The Golden Age of Third Worldism: International Development, the Cold War and the Contradictions of Global Modernity

2014 ◽  
pp. 60-80
Author(s):  
Mark T. Berger ◽  
Heloise Weber
Author(s):  
Ayokunle Olumuyiwa Omobowale

Most of the discourse on development aid in Africa has been limited to assistance from Western countries and those provided by competing capitalist and socialist blocs during the Cold war era. Japan, a nation with great economic and military capabilities; its development assistance for Africa is encapsulated in the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) initiative. The TICAD started in 1993 and Japan has so far held 5 TICAD meetings between 1993 and 2013 during which Africa’s development challenges and Japan’s development assistance to the continent were discussed. The emphasis on “ownership”, “self-help” and “partnership” are major peculiar characteristics of Japan’s development aid that puts the design, implementation and control of development projects under the control of recipient countries. This is a major departure from the usual practice in international development assistance where recipient countries are bound by clauses that somewhat puts the control of development aid in the hands of the granting countries. Such binding clauses have often been described as inimical to the successful administration of the aids and development in recipient countries. Though Japan’s development aid to Africa started only in 1993, by the 2000s, Japan was the topmost donor to Africa. This paper examines the context of Japan’s development aid to Africa by analyzing secondary data sourced from literature and secondary statistics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 113-145
Author(s):  
Ethan B. Kapstein

This article sheds light on the role of foreign direct investment as an instrument for economic development and, in turn, for the advancement of U.S. foreign policy goals during the Cold War. From the earliest days of the Cold War, and especially after the U.S.-Soviet competition for influence in the developing world began in the 1950s, the United States sought to promote private enterprise on behalf of U.S. goals. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, U.S. officials believed that foreign investment would suffice to fuel international development, obviating the need for official development assistance. These hopes, however, were largely disappointed. On the one hand, U.S.-based multinational companies preferred to invest in the industrial world; on the other hand, some Third World governments were uninterested in promoting private enterprise rather than state-led development. In part because foreign investment did not meet expectations, the U.S. government ended up elaborating an official foreign aid program instead.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 39-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Schuhrke

In 1962, the AFL-CIO launched its government-funded labor education project in Latin America — the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) — to spread the tenets of anticommunist, “free” trade unionism. From its earliest days, leftists and anti-imperialists accused the Institute of being a CIA front with the mission of “brainwashing” Third World workers into becoming counterrevolutionaries. While AIFLD was indisputably a Cold War program aligned with US foreign policy objectives, its goal of proselytizing US-style industrial relations should not be understood solely as a CIA-manufactured ploy. It was also the product of a broader social-scientific vision in the 1950s and 1960s to rapidly “modernize” the Third World and to stabilize labor conflict through rational, pluralist industrial relations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-56
Author(s):  
Arnab Chatterjee

Abstract Humanity has long been haunted by the notions of Armageddon and the coming of a Golden Age. While the English Romantic poets like Shelley saw hopes of a new millennium in poems like “Queen Mab” and “The Revolt of Islam”, others like Blake developed their own unique “cosmology” in their longer poems that were nevertheless coloured with their vision of redemption and damnation. Even Hollywood movies, like The Book of Eli (2010), rehearse this theme of salvation in the face of imminent annihilation time and again. Keeping with such trends, this paper would like to trace this line of apocalyptic vision and subsequent hopes of renewal with reference to William Golding’s debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954) and his Pincher Martin (1956). While in the former, a group of young school boys indulge in violence, firstly for survival, and then for its own sake, in the latter, a lonely, shipwrecked survivor of a torpedoed destroyer clings to his own hard, rock-like ego that subsequently is a hurdle for his salvation and redemption, as he is motivated by a lust for life that makes him exist in a different moral and physical dimension. In Lord of the Flies, the entire action takes place with nuclear warfare presumably as its backdrop, while Pincher Martin has long been interpreted as an allegory of the Cold War and the resultant fear of annihilation from nuclear fallout (this applies to Golding’s debut novel as well). Thus, this paper would argue how Golding weaves his own vision of social, spiritual, and metaphysical dissolution, and hopes for redemption, if any, through these two novels.


2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Morrison

How does the internal organization of a foreign aid donor affect its aid allocation decisions? Despite the voluminous literature on the political economy of foreign aid, little systematic scholarship exists on this topic. This paper analyzes the allocations of the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank's lending arm for the poorest countries, to all eligible countries between 1977 and 2005. While factors such as a country's need and its policy environment have consistently impacted IDA's allocation decisions, other factors have changed in important ways. For example, IDA disbursements do not follow US aid disbursements in the post–Cold War period the way they did during the Cold War. And most strikingly, IDA's allocations have become tightly linked to debt owed to IDA's sister organization, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). While IDA used to shy away from countries with higher debt to the IBRD, the last two decades have seen IDA engage in apparently defensive lending for the IBRD, lending more to countries with outstanding balances to that institution. The results suggest greater focus on the internal structures of donors would yield insight into their allocation decisions.


2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-513
Author(s):  
Paul Lever

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 436-452
Author(s):  
Nick Barnett

This article explores how nostalgia for both the Cold War and the 1970s in general became a key feature of the BBC drama The Game (2014). It argues that the serial situated the Cold War as a more stable era in international relations in which the enemy played by a specific set of rules, thus leading to a danger that was manageable and more predictable than the terror threat of the twenty-first century. Furthermore, the article argues that the serial presents the 1970s as a golden age which was defined by the continuity of consensus politics and communities of class and family. Finally, the article examines how this nostalgia is reinforced by narrative devices which engage with generic features such as the storyline playing out like a game. However, in the re-imagined Cold War of the twenty-first century, the traditional chess trope has been replaced by the more complex game of Alice Chess.


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