240099 FS FM2 - Forschungsseminar (Teil 2) - Forschungsumsetzung (2025S)

As the historian Joseph Morgan Hodge has noted, “the neoliberal ascendancy of the 1980s, combined with the unravelling of the Cold War at the end of the decade, ushered in a period of prolonged crisis and skepticism about ‘development’ as a global project” (2016: 125). However, in the three decades preceding the global neoliberal offensive, African governments, political organizations, and individual actors forged a whole set of transnational entanglements, aimed at breaking with the unidirectionality of development thinking and practice that underpinned (neo)colonial dependencies and capital-led globalization. In the context of competing global visions of modernity, Africa’s ‘lagging behind’ could be turned into an advantage, with newly independent countries evaluating and employing resources (material, intellectual, diplomatic, etc.) 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 Łukasz Stanek and Adom Getachew, the concept of worldmaking has proven particularly fruitful to encompass the wealth of simultaneous and often competing practices of transnational collaboration in the peripheries during the Cold War.

The aim of this research seminar is to facilitate student research projects on the history of development practices during the period of decolonization and the Cold War (1950s-1990s). Our focus will be on governments, institutions, organizations, and individuals from the Cold War 'West', 'East', 'South', and 'in-between' instances of economic cooperation (e.g., neutral, non-aligned) in the self-proclaimed developing countries of Africa. We will also examine the involvement of (inter)national organizations in shaping the practice of 'worldmaking' (Getachew 2019; Stanek 2020), such as the United Nations, the International Labour Organization, the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as NGOs and think-tanks (e.g. the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung) and international trade union federations (Dinkel 2019; Muschik 2022; Prashad 2014; von zur Mühlen 2009).

With this course, we aim to guide students in their historical, empirical examination of attempts to converge national economies through development cooperation between the emerging African nations and the rest of the world. In this way the course provides an opportunity to historicize development practices and highlight African perspectives through the usage of primary historical sources. Development projects and practices that can be studied by students include instances of cooperation in architecture and civil engineering, such as housing, dams, steel mills, etc. They may also include expert mobility and know-how transfer, as well as avenues for new empirically based research on more sustainable and consumer-oriented transnational cooperation in manufacturing, agriculture, mining, transportation, etc.