St Antony’s and International Development Studies at Oxford

Header image: David Fisher

St Antony´s College and Queen Elizabeth House: two newcomers in Cold War Oxford

St Antony´s has acquired a central role in development studies at Oxford, a social science discipline in which the University is acknowledged to be a world leader. The institutional focus of development studies in Oxford is the Oxford Department of International Development (known until 2005 as Queen Elizabeth House); but many of the academic staff and postgraduate students at the Department have been (and are) College members, and there evidently exist important intellectual similarities between this subject and the regional studies which have traditionally characterized the College’s intellectual life.

Queen Elizabeth House had been founded by the Colonial Office and constituted by Royal Charter in 1954 (a year after St Antony’s) as a collegiate centre at Oxford for Commonwealth visitors. In effect, both House and College were children of the quest for a new international role for Britain in the radically different world order that had emerged after the Second World War. The geopolitics of new alliances and state rivalries during the Cold War set the agenda for area studies at St Antony’s; while the postimperial creation of the Commonwealth with its declared programme of preparing British colonies for independence, set the ‘development’ agenda for Queen Elizabeth House on the other.

Area studies expanded in staff and students during the subsequent decades; both at the familiar College centres and at others under separate inter-Faculty committees of the University. Oxford deservedly became the national and European focus for the subject.

Development studies at Oxford did not fare so well, even after the University’s decision to pivot QEH away from the postcolonial tradition towards a development agenda defined more broadly by the United Nations in the late 1970s. In 1986 the House was merged with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the Oxford University Institute of Agricultural Economics to create the International Development Centre, a department of the University within the Social Studies Faculty.

In 1985 Robert Cassen was appointed to the directorship of QEH and elected to a Fellowship at St Antony´s; despite Governing Body reservations about the relationship of development studies to area studies – and indeed whether the former was an academic subject at all. Unfortunately, Cassen himself appears to have been unable strengthen the relationship between the House and College (or indeed the former’s status within the University).

Area and Development Studies come of age at Oxford

By the early 1990s, development studies at Oxford had reached institutional crisis, and the University – on receiving the Crouch Report – seriously considered closing Queen Elizabeth House and dispersing its staff and activities. Fortunately, the General Board decided in 1992 what was, in effect, a refoundation by creating a new Department and appointing a new director to replace Robert Cassen (who subsequently left for the LSE) under a strong inter-Faculty Committee chaired by Rosemary Thorp. Only a decade later, a University review of Area and Development Studies (the Hay Report) would state that “Over the past ten years Queen Elizabeth House has developed into an outstanding centre of international research excellence…” By this time, the new Department – soon to be renamed the Oxford Department of International Development – had nearly two hundred postgraduate students, of whom a quarter were Antonians. The governance of the University had meanwhile been transformed following the recommendations of the North Commission, which effectively decentralised decisions on teaching, research, appointments and management down to the level of faculties and departments. Further, all academic activities were to be grouped within the four Divisions upon which the University is still constructed: Humanities, Medicine, Mathematics, Physical and Life Sciences, and Social Sciences. Making departments responsible for their own budgets (rather than being allocated funds centrally) created strong incentives to establish new teaching courses and generate external research funding.

North had important consequences for both development and area studies at Oxford. It meant that the former inter-Faculty committees which previously supervised each area studies centre and development studies were dissolved, and the Social Sciences Division became responsible for all of them. Given that these units were relatively small compared to other former Faculties such as Economics or Politics, in 2000 the University decided to create a single Area and Development Studies Committee within the Social Sciences Division that would become responsible for both subjects.

This mariage arrangé was intended not only to simplify University administration but, more importantly, to bring together teaching and research in these contiguous fields. A certain degree of bureaucratic friction was only to be expected, particularly from the area studies centres which were each a jealously defended petite patrie. However, it was hoped that an intellectual interest in similar areas of the world with common policy issues would serve as a solvent. Above all, it was intended that the Committee would rapidly evolve into a full department of area and development studies within Oxford social sciences.

