240067 VO+UE VM5 / VM4 - The Non-Aligned Movement and its Actors: A Bottom-up Perspective (2021S)

A wave of recent studies insists on decoupling globalization from the most developed capitalist economies and their interaction with the developing countries. These works shed light on alternative spaces of globalization during the Cold War by focusing on postcolonial and socialist development cooperation. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) provides a concrete political and institutional framework in which one can trace various examples of political, economic, military and cultural exchange between the countries of the Global South, as well as co-operation between the “Second” and “Third World”. This course adopts a “bottom up” view of the South-South and East-South exchanges by focusing on the human agency or the chief protagonists of these processes.

Instead of the “usual suspects”, such as Western diplomats and transnational corporations, the curriculum will look at the formerly neglected agency of groups like communist technocrats, acivists of national liberation movements, exchange students, engineers and workers in training programs, military staff or even terrorist networks. The idea is to encourage students to think about the impact of “other globalizers” and engage in critical discussion about the 20th Century globalization and attempts to establish alliances inside the “developing world”. In order to do that the course will present examples of specific on-site collaborations in different NAM member states which aimed to spark transfers of knowledge and modernization experiments beyond “Eastern” and “Western” approaches, usually arguing for uniqueness grounded in anti-colonial liberation narratives.

Besides the general theoretical insights of development studies and the framework of development history, this course will also rely on the literature stemming from global labor history and critical race studies in order to capture the agency of different actors on the ground and account for the cultural aspects of alternative development efforts.