Call for papers: Development Knowledge and Policies from the Global South, 1930–2000

Call for papers: Development Knowledge and Policies from the Global South, 1930–2000. Organisers: Teresa Huhle, Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen, Frederik Schulze (Department of History & Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne). Cologne 19.07.2027 - 20.07.2027, Deadline 18.10.2026

In recent years, scholarship on the history of developmentalism has included the Global South by exploring anti-developmentalist thought and resistance to development policies. At the same time, historiography started to acknowledge the participation of Global South actors in the making of Cold War development projects. Our conference aims to systematize these approaches and to resituate the Global South within the history of twentieth century developmentalism. To this end, we want to explore development knowledge and policies which were produced by actors from the Global South.

We can build on scholarship that has illuminated the dynamic and heterogeneous trajectories of development throughout the twentieth century by moving beyond a focus on Point IV and US-American policies and situating them within a broader chronological, geographical, and substantive context (Unger 2018, Lorenzini 2019). Authors have described non-US-American origins of the idea of “development” (McVety 2018). They have also analyzed the role of the League of Nations (Clavin 2013) as well as late imperial policies of development from the 1930s to the 1950s (Cooper 1996). Studies of community development in the 1950s and 1960s have highlighted that there was not only modernization theory-led authoritative planning but there also existed small-scale and bottom-up development schemes (Immerwahr 2015/ Pohl-Valero 2026). The broad disenchantment with large-scale state-led development projects, the rise of NGOs in the sector, and the turn to entrepreneurial approaches of development have been described for the period since the 1970s (Scott 1998, Davies 2014, Macekura 2015). Concepts of sustainable development and ideas of de-growth are receiving growing attention, too (Borowy/Schmelzer 2017). What is more, global histories of Eastern European state socialism have shed light on development thinking and practices beyond the Iron Curtain and have diversified our image of North-South entanglements during the Cold War (Mark/Kalinovsky/Marung 2020).

Yet, the historiographical narrative continues to be shaped predominantly by ideas and practices originating in the Global North. Critical scholarship has paid great attention to analyzing the continuity of exploitative and partly violent power relations that were inherent to many development policies stemming from the Global North. This line of research has understood local actors as agents of resistance against these power relations and interpreted development critique, post-development approaches, and indigenous knowledge as opposition to Western development thought (Escobar 1995, Lang/Mokrani 2013).

As a consequence, the Global South is still often treated as a “supposed local institutional and scientific vacuum” (Pohl-Valero 2026, 21). Ideas and practices of development devised by local elites – on national, regional, or community levels – are therefore mostly overlooked. The workshop aims at uncovering how actors and institutions from the Global South (co-)produced theoretical and practical knowledge to develop their countries, regions, and communities. We welcome contributions discussing one or several of the following areas:

1. Development knowledge (co-)produced in the Global South

African socialism, ujamaa, and dependency theory are among the most well-known concepts of development brought forward, negotiated, and circulated by actors from the Global South. What other concepts were there and what fields of knowledge have been identified as relevant to development by actors from Africa, Latin America, and Asia? In which socio-cultural settings have they been developed? What institutions and actors contributed to stabilizing and circulating them? How where they put into practice?

2. Relations between the Global North and the Global South

How did actors from the Global South conceive of their relationship to development policies from the Global North? Did they understand their knowledge as in resistance to approaches from the United States, Western, or Eastern Europe? Or did they regard them as adaptation or local transformation of Northern ideas and practices? How did actors from the Global North react to non-Western development approaches? How can we describe this relationship, taking Global South agency into account but not losing power asymmetries from sight?

3. Debate and resistance within Global South societies

How did development thinkers and practitioners from Africa, Latin America, and Asia negotiate their ideas and concepts within their respective societies? How did they react when facing resistance? What power relations did their ideas and practices imply?

4. Networks and institutions of development knowledge from the South

Can we identify specific spatial or institutional hubs for the emergence of development knowledge from the Global South? What role did the UN-system play and how did institutions of South-South interaction contribute to the production and circulation of alternate development knowledge?

The workshop is open to a variety of fields of development thought and intervention such as urban planning, infrastructure development, economics, business administration, agriculture, family planning, public health, and social planning. We particularly welcome contributions that address the listed questions and fields of development from a history of knowledge perspective.

The workshop will be based on pre-circulated papers of max. 4,000 words which need to be submitted by 31 May 2027.

If you are interested in participating, please send your abstract of max. 400 words and a short CV (1 page) to the organizers by October 18, 2026. Travel and accommodation costs will be reimbursed depending on the outcome of a conference grant application. A budget for junior researchers has already been secured.

Organizers:

Teresa Huhle (teresa.huhle@uni-koeln.de)

Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen (katharina.kreuder-sonnen@uni-koeln.de)

Frederik Schulze (frederik.schulze@uni-koeln.de)

Bibliography

Clavin, Patricia (2013). Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cooper, Frederick (1996). Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Davies, Thomas (2014). NGOs: A New History of Transnational Civil Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Escobar, Arturo (1995). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Immerwahr, Daniel (2015). Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lang, Miriam and Dunia Mokrani, eds. (2013). Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America. Quito: Fundación Rosa Luxemburg.

Lorenzini, Sara (2019). Global Development: A Cold War History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Macekura, Stephen (2015). Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mark, James; Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Steffi Marung, eds. (2020). Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Maruca, Barbara and Matthias Schmelzer (2017). “Sustainable Degrowth,” in Iris Borowy and Matthias Schmelzer, eds. History of the Future of Economic Growth: Historical Roots of Current Debates on Sustainable Degrowth. Milton Park: Routledge, 174–197.

McVety, Amanda Kay (2018). “Wealth and Nations. The Origins of International Development Assistance,” in Stephen J. Macekura and Erez Manela, eds. The Development Century. A Global History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 21–39.

Pohl-Valero, Stefan (2026). “State, Experts, and Rural Development in Colombia, 1930–50. A Local Genealogy of International Community Development,” in History of Science, online first, 10.1177/00732753261428874.

Scott, James C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Unger, Corinna R. (2018). International Development: A Postwar History. London: Bloomsbury.

Kontakt

Teresa Huhle (teresa.huhle@uni-koeln.de)

Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen (katharina.kreuder-sonnen@uni-koeln.de)

Frederik Schulze (frederik.schulze@uni-koeln.de)

[Image: Roger Joseph Felli – the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ghana in Gdańsk. Janusz Uklejewski, 1979 / PAP, from the page afrotopie.online]