This proto-department was logically expected to have a close relationship with St Antony’s: not only intellectually, but also through the teaching appointments of distinguished Fellows and the attraction of outstanding graduate students. This had become strategically necessary because one of the (possibly unintended, or at least unanticipated) consequences of the departmental devolution under ‘divisionalisation’ resulting from North was that the Departments of Economics and Sociology declared their intention not to replace their regional specialist posts once their incumbents retired. This presented a serious problem for St Antony’s, because the teaching posts of a considerable number of Fellows would be affected.

A further complication was that not all the Governing Body were happy with the location of area studies within the new Social Sciences Division at all. A number of College historians would have preferred to belong to the new Humanities Division instead; and thus, were logically opposed to the planned department of Area and Development Studies to which they would now belong.

An Area and Development Studies Building at St Antony’s?

Meanwhile QEH was faced with the expiry of the long lease from St John’s College of its premises in St Giles. The University engaged in an urgent search for an appropriate new location and one logical possibility, given the close association with area studies, seemed to be a building close to – or even at – St Antony’s.

In late 2000 therefore, Thorp and FitzGerald, both Governing Body Fellows as well as senior QEH members, were tasked by the Social Sciences Division with exploring the feasibility of constructing a purposed building within the College curtilage for both QEH itself and Area Studies; an initiative supported by the ADS Committee – on which the College was also represented by a number of Fellows.

The new building was to be located on the Woodstock Road frontage (where the Gateway Building now stands) with three floors of research, teaching and administrative rooms plus a large basement library. It was also to provide rooms for an Asian Studies Centre as well as Area Studies administration. The University was to provide funding in the form of rent over twenty years, after which the building would become College property. However, it would occupy a key remaining site on what was (and still is) a very small curtilage by Oxford college standards, where the remaining land to the east had been occupied by the Nissan Institute in 1993 and the recently completed Founders’ Building.

This proposal generated a heated debate among the Fellows of St Antony’s over six months during 2000 because it concerned the future direction of teaching and research (ie the intellectual substance of the College). In addition, some Fellows appear to have regarded the ‘critical post-colonial’ approach of development studies at Oxford as academically inappropriate. In addition, the role of the University in regulating graduate studies (‘Wellington Square’) – and the Social Sciences Division in particular – was still resented by many of the older members of Governing Body.

At two successive Governing Body meetings the arguments on both sides were thrashed out in detail. The debate was meticulously prepared and recorded by Warden Goulding (who himself supported the project) but in the event, Fellows voted to reject by a large majority.

QEH itself was in any case concerned by insufficient space in the proposed building and its distance from central Oxford, and the implications of focussing on one graduate college for relations with the other six at Oxford where most of its students and academics were housed. In 2003 the University relocated QEH to the former Geography Faculty premises in Mansfield Road. When QEH became the Oxford Department for International Development (ODID) in 2005, permission from Buckingham Palace was obtained to rename the building itself Queen Elizabeth House.

*Proposed Area and Development Studies Building at St Antony’s College, 2000*

A road not taken

In the event, Area and Development Studies (ADS) as a single departmental entity only lasted three years. It was undoubtedly a creative project intellectually, and the explicitly multidisciplinary approach was intended to accommodate earlier academic differences. However, the two partners were too different organizationally to work in a single harness. ODID was already organized as a single department with large postgraduate teaching programmes and considerable external research funding similar to other departments in the Social Sciences Division. Area Studies remained a group of seven small centres without central leadership, a doctoral programme or significant research funding.

In 2003 the University recognized that ADS was unsustainable as a single institution and addressed the issue in a Commission (which included Rosemary Thorp) chaired by Donald Hay, then Head of the Social Sciences Division. The resulting Hay Report repeatedly and justifiably cites St Antony’s as central to both area and development studies at Oxford. The main conclusion was to separate the two groups into separate departments: a task that was relatively simple in the case of development studies, but which required considerable administrative and teambuilding effort for the newly created School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS) at 12 Bevington Road.

Despite the obvious importance of these events for College, there is no trace of any discussion of (let alone decisions on) this issue in Governing Body. It is true that these were University issues, and that the relevant respective teaching and research programmes were not in question, so issues of academic appointments and student numbers were not apparent from St Antony’s point of view. None the less SIAS (subsequently renamed the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, OSGA) and ODID did involve the majority of College members – both senior and junior. The intellectual future of the College was thus in play.

