Date: Tuesday 15 June 2010
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speakers: Professor Teddy Brett, Professor Paul Collier, Professor James Robinson
Chair: Professor James Putzel

Over the past twenty years many Western development agencies have suggested that good governance, and possibly even democratisation, are key to promoting economic growth and development in poorer countries. The Chinese take a more agnostic view. This panel discussion will discuss both the merits of democratic forms of rule in fragile states and the very possibility of democracy in such contexts.

Teddy Brett is a Visiting Professor at the Development Studies Institute who has been working on development theory and the Political Economy of Africa since the 1960s. He was educated in South Africa, has taught at Witwatersrand University in in Johannesburg and Makerere University in Uganda for many years, at Sussex University and has been at the LSE since 1993. He published Colonialism and Underdevelopment in East Africa in 1973, The World Economy Since the War in 1985, and Reconstructing Develoment Theory in 2009. He has also produced a wide range of articles and policy papers on Uganda and Zimbabwe looking at explanations for political breakdown and problems of policital and economic reconstruction.

Paul Collier, CBE is a Professor of Economics and Director for the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the University of Oxford. He also serves as co-director of the International Growth Centre. From 1998 – 2003 he was the director of the Development Research Group of the World Bank. He is the author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, published in 2007, Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places, published in March 2009, and his most recent book The Plundered Planet How to Reconcile Prosperity with Nature. His research covers the causes and consequences of civil war; the effects of aid and the problems of democracy in low-income and natural-resources rich societies.

James Robinson is the David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard University where he has taught since 2004. His main research interests are in political economy, comparative economic development and economic history and he teaches in the Government, Economics and History Departments at Harvard. He is the co-author with Daron Acemoglu of the book Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006 which was awarded the 2007 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award awarded by the American Political Science Association for “the best book published in the United States during the prior year on government, politics or international affairs.” He has just completed a new book with Daron Acemoglu entitled Why Nations Fail which will be published by Random House in 2011.

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