Development Studies in universities continues to flourish and paradoxically so in a period of hegemonic neo-liberalism which seems to subvert key assumptions and commitments on which Development Studies was established as a field of academic attention, not long ago. The paper will examine this and other paradoxes in terms of the underlying tensions that generate them. On one hand, those tensions manifest different kinds of boundary issues: intellectually between Development Studies and the established disciplines (and traditions) on which it draws; practically and politically between the conventions (and conditions) of scholarly inquiry and the demands of agencies that do development (governments, aid donors, various international organisations). On the other hand are issues of how tensions between instrumental and reflexive knowledge (as formulated by Michael Burawoy) are internalised within Development Studies, and with what effects.
