{"id":39595,"date":"2024-02-12T18:34:45","date_gmt":"2024-02-12T18:34:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/historiografija.hr\/?p=39595"},"modified":"2024-02-12T18:34:45","modified_gmt":"2024-02-12T18:34:45","slug":"international-conference-cfp-the-business-of-worldmaking-new-perspectives-on-liminal-actors-in-postcolonial-development-cooperation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/historiografija.hr\/?p=39595","title":{"rendered":"International Conference CfP: The Business of Worldmaking: New Perspectives on Liminal Actors in Postcolonial Development Cooperation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Koper, Slovenia, 19-20 September 2024<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Governments in Africa, Asia and South America, most of which achieved political independence in the decades following World War Two, forged a whole set of transnational developmental entanglements, with the aim of breaking with the unidirectionality of development thinking and practice that underpinned (neo)colonial dependencies and capital-led globalization. In the context of contending global visions of modernity, \u2018lagging behind\u2019 could be turned into an advantage, with newly independent countries evaluating and employing resources from various partners. In recent years, scholars have opened exciting new vistas for theorizing such alternative spaces of globalization, by highlighting cooperation in the frames of communist support for decolonization, socialist internationalism, and horizontal links between postcolonial states. Popularized by authors such as \u0141ukasz Stanek and Adom Getachew, the concept of worldmaking<\/em> has proven particularly fruitful to encompass the wealth of simultaneous and often competing practices of transnational collaboration in the peripheries during the Cold War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seeking to move beyond a focus on former colonial Metropoles and Cold War superpowers, and zooming in on peripheral modernization projects, this conference intends to investigate the \u2018in-between\u2019 instances of economic cooperation in the self-professed developing countries in Africa, Asia, and South America. The conference will primarily focus 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 \u2018catching up\u2019 with the most developed nations (e.g. Japan, Israel, South Korea). While not excluding examples of Cold War superpowers and former colonial metropoles\u2019 inserting themselves into this newly emerging multidirectional development consensus the conference will focus on the above described, liminal examples of bilateral collaboration and particularly welcomes contributions emphasizing tri- and multilateral efforts between \u2018East\u2019, \u2018South\u2019 and \u2018West\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We further aim to advance the state of the art in the field by inspecting how the visions of worldmaking were applied to the concrete experiences on the ground. The bulk of research looking at economic worldmaking in the Global South thus far focused on instances of collaborations in architecture and civil engineering, such as housing stock, dams, steelworks, etc. Although illuminating expert mobility and transfer of know-how, the joint work on such turnkey projects was usually of relatively short duration while their market position of natural monopolies often implied predictable economic and social impact. Moving beyond a focus on large-scale infrastructure projects, the conference encourages papers stemming from new empirically informed research on more sustained, uncertain and consumer-oriented transnational cooperation in manufacturing, agriculture, mining, transport, etc. We want to illustrate unconventional attempts of converging national economies through long-term technological cooperation operationalised in the form of joint-ventures with (para)statal companies, shared production, or joint export schemes, independently from the dominant multinational companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conference seeks to bring together scholars of business, development, social and economic history tackling topics such as:<\/p>\n\n\n\n