From “dependency” to “decoloniality”? The enduring relevance of materialist political economy and the problems of a “decolonial” alternative
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traditions within development thought sceptical of market-led development and which emphasise the unevenness and instabilities of global capitalism are experiencing some renewed interest. One such tradition is dependency studies: a school of thought once prominent in the field of development. We critically review the dependency tradition alongside a more recent branch of critical inquiry into development, namely decoloniality. One of our core contributions is to clarify what makes the decolonial tradition substantially distinct from dependency and other traditions in development thought. We locate decoloniality in the context of the “cultural turn” that swept through social theory from the 1970s. Our paper problematises decoloniality’s critique of Modernity as inherently colonial and oppressive and finds that its core features are idealism and the strong risk of cultural relativism. We assert that the substantive commitments of the dependency tradition are its strength and reject the equivalence drawn by decolonial theorists between “Eurocentrism” and belief in Enlightenment values and methodologies. Drawing on the work of Samir Amin, we emphasise the need for development theory to retain an analytic focus on a materialist analysis of global capitalism; we echo Amin’s critique of culturalism and endorse his defence of universalism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it