This lack of College initiative was not a new problem. In the mid-1990s Warden Dahrendorf had proposed strengthening inter-centre research and teaching by establishing a joint programme to address ‘global’ issues. This was not supported by Governing Body (and the historians in particular) on the purported grounds that globalization was an unproven concept. More seriously, for the next three decades no new College centres were established to address emerging powers such as China, Korea, India or Brazil. The one new initiative was made by Warden MacMillan, for a North America Centre, but this was unfortunately short lived. Furthermore, neighbouring Colleges founded their own centres on India (Somerville) and China (St Hugh’s). Ironically, the History Faculty itself established an Oxford Global History Centre in 2011.

Both OSGA and ODID have undoubtedly become highly successful Departments academically in terms of internationally recognized research and teaching. But St Antony’s part in this success has been the result of the efforts of individual Fellows and students rather than institutional leadership.

Area studies and development studies at Oxford are both multidisciplinary in practice and interdisciplinary in aspiration. While the former is mainly concerned with the history, anthropology and politics of particular countries and regions, the latter focuses on the economic, governance and social issues common to poor countries. Nonetheless, field research in development studies is necessarily rooted in specific countries and regions, while area studies necessarily have policy implications for development. The two fields had become organically linked, at Oxford and elsewhere, whatever their differences in scope or methods.

Building projects finally (?) resolved

The ODID move eventually took place in 2003 to Mansfield Road – led by two St Antony’s fellows, Thorp and FitzGerald, as departmental heads. College did not leave the proposed site fallow for too long. In 2013 the new Gateway and Ghassan Shaker Buildings were completed, the former being the site proposed for the academic building a decade earlier but now providing for College administration, student rooms and meeting space.

Nonetheless, by 2019 the building issue had returned to the agenda once again – as building issues tend to do in Oxford. ODID’s Mansfield Road premises had recently been acquired from the University by Harris Manchester College, and the Department was thus once again looking for a new home.

OSGA, which had by now been an independent University Department since 2004, also lacked a common premises needed to integrate its component parts and accommodate emerging activities. The University proposed a joint project with Hertford College on Winchester Road that would allow for graduate student accommodation as well as the academic and administrative activities of both OSGA and ODID.

International Development Studies at St Antony’s: the Human Factor

Since the 1990s, a substantial proportion of ODID-established academic staff have held Fellowships at St Antony’s and all of them have played an active part in the academic life of College centres as researchers and teachers. The most visible manifestation of the link is the fact that of the eight heads of ODID since its constitution by the University in 1995, four have been Governing Body Fellows at St Antony’s: Rosemary Thorp (2002-3), Valpy FitzGerald (2007-13), Nandini Gooptu (2013-2016) and Diego Sanchez (2019-23).

*Four Antonian Heads of Department: Rosemary Thorp, Valpy Fitzgerald, Nandini Gooptu and Diego Sanchez.*

These human factors ensured a closer de facto academic relationship between Department and College, despite the views of Governing Body on a physical presence. This was underpinned by a substantial number of Fellows concerned with the economics and politics of development.

When the Department of Economics eliminated their specialist regional economics posts, the development economists in College made up for much of this loss. Rosemary Thorp, Diego Sanchez and Valpy FitzGerald were active in the Latin America Centre (the former two serving as directors). Paul Collier and Doug Gollin provided strength and depth in African Economics. Recently Amir Lebdioui has opened a new field for the College in green industrial strategy. In addition, the Centre for the Study of African Economies provided College with four outstanding research Fellows: Chris Adam, Pramila Krishnan, Richard Mash and John Toye.

The College also built up strength in the politics of development, starting with Nandini Gooptu working on social change in India. She was joined by Rafu Mustafa who specialised on Islamic radicalism in Africa, Miles Tendi on militarism in Africa, and Simukai Chigudo on African health provision. Finally, St Antony’s appointed its first law Fellow – Cathryn Costello working on refugee law, followed by Catherine Briddick in a similar role.

In addition, two further 21^st century debates in the wider University context closely involved both St Antony’s and ODID. The first was the growing consciousness of the importance of Oxford’s own colonial past, and thus duty to address the ‘decolonization’ of institutions and teaching programmes in addition to repurposing research agendas. It is not surprising that the Oxford & Colonialism Project was chaired by a College Fellow, Kalypso Nicolaïdis; and counted Nandini Gooptu, William Beinart and Valpy FitzGerald among its members.

