Third Worldism Retreating: International Development, the End of the Cold War and the Crisis of Global Modernity

2014 ◽  
pp. 81-105
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.


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.


sjesr ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 282-288
Author(s):  
Dr. Murad Ali

The paper explores bilateral ties between Turkey and the United States (US) following the end of World War II to the recent era of Trump-Erdogan. Due to its immense geostrategic significance and a strong military, throughout the Cold War period and also in the post-Cold War era, Tukey has mostly remained a key US ally. The methodology adopted for this study is based on both qualitative data available in the form of policy documents and existing literature about the subject as well as utilizing quantitative data comprising US economic and military aid and arms' sales to Turkey obtained from databases of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) respectively. Like numerous developing countries in other parts of the world, Turkey also became one of the biggest recipients of US economic and military assistance and Washington also provided huge arms to Ankara during the Cold War years. The US has provided Turkey an aggregate of US$ 70 billion in civilian and military assistance and has delivered its arms worth US$ 34 billion. However, it has not been a smooth journey as their bilateral relationship experienced some upheavals not only during the Cold War period but ties have been strained by various thorny matters in recent years. These include Turkey's dispute with Greece on Cyprus, targeting Kurdish fighters in Syria, purchase of S-400 defense systems from Russia, and human rights violations at home. By examining these vital points of concern, the paper concludes that although both countries have historically maintained warm bilateral ties, several divergent issues have marred the relationship between the two countries in recent years.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 452-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard MacDonald

This article explores the discursive theme of documentary's crisis and renewal through internationalism as it evolved at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, established in 1947. During its first decade Edinburgh was the most significant forum for discussion on the future of documentary as an international genre, a debate to which all the key figures of the prewar generation contributed, as critics, panelists, advisors, speakers and film-makers. Amid a sense of crisis for British documentary, marked by the perceived dominance of instructional film-making of limited social and aesthetic ambition, these figures urged film-makers to look to the developing world, where the old themes of documentary could inspire new work to match the canonical works of the past. Presented at Edinburgh in 1953 World Without End, an aesthetically ambitious film made in Siam and Mexico, sponsored by the international agency UNESCO and co-directed by two of the British documentary movement's most celebrated film-makers Basil Wright and Paul Rotha, was widely praised as renewing the prewar traditions of the sponsored documentary. The article argues that the well-intentioned critical discourse of renewal through thematic engagement with international development, evident in the reception of World Without End, evades the contemporary politics of the British state's relationship to its empire, the movements of national liberation that actively sought to end it and the new forms of despotism nurtured by the geopolitics of the Cold War.


2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 529-531
Author(s):  
Jennifer Clapp

History holds important insights for political scientists concerned with contemporary international development issues. Michael E. Latham and Nick Cullather's recent historical accounts of US foreign policy toward developing countries provide excellent examples of the significance of understanding the past in order to interpret the present. Both books highlight the ways in which strategic concerns of the US government during the Cold War shaped its international aid policies.


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