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Samir Amin, a top thinker of the neo-marxist ‘world-system’ group, is lecturing at the University of Copenhagen Friday
One of the world’s top theoretical heavyweights, the Egyptian economist and development thinker Samir Amin, will be presented by the Faculty of Life Science, now Faculty of Science, in Copenhagen this Friday 16 March.
Amin developed the so-called world-system theory along with thinkers such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank from the 1960’s and onwards. The theory is that world capitalism has a core and a periphery: Growth and development happens at the core while the periphery is doomed to regression. Amir’s views are cited in the invitation to the event:
»Conventional economics is a liberal virus because this approach does not capture the relation of poverty to the process of accumulation which consequently ‘pollutes contemporary social thought and annihilates the capacity to understand the world, let alone transform it’«.
Samir Amin is now director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal, an international non-governmental association for research and debate.
Apart from his work on Third World dependency and world-system theory, Samir Amin has written books on capitalist hegemony, imperialism, eurocentrism, and political Islam.
Amin is one of the world’s most-referenced intellectuals when it comes to post-colonialism and theories of development and under-development.
The agricultural economists at the Faculty of Life Science, now Science, are happy to be able to get him to talk in Copenhagen.
Nanna Bøgesvang Olesen is doing her Bachelor in agricultural economics. She says to the University Post that she and her colleagues and fellow economics students consider it »a scoop« to get Samir Amin here.
»I myself, first heard about Samir Amin and his development theories when I was on exchange in Istanbul. So now it is a big thing for me to hear him in person,« she says.
miy@adm.ku.dk
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