Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Poverty, Inequality and Development

We live in an affluent world where at least 1 billion people presently live in extreme poverty. Every day, hundreds of millions of people experience severe forms of deprivation that inflict suffering and obstruct human flourishing. Development has always claimed poverty eradication as its ultimate goal. In recent decades, this objective has matured into an international consensus with quantitative targets and firm commitments by powerful governments.

a

Poverty is thus now firmly established as central to framing the study and practice of international development. This also raises many profound questions for scholars to consider, such as how we define and accurately measure poverty; how images and narratives of poverty are represented to development audiences? How can we assess the historical entanglement of global poverty and inequality with colonialism and its legacies? How do gender and other vectors of inequality cut across strategies to address poverty? How effective are the global institutions for tackling poverty (from multilateral agencies and donor governments to NGOs and popular celebrities)? And what are the limits of global governance and the need for alternative paths to sustainable development?

Many scholars at Warwick are working intensively on these important questions, often across disciplinary and institutional boundaries in both their teaching and research. Together we will produce a programme of research and dissemination - workshops and seminars, a photography competition, a post graduate student conference and an Annual Lecture - to address the important and urgent questions outlined above.