. The reality is that development is transitioning, and will have to transition, amidst the conditions and outcomes of waste, wars, and maldevelopment.
#DevDays2025 will provide a space for development researchers, practitioners, and activists to share their research findings and interrogate ideas related to these critical phenomena and the broader concept of “development transitions”.
Waste is readily perceived in an ecological sense, relevant to issues of climate change and extractivism, but it can also be interpreted in class terms. This refers to the exploitative relationship between the wasting and wasted classes, or the process of transforming what is valuable into something wasteful.
Wars at various scales are usually seen as the absence of development, necessitating humanitarian and development interventions in their aftermath. However, it is forgotten that wars have been products of, and are organic to, the racialized and gendered power relations in the violent history of global capitalist development processes.
Maldevelopment has a much deeper and more complex connotation than underdevelopment. It signifies the original sin and intrinsic logic of the historical processes of global development itself, resulting in the convoluted situation of humanity today due to the histories and legacies of imperialism and colonialism in the evolution of the world system. Conceptualizing present-day maldevelopment encourages a reflexive, introspective, and self-critical reflection as development subjects and actors ourselves.
The #DevDays2025 conference will feature a keynote lecture by Ali Kadri (author of The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction), a Kapuscinski Development Lecture, and a roundtable among researchers and stakeholders to reflect on past lessons and future visions for Finland’s development community today.
In line with our commitment to democratizing, diversifying, and decolonizing development knowledge, we welcome online participation and hybrid engagement. We particularly encourage collaboration with colleagues from the Global South.
#DevDays2025 Timeline (may be subject to change):
- 28.09.2024: Call for working groups opens
- 20.10.2024: Deadline for working group proposals
- 28.10.2024: Acceptance of working groups
- 4.11.2024: Call for papers opens
- 24.11.2024: Deadline for paper abstract submission
- 2.12.2024: Notification of accepted abstracts
- 13.01.2025: Registration opens
- 20.02.2025: Registration closes
- 27.-28.02.2025: #DevDays2025 Conference in Helsinki
For more information and updates, please visit the conference website regularly, follow FSDR’s social media pages, or contact us at info.developmentdays@gmail.com.
