Professor Luke Glanville1
1Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Biography:
Luke Glanville is Professor in the Department of International Relations at ANU. His research spans past and present thought and practice regarding refugees, mobility, and borders, rights, responsibilities, and priorities, and colonial conquest, rule, and domination. Recent books include Prioritizing Global Responsibilities (with James Pattison, OUP, 2024) and Sepúlveda on the Spanish Invasion of the Americas: Defending Empire, Debating Las Casas (co-edited and translated with David Lupher and Maya Feile Tomes, OUP, 2023).
Abstract:
Scholars increasingly point out ways in which present-day international concepts and practices echo those used in past contexts of colonialism and slavery. They do this with respect to development, humanitarianism, bordering, and many other themes. This is typically meant to serve as a critique of these concepts and practices. But what exactly is the nature of this critique and what are its potential possibilities, limits, and hazards? What exactly are we doing when we demonstrate similarities between things from the past that we find shameful and things that are taken for granted today? This paper will examine the ethical implications of disturbing historical echoes, focusing on four ways of arguing about these echoes: comparison, relationality, genealogy, and resonance. It will explore these four approaches via engagement with past and present uses of the concept of development.