The Politics of Debt and Development in the New Millennium: an introduction

This article serves as an introduction to this special issue of twq on ‘Debt and Development in the New Millennium’. It highlights the gaps in our knowledge about debt that the following contributions seek to fill and why this is important, both analytically and politically. In doing so, it discusses two core objectives of the special issue: first, to examine the role(s) that debt plays in mediating the underlying tensions of neoliberal-led development and its emphasis on market-led growth and poverty reduction schemes; and, second, to interrupt, contest and deconstruct the dominant economic representations and meanings of debt. Although the contributions draw on different theoretical frames to explore different features of debt across a variety of social spaces, a core hypothesis running through each article is that that there are additional complex and paradoxical dimensions to debt beyond what is represented by its common-sense economic meaning as an amount of money borrowed, voluntarily, by one party from another. This introductory article concludes by providing the reader with an overview of each contribution comprising the special issue.