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?

Fractured narratives

Constructing identities in India's political vacuum

At the time of independence, the idea of diversity was about the right to free and open political, linguistic, cultural and religious expression. What stands in its place today is a politics of representation that has made diversity itself a political right rather than a cultural fact.

Romantic capitalism

What explains the enduring appeal of Ayn Rand?

Contrary to Rand’s image of heroic capitalists as beacons of integrity and thrusting enterprise, the capitalist class has shown itself in recent years to be every bit as snivelling and mendacious as the worst of the collectivist villains in Rand’s fiction. Who’s been raking in all that bailout money, after all?

Asian food for thought

On the remarkable malleability of the human palate

I wondered: is it really true that the Chinese will eat any part of just about anything that moves? How did they turn out this way? How can two neighbouring Asian countries have such divergent approaches to what they consider food?

The glutinous mud of the city

Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites, 1952-62 Courtauld Gallery, London

The construction of the Shell Building on the South Bank of the Thames, near Waterloo, caught Auerbach’s imagination. ‘Shell Building Site from the Thames’ (1959) shows a cable being lowered by a crane into the deep excavation that was carried out for this building. As the cable drops against a background of bright, light clay it’s difficult to stave off an attack of vertigo.

Made and betrayed

The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (Free Press)

Meredith blasts away the stereotypes with cold fact and blunt candour in this magisterial yet concise history in order to demonstrate how what followed in the years after independence was in many ways disastrous for most of Africa’s nascent states.

Beyond the routine badness of humanity

District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp (2009)

Reaction to the film has been divided on its portrayal of the Nigerian gangsters who feed off the misery of the alien refugees. Much of the blame lies at the door of what superficially makes the film most interesting: its allegorical treatment of apartheid politics. And yes, the film does come down on the side that apartheid was bad, while at the same time portraying Nigerian characters as dehumanised and barbarous savages. Is this hypocritical, anti-human or deliberate?

Mere prawns

District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp (2009)

Shot in a documentary style with hand-held cameras that give it a visceral immediacy, and with truly fantastic special effects, it avoids the didacticism of other overtly ‘political’ films of recent years, preferring the traditional science fiction technique of exploring the real world through allegory.

Industrial resolution

Nations Choose Prosperity: Why Britain Needs an Industrial Policy, edited by Ruth Lea (Civitas 2009)

One wishes the Civitas team well: it makes a compelling case. But it has a mountain to climb in attempting to rejuvenate - or, rather, resurrect - British manufacturing policy. Effecting change will not be easy, especially when it comes to the determined slaying of disparate sacred cows like equality legislation, laissez-faire, protectionism, and the all-must-have- prizes attitude which results in education lacking intellectual rigour

Credit crunch roundup

Various authors, various books past and present

Nominal left and right alike were taken by surprise, and there has been a big gap between the political and intellectual debate. Developing serious political positions on the economy is likely to be a much longer task.

The bigger economic picture

Post-G20 Public Summit: The Battle for the Economy, Goodenough College, London, 16 May 2009

The financial crisis taught us that it is dangerous to leave decisions about our economy to self-appointed ‘experts’. To hold politicians and business leaders accountable, the public needs to be educated, informed and engaged in a high level of economic debate. It’s time to take the battle of ideas out of the conference hall, and on to the streets. 

Energise! Power to the people

Brighton Salon, Tuesday 28 April 2009

’We realised that we had to look much more carefully at energy and its uses and production. The politicisation of climate change is a serious issue because it stands in the way of solving problems and stifles debate,’ said Joe.

Ascent and Exchange

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, by Niall Ferguson and A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, by William J Bernstein

When they set out to write these texts, neither author must have expected to create an especially political book. But for the first time in decades, opinions about the detailed management of the economy are intensely political, and any book, article or quotation on financial matters in the last few years is likely to be re-read in that light.

This rotting metropolis

Akira (1988), directed by Katsuhiro Ôtomo

There is enough going on with Akira, visually and intellectually, to keep it engaging. Perhaps its unique selling point is that it depicts a city that is both pre-and post-apocalyptic, cut off from its destructive past but consequently in fear of its future. Neo Tokyo is all too familiar.

Radical vision

Le Corbusier – The Art of Architecture, Barbican, London

Le Corbusier had summed up one of the crucial paradoxes of his age in his dictum ‘architecture or revolution’. His preference was clearly for the former. Le Corbusier presented better architecture and cities as solutions to the problems of the industrial city and the threat of disorder that it had nurtured.

Humanitarian blues

The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, by Conor Foley (Verso)

Given Foley’s identification of the anti-democratic aspects of political humanitarianism, it seems odd that he can then argue that it is actually a positive thing that a court applies international rather than domestic law and is actually insulated from the society over which it presides.