The second was a rapid expansion of teaching and research on global issues in existing University departments (such as history, politics and law) and the establishment of new multidisciplinary institutions at Oxford concerned with global policy issues such the Oxford Martin School in 2005 and the Blavatnik School of Government in 2010.

The North reforms had stimulated a rapid growth in student numbers in Development Studies, rising from the low tens in 1995 to 250 by 2025. Approximately a quarter of ODID postgraduate students were matriculated at St Antony’s and because the student bodies were of similar size, a similar proportion of College students were reading Development Studies. In addition, the remaining three quarters of ODID students matriculated in other (usually graduate) colleges would regularly attend research and policy seminars at St Antony’s, and were visible multicultural regulars at the Late Bar.

St Antony’s Contribution to Development Studies at Oxford

In sum, both St Antony’s and Oxford Development Studies have changed a great deal over the last three decades. They have become closer over time, and their interaction has been overwhelmingly positive in terms of ideas which influenced both teaching and research and in terms of contributing to the University’s own engagement with postcolonial globalization. Above all, the shared commitment of College and Department to interdisciplinary research and teaching has had a profound influence on the emerging graduate school of social sciences at Oxford.

What was the intellectual influence of College on Development Studies in Oxford? Beyond the contributions of individual Fellows discussed above, the most significant influence was probably to link Development Studies firmly to Area Studies, and thus ensure that research and teaching in general, and policy work in particular, had a concrete historical and political context. This in turn meant that while the wider community of development studies in the UK – and indeed Europe – was dominated by an ‘aid agenda’ set by donor governments and international organizations, ODID could construct its own research and teaching priorities in a more academic context.

And what has been the influence of Oxford Development Studies on St Antony’s? Working with ODID gave College a wider thematic view of global problems (such as migration, financial instability or armed conflict) to the Centres, while strengthening the presence of economics as a discipline after the withdrawal of the Department of Economics from the support of regional economics. This influence was undoubtedly strengthened by the presence of ODID students in College as active participants in both regional seminars and general student discussion.

Retrospect: three decades of cohabitation

In retrospect this process may appear to have been slow, although of course by Oxford standards three decades represent little more than the blink of an eye. It has culminated in Warden Goodman being able to state that St Antony’s ‘mission statement … (is) … to provide the environment for the best possible research in what I call area and development studies in the social sciences writ large’.

In sum, this interaction between area and development studies (not always smooth and sometimes contested) can be seen in retrospect as a key part of the process by which St Antony’s moved over several decades from being a small college with a humanities profile and students reading for research degrees, to a become a much larger college dominated by students on taught postgraduate degrees in the social sciences by the 75^th anniversary of its foundation.

Bibliography

Chan, S. (2016) ‘A Brief History of Development Studies’, European Review of International Studies, 3(1), pp. 93–104.

Hayter, W. (1975) ‘The Hayter Report and After’, Oxford Review of Education, 1(2), pp. 169–172.

Nicholls, C. S. (2000) The History of St Antony’s College, Oxford, 1950–2000. London: Macmillan Press.

Oxford University (1992) Report of the Committee to Review the Future of Queen Elizabeth House (“Crouch Report”). Oxford: University of Oxford.

Oxford University (1997) Commission of Inquiry: A Review of Issues Concerning the Operation and Structure of the University of Oxford, and its Decision-Making Machinery (“North Report”). Oxford: University of Oxford.

Oxford University (2003) Review of Area and Development Studies: Report of the Review Committee (“Hay Report”). Oxford: Social Sciences Division, SSD/9, 20 August 2003.

Paquette, G. (2019) ‘The “Parry Report” (1965) and the Establishment of Latin American Studies in the United Kingdom’, The Historical Journal, 62(1), pp. 219–240.

Stewart, F. and FitzGerald, V. (2021) ‘Development Economics at Oxford, 1950–2020’, in Cord, R. A. (ed.) The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics. Cham: Springer, pp. 29–73.

Symonds, R. (1993) Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? Oxford: Oxford University Press.

St Antony’s College 75th Anniversary