Globalisation and Development Studies

The master’s programme in Globalisation & Development Studies is a social science programme that focuses on how globalisation affects and interconnects communities around the world. While we acknowledge the macro-level roles of states and commerce in processes of globalisation and development, we focus on how they are experienced ‘from the ground up’ in the everyday lives of families, indigenous communities, migrant diasporas, grassroots organisations, individual policymakers and NGOs. In this programme, you will study diverse local responses to globalisation and development by actors who are central to these processes and those who are marginalised by them.

This programme builds on more than 20 years of globalisation and development teaching at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. It has a pronounced global and transnational orientation: from the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, to emancipation and empowerment, hybrid identities, transnational social and political formations, and new possibilities for transforming society. You will develop a sound knowledge basis in the concepts, theories and issues relating to globalisation and development. Using Problem-Based Learning (PBL), which is very well suited for Globalisation and Development Studies, your learning is problem-driven and theory-driven and requires students to be active rather than passive.

Freedom to choose

You will have a great deal of scope to tailor the programme to your needs. For example, you can take elective courses that suit your own goals and interests, such as: 

• Transnational Migrant Networks and Flows
• Science and Technology Studies for Development in a Global Context
• Brokers and translators in development: A focus on civil society
• Global Connections: non-Eurocentric Historical Narratives
• Global Health in Times of Crisis
• Europe and the Global South: Migration, Development and Beyond

For your thesis, you will be able to choose between doing a research internship, conducting fieldwork research abroad and a desk study.

Problem-Based Learning

As with many Maastricht University programmes, the Globalisation & Development Studies programme is taught using Problem-Based Learning (PBL). In tutorial groups of 12 to 15 students, you'll learn to conduct academic research and seek solutions to concrete ‘problems’ taken from situations involving current issues in globalisation and development. Instructors act as facilitators, giving help as it’s needed. This teaches you to think like an academic and helps you develop the independence and problem-solving skills that you’ll need in the field.

Focus on research

You will develop a sound understanding of the theories, concepts and research methods pertaining to globalisation and development while exploring contemporary globalisation issues that are relevant for countries in the Global South. You will examine problems of inequality, poverty, and vulnerability and explore the potential roles of contemporary global actors such as emerging economies, migrant diasporas and transnational activist groups.

You will gain in-depth knowledge of perspectives that emphasise micro-level linkages between actors on a global scale, showing how linkages connecting the Global North to the South — as well as within the Global South — give rise to global phenomena. You will be familiarised with two research perspectives strongly represented by cutting-edge research at Maastricht University: ‘transnationalism’ and ‘science, technology and society studies for development’.

Research methodology

You will learn various research methods such as:

• Case study
• Ethnography
• Interviewing
• Discourse analysis
• Descriptive statistics
• Correlation

Internship, fieldwork or desk study

During your second semester, you will combine academic research with the analysis of ‘real world’ problems, either through an academic two-month internship, a three-month fieldwork or a desk study. Your master’s thesis will be based on this work.

Fieldwork

You can gain field experience by executing research in diverse locations and analysing data gathered in the field. Students have done projects on diverse topics, such as:

• Mexican return migrants from the US
• The attitude of Georgians towards Russian migrants after the influx of 2022
• The lives of underprivileged pre-schoolers in Mauritius
• Female empowerment and Climate crisis in Fiji
• The Christian church as development actor in South Africa
• Empowerment of girls through surfing in Ghana
• Micro-credit and rural women’s empowerment in Nepal

Examples of GDS Fieldwork theses in the media

• Sanne Schoonbrood thesis in 2024 was titled ‘Including Nature as a Colleague: Exploring Attunement to the Nonhuman in Approaches of Environmental Personhood. Ethnographic Fieldwork in South-Limburg, the Netherlands’, for which she won the national prestigious KHMW Jan Brouwer Thesis award Sociology and Anthropology.

   

• Jana Echterhoff collected data for her thesis at the US border crossing in the Mexican city of Nogales. Her experience was featured in a Deutsche Welle article titled ‘The human tragedies at the Mexican wall’.
• Eva Marie Wüst Vestergaard did her fieldwork in Ghana on the decolonisation of the fashion industry. You can find some of her results in this blog for the Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion.

Academic internship

You can conduct research within national and international knowledge institutes or organisations. Some examples of where students did their internships in the past are:

• GIZ, Germany
• World Fair Trade Organisation, The Netherlands
• Save the Children, Egypt
• Goethe-Institut, Dakar, Senegal
• Institute of Migration, Finland
• European Women's Lobby, Belgium
• Transnational Institute, Amsterdam

Desk study

You can choose to conduct research as a desk study, which will be largely based on literature research. Topics students have covered include:

• China’s economic influence in Africa
• Feminist Activism in Mexico
• Public Information Campaigns deterring irregular migration
• Neotropical conservation and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Surinam
• Biometric Technology in the Za’atari Refugee Camp in Jordan
• The Catholic Church and the Imposition of Domesticity in Belgian Congo