Inventing critical development: A Brazilian geographer and his Northern networks

This paper addresses a corpus of unpublished sources in a first attempt to reconstruct the exile networks of Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, placing his geographical and political work in the context of present-day debates on development, anti-development and critical development. Our main argument is twofold: first, we argue that Santos played important although poorly understood roles in the debates that shaped both Anglophone and French-speaking critical geographers in the 1960s and 1970s. Far from being passive receivers of ideas from the Global North, Southern scholars like Santos contributed to shape worldwide concepts in critical studies on development and underdevelopment. Second, the ideas spiralling out of Santos’ networks can still nourish present-day scholars in development and critical development theories who are willing to criticise the “ideology of development” without forgetting the material existence of poverty and socio-spatial marginalisation. Finally, Santos’ biography and networks provide an example of cosmopolitan and multilingual intellectual work that can provide insights for the present-day internationalisation of critical and radical geographies.