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Dependency theory and its relevance today: international institutions in telecommunications and structural power*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Jill Hills
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Extract

The majority of political theories have arisen in opposition to existing theories and the interests they represent. Dependency theory was no different in this regard. It arose as a reaction to ‘modernization’ theory, which linked industrialization to political development and to those theories of political development which themselves represented American interests during the period of the Cold War.1 It arose also in reaction to the economic theory of ‘trickle down’ which characterized the post-war social democratic concern with economic growth and Keynesian economics in industrialized countries and which linked the poor in the industrialized West with the poor in the non-industrialized South. In both, Keynesian based, state led policies of capital investment were expected to provide the locomotive for indigenous development.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , April 1994 , pp. 169 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1994

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References

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