International Conference THE BUSINESS OF WORLDMAKING: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LIMINAL ACTORS IN POSTCOLONIAL DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION

Opis

International Conference THE BUSINESS OF WORLDMAKING: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LIMINAL ACTORS IN POSTCOLONIAL DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION

Programme and Abstracts (PDF)
Editors/Uredniki: Immanuel Harisch, Goran Musić, Jure Ramšak

Seeking to move beyond a focus on former colonial Metropoles and Cold War superpowers, and zooming in on peripheral modernization projects, this conference investigates the ‘in-between’ instances of economic cooperation in the self-professed developing countries in Africa, Asia, and South America. The conference primarily focuses on those dynamic players in the postcolonial world which circumvented the habitual East-West and North-South cleavages and presented themselves as: 1) neutral (e.g. Austria, Sweden, Ireland), 2) non-aligned (e.g. Yugoslavia, India, Egypt), 3) pursuing more independent socialist course (e.g. Romania, Cuba, China), 4) allegedly not sharing the colonial past with other Western European nations (e.g. West Germany, Italy), or 5) successfully ‘catching up’ with the most developed nations (e.g. Japan, Israel, South Korea). While not excluding examples of Cold War superpowers and former colonial metropoles’ inserting themselves into this newly emerging multidirectional development consensus the conference focuses on the above described, liminal examples of bilateral collaboration, particularly contributions emphasizing tri- and multilateral efforts between ‘East’, ‘South’ and ‘West’.

The conference is jointly organized by the University of Vienna – Research Platform for the Study of Transformations and Eastern Europe, and Science and Research Centre Koper within the framework of their respective research projects A Socialist Workplace in Postcolonial Africa: A Connected History of The Yugoslav Workforce in Zambia (FWF, P34980) and Being European and Decolonial: Utopian Realism of The Yugoslav Nonaligned Internationalism (ARIS, J6-50187) and Rendering a Globalization Otherwise (ARIS, N6-0304).