CFP: The Other Globalisers: How the Socialist and the Non-Aligned World Shaped the Rise of Post-War Economic Globalisation

Date and Location: 6-7 July 2017, University of Exeter, UK

Join the 1989 after 1989 research team for our conference on the “Other Globalisers” – how the socialist and the non-aligned world shaped the rise of post-war economic globalisation. Based at Exeter, this conference is the second in a series of events exploring how processes and practices that emerged from the socialist world shaped the re-globalised world of our times.

CALL FOR PAPERS

In the wake of the Second World War, the world economy began to ‘reglobalise’ – following the disintegrative processes of the interwar period. This story has most often been told as the final triumph of a neoliberal international order led by the West. Recent research, however, suggests that the creation of our modern interconnected world was not driven solely by the forces of Western capitalism, nor was it the only model of global economic interdependence that arose in the second half of the twentieth century. This conference aims to rethink the histories of postwar globalisation by focusing on the socialist and non-aligned world, whose roles in the rise of an economically interconnected world have received substantially less attention.

Colloquium “In from the Cold: Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War”

Colloquium “In from the Cold: Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War”, Bucharest, June 17, 2016.

Organized by:

The Regional Francophone Centre for Advanced Research in Social Sciences (CEREFREA Villa Noël), Bucharest

In partnership with:

National Archives of Romania

Portuguese Embassy in Bucharest

Camões Institute for Cooperation and Language, Portugal

Call for Papers

In 1955, the Afro-Asian Conference held at Bandung, Indonesia, was a historical marker. Representatives of newly independent states came together to discuss the fate of African and Asian nations in face of the superpower’s political ambitions over the “Third World.” The “Bandung spirit” would epitomize the commitment to anti-colonialism and neutralism during the Cold War. In 1961, the Belgrade Summit crystallized this state of affairs as it advocated an eminently independent path for the “Third World”: the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). This shift from neutralism to non-alignment co-existed with important historical events, such as the Sino-Soviet split and the Sino-Indian conflict. In the early 1960s, as the “Second world” of socialist countries was strongly divided and the decolonization process in Africa took off, new ideological and political fronts were opened in the global Cold War.  Africa became an important battleground on which a myriad of political projects were confronted and played out, from anti-colonialism and socialist solidarity to “third worldism”, non-alignment or Pan-africanism. In this context, cultural diplomacy became an important strategy for building cultural ties and fostering forms of political identification among different, sometimes estranged, actors.