World Development today is a contested concept, and one that provokes debate across the board. Culture Wars is bringing together reviews of books and the arts, to engage with everything from globalisation to slum cities, from consumerism to international aid.

Questions dealt with throughout these reviews include: following massive economic growth from China and India, are we seeing a new distribution of power on the world stage? How should we respond to the perceived costs of development such as global warming and the erosion of communities? And what are the best models for growth?

Will the Chinese really eat the West?

How The West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly - And the Stark Choices Ahead, by Dambisa Moyo (Allen Lane, 2011)

The book is full of the discourse of winners and losers, victors and vanquished, races to be won, opponents to be outmanoeuvred, markets to be cornered. The author would no doubt consider this to be simple realism, premised upon a world with finite resources (how depressing), but one has to ask, does the world really need another book which implores nations to better impoverish one another?

La mort de l’Europe

The End of the West: the Once and Future Europe, by David Marquand (Princeton University Press, 2011)

Marquand reduces democracy to being a way of adjudicating between competing claims of individuals who just won’t get along, much like a marriage guidance counsellor - or a judge. It means ‘accepting difference, rejoicing in difference, and negotiating difference’. Marquand stresses the complexity of modern life and proposes democracy as a tool to manage competing identities and differences.

2LDK

At Home in Japan – beyond the minimal house, Geffrye Museum of the Home, London

The facts to be learned range from the curious (we learn that towels are ‘very popular generic gifts’ in Japan, and most people therefore have far too many) to the crazy (‘It is also common to eat a bean for every year of your age’), and they document everything from rubbish collection etiquette to gardening habits.

Should the United States help drive global development?

Delivering Meaningful Results in Global Development’, a lecture by Dr Rajiv Shah, LSE, London, Tuesday 14 June

USAID is currently undertaking several projects around the world, two of which Dr Shah spoke about in considerable detail. One of them is helping impoverished places in Africa, and elsewhere, to decrease the percentage of malnourished people while aiming to stimulated their economy at the same time.

The economics of don’t meddle and muddle through

The Age of Instability, by David Smith (Profile Books, 2010)

Not making decisions, not having a long-term strategy, ditching theory and rationality: all seem to be virtues for today’s economists. Economics post-crash seems like a codification of messy pragmatism: to be anti-theory now in principle. Leaving us, of course, with things just the way they are.

I know a dirty word

Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, Wellcome Collection, London

It makes you wonder, if we were all left to clean up after ourselves, from our houses and gardens to our schools and streets, whether we’d be so pernickety about that spot of dust on the kitchen surface, or that banana peel in the corner.

Yeh hai Bambai meri jaan!

Mumbai Fables, by Gyan Prakash (Princeton University Press 2010)

The promise of the city, like that of Independence, was real – and perhaps still is. There is a tragic quality to Prakash’s account, but the gradual demise of the Modernist dream in the second half of the twentieth century should not be seen as inevitable or even, perhaps, final.

Civilisation is power

Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World, British Museum, London

This exhibition reminds us that international involvement and influence in Afghanistan are nothing new. Like Belgium and Poland it has - because of its geographical location - found itself an unwilling cockpit in world affairs, the fate of countries when caught between competing power blocks. It also shows that cross-border trade is a centuries-old activity: it helped to bring about the ideas and art which these exhibits exemplify.

Exploring the Concrete Jungle

Interview with film-maker Katerina Cizek

While Out My Window seems to affirm the postmodern rhetoric of alienation and isolation we are all familiar with, it is worth asking if Cizek’s account of postmodern life actually fits this description. By visually uniting these social realms in the webdoc’s physical presentation she has cleverly interrogated the reality of the perceived split. For the most part, she reminds us that we do participate in the two worlds simultaneously most of the time.

Rethinking Asia

Adapting to a different world view

Buy a world map in China, and China (the Middle Kingdom) is in the centre; not ragged islands on the edges of Europe, fringed by a small sea. We have not come to terms with Asia’s rise, and can have no conception of what it means for us (beyond, perhaps, a nagging anxiety that it can’t be good). As power shifts to the twin giants of China and India, we can only realise we are small, and what we think might not matter very much.

The brahminical brain

The Story of My Assassins, by Tarun J Tejpal

Just like poor Kabir, language is the undoing of Tejpal: you simply cannot believe that a writer who uses English so inventively and richly despises the canon as much as he claims. Perhaps, like one of his many characters, he is enjoying denouncing it with the one hand while using the other to nab a share for himself.

Mobility tomorrow: just take a cab!

On the future of innovation

Government, economists and product developers would be well advised to concentrate on those recommendations made by futurologists that consider the wishes of the user. The needs of the customer decide whether a technological innovation becomes successful or not, and the user prefers those innovations that improve upon existing technologies in the fields of energy, communications and mobility by dissolving the tensions between robustness, safety and cost-effectiveness without any compromise.

Traces of the future

Walid Raad: Miraculous Beginnings, Whitechapel Gallery, London

To say that Raad’s work occurs in the space between truth and fiction is a cliché that doesn’t give the work the merit it deserves. A far better way of describing it is that it explores the space between the latent and manifest aspects of Lebanese culture and history.

Grow your own?

Urban Farming: The future of food or Arcadia on the cheap?

Viewed in historic terms, this seems like an aristocratic attack on the bourgeoisie. Think I’m joking? Prince Charles is a big fan of urban agriculture, with good reason. He has large estates that he has every interest in keeping out of the reach of the masses.

The internet: made for Islam?

iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam, by Gary R Bunt (Hurst & Company, 2009)

But what of the ostensible contradiction between Islam and modernity? Far from being in antithesis to Islam, the internet is entirely germane to a religion that has always been ‘wiki’ in its nature.