The Evolution of Development Policies and Strategies, 1945-1970

Marc Frey (University of Cologne and Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies) and Ron Pruessen (University of Toronto) are hoping to organize a Spring 2004 conference dealing with the first stages of development policies in the post-World War II period.

The conference would be designed to serve as a building block in a gradually unfolding collaborative research project focused on a half-century sequence of inter-related phenomena – with decolonization, development, modernization, and globalization as key layers or components.

A first conference dealing with decolonization was held at the National University of Singapore in 2001 and M.E. Sharpe is publishing a volume of selected papers this summer as "The Transformation of Southeast Asia: International Perspectives on Decolonization". This new conference would entail a broadening of the collaborative research focus both geographically (to a full spectrum of Asian, African, and Latin American case studies) and thematically (to a wider range of “development” and “modernization” issues). It is expected that a volume of conference papers would again be published – and that subsequent workshops or conferences would be organized in order to stretch the chronological reach of the project into the post-1970 “globalization” era.

We expect that we will be able to mobilize the funds required and are making plans to hold the conference from April 22-24, 2003 at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar (near The Hague). Conference sessions will be devoted to the discussion of the papers. We therefore expect to distribute the papers among the participants prior to the workshop. The submission date would be March 15, 2003.

A list of suggested paper topics is included below and we would welcome communications from those historians whose work might make it possible for them to contribute under one or more of these headings. This is not intended to be an exhaustive or restrictive list, however: we would also certainly like to hear from those who have alternative or additional suggestions.

Please send a one-page outline of your paper proposal together with a one-page cv to:
Marc Frey (marc.frey@uni-koeln.de) and to Ron Pruessen (pruessen@chass.utoronto.ca) by September 30, 2003.

Possible themes and topics:
- Development theories and the emergence of an academic-political community of experts
- Development, regimes, and the international system of trade and finance
- The United Nations and development
- U.S. development policies
- British and French development policies
- Late-coming ‘do-gooders’: The Scandinavian countries
- Exporting revolution? Soviet and Chinese development policies
- Development policies in India: the view from the recipient side
- Colonial development and national emancipation: Perspectives from Nigeria
- Non-governmental actors in the early period of development
- “God´s adventurers”: Missionaries and the role of the Churches
- Modernization: The rise and demise of a development doctrine
- Philanthropy and security: the domestic imperatives of development assistance
- The Semiotics of Development