.... Speaking of nuanced argument....yea - I'm well aware there's a lot of stuff out there on political development, but most of it is even more ideologically charged than the theories of economic development they often mimic.  The very title "modernisation" implies a progression from primitive to advanced - from  underdeveloped to developed.  But guys like Andre Gunder Frank argued that much of what the first world does in the third is about underdeveloping not developing it, about preventing third world countries developing their own models and improvements in society by creating a greater dependency on the first...  

I did some undergrad work debunking some of that stuff - because it too, I think, doesn't fully explain what is happening in many countries, and in any case, globalisation doesn't really allow countries to develop in isolation.  

I suppose my big disagreement is with "one size fits all" global solutions or ideological prescriptions for success. I'm more interested in developing political processes for governance than being too prescriptive as to what the short term outcomes of those processes should be.

notes from no w here