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Ana María Bejarano, University of Toronto, ana.bejarano@utoronto.ca
Antoinette Handley, University of Toronto, a.handley@utoronto.ca

We invite all proposals in the field of comparative, developing politics but in particular welcome carefully constructed panel proposals that address this year's twin themes, complexity and change. What is new and what has remained the same in the developing world? Is it simply our analyses that have changed? And is the nature of change - and/or of complexity - substantively different in developing countries?

Change and complexity may of course be manifest on at least four levels: globally and regionally, at the level of national regimes, at the level of governments, and within broader societies. What, for example, are the implications of the passing of the Cold War order? How, if at all, has globalization "thickened" the set of interactions between various economies? What do migration patterns tell us about the politics that moves people? Are new types of regimes (democratic or otherwise) emerging? Has the state been effectively stripped down by neo-liberalism and/or has its reach proliferated in subterranean ways? Do social transformations (spurred by new technologies and/or rapid urbanization) substantively change the nature of politics? How new is the new commodities boom? And how do policymakers grapple with the staggering complexity of it all?

The notions of change and complexity can themselves be dissected. Given that our field has been shaped by both dialectical and more linear models, how do we understand "change" in the developing world? Does it always mean movement forward? Focusing on "complexity" may evoke alternative approaches, less focused on motion, more grounded in specificity and context. How do we parse the complex, evolving matrices of political life in analytically meaningful ways? Both complexity and change pose distinct methodological challenges, and papers addressing these issues are invited too.