Prof Jean-Paul Faguet

This course is available on the MSc in Anthropology and Development, MSc in Development Management (Applied Development Economics), MSc in Development Management (Applied Development Economics) (LSE and Sciences Po), MSc in Development Management (Political Economy), MSc in Development Management (Political Economy) (LSE and Sciences Po), MSc in Development Studies, MSc in Health and International Development, MSc in International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies and MSc in Political Economy of Late Development. This course is freely available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. It does not require permission. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

How to apply: ID and joint-degree students will have priority in the allocation of places.  If there are more ID and joint-degree students than the course can accommodate, places will be allocated randomly. Non-ID/Joint Degree students will be allocated available places by random selection, with preference given first to those degrees where regulations permit this option.

No specific course pre-requisites. A good social science background will be helpful, especially politics and economics.

Deadline for application: You should make your request to take ID courses by 12 noon Friday 25 September 2026.

You will be informed of the outcome by 12 noon Monday 28 September 2026.

Students do not need to write a statement to apply for this course.

 

Rapid development is a wrenching political, economic and social process. How is it best done? Rapidly and discontinuously? With violence if necessary? Is violence ever really necessary? If so, when and why? Is rapid change best driven by outsiders, or must change come from within if it is to benefit a society and be sustainable? Or is peacefully reform a better path? 

This course examines the social, political and economic changes associated with development transformations through the lens of distinct, powerful modes of change: Revolution, Reform, and Colonialism. We critically examine the roots of each, and then analyse their successes and failures as models of change in generating large and sustainable improvements in development broadly construed. 

We begin by defining each of these as a discrete, analytically distinct model of change. We then examine specific cases of colonialism, revolution, evolution/reform, as well as failed cases of each. We evaluate the immediate and long-term costs of these episodes in light of the changes that resulted in each country's development trajectory. We focus on the conditions that sustained discontinuous, violent vs. continuous, non-violent processes of change in each empirical case, and then on the ability of each model of change to cause lasting improvements in societies' economic, political and social development. 

Much of the theoretical debate in development concerns either specific reforms (e.g. market liberalisation), or general institutional systems (e.g. democracy), that will hopefully lead to higher levels of development. But the process of change itself, both its intention and directionality (i.e. originating from within or imposed from without), and the speed and violence that characterise it, remain mostly in the background. This course seeks to bring processes of change into the foreground, analysing both their drivers and their ultimate effects on development. 

Most of the development field focuses on partial equilibrium – e.g. changing a policy or institution when all else is held constant.  We focus on general equilibrium transformations where everything changes. 

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars in the AT. Seminars will be at or upwards of 45 minutes duration and lectures will be at or above 90 minutes duration. There will also be 4 hours of workshop in the AT. 

Student on this course will have a reading week in week 6. 

Lectures will present key facts and theoretical insights, and lay out the contours of major debates from the literature.  Seminars will be student-led, and will probe each week's topic in more detail, both to clarify concepts and to test them against evidence, some of which students will draw up and present independently.  The workshop is a different sort of exercise, intended to give thorough review to students' research proposals in a constructively critical, collegial atmosphere.  Students will present their research proposals and then receive feedback from fellow students and faculty. 

Presentation.

Presentation.

Students will be expected to produce one presentation in the AT. Student presentations will be carried out individually or in groups (depending on student numbers), which will also receive formative feedback. 

In preparation for their research essay, students opting for this assessment path will submit a formative research proposal, which they will present in a research workshop in AT.  This will receive detailed feedback intended to improve the proposal.  They will then revise the proposal and re-submit as summative work.  

A detailed, weekly reading list will be provided at the start of term: 

• Arendt, Hannah. 2006. On Revolution. London: Penguin Classics. 

• Dix, Robert H. 1983. "The Varieties of Revolution." Comparative Politics, 15 (3): 281-294. 

• Faguet, J.P. (Ed.). 2026. “Complexity in Institutional Reform.” World Development. 

• Huntington, Samuel P. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press. 

• Moore, Barrington. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. 

• North, D., J. Wallis, and B. Weingast. 2009. Violence and social orders: A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

• Procter, Margaret. The Academic Proposal.  University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto. 

• Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

• Tilly, Charles. 1995. European Revolutions: 1492-1992. Oxford: Blackwell. 

• de Tocqueville, Alexis. 1865. The Old Regime and the Revolution. New York: Harper & Brothers. 

• Tucker, Robert C. (Ed.). 1975. The Lenin Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 

• University Library. Writing a Research Proposal. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Assessment Pathway 1

Exam (80%), duration: 120 Minutes in the Spring exam period.

Presentation (20%).

Assessment Pathway 2

Presentation (10%).

Proposal (20%, 1500 words) in Winter Term Week 1.

Research paper (70%, 6000 words) in Spring Term Week 2.

Two assessment paths are available for this course.  The default path is No.1 (written exam).  Students who prefer path 2 (research paper) should speak to the professor and apply with a 1-page research proposal no later than Friday of reading week (week 6).