Showing papers in "Humanity in 2015"

The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduction

Abstract: The most widely discussed transnational governance reform initiative of the 1970s, the New International Economic Order (NIEO) called for fundamental legal, economic, and political transformations to international institutions and norms designed to redirect more of the benefits of transnational integration toward the developing nations of the Global South. This special issue of Humanity reconsiders the claims of the NIEO in light of recent debates about global governance, and suggests that the NIEO’s proposals for an alternative global order continue to haunt the global geopolitical imaginary.

Writing the History of Development (Part 1: The First Wave)

Abstract: Today . . . the idea of development stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape. Delusion and disappointment, failures and crimes have been the steady companions of development and they tell a common story: it did not work. Moreover, the historical conditions which catapulted the idea into prominence have vanished: development has become outdated. But above all, the hopes and desires which made the idea fly, are now exhausted: development has grown obsolete ... It is time to dismantle this mental structure . . . [and] bid farewell to the defunct idea in order to clear our minds for fresh discoveries.-Wolfgang Sachs'It has been over twenty years since Wolfgang Sachs boldly proclaimed the "end of development" in his postdevelopment studies collection, The Development Dictionary. Sachs and his fellow contributors were not alone in their desire to relegate the idea to the dustbin of history. Indeed, since the late 1980s, the concept of development as applied to the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America has come under intense fire, not only from academics but also from within mainstream policy circles. For a time, under the onslaught of such scrutiny, it looked as if the critics might be right, and that we might be witnessing development's last rites and requiem. Yet today, more than two decades later, the central tenets of the development discourse continue to persist and permeate the minds of policy makers and analysts, seemingly impervious to criticism and meaningful reform. In face of such persistence and comeback, even across as significant a historical watershed as the end of the Cold War, historians and other social scientists in a variety of fields have embarked upon a different and novel approach, one which treats development as history.2 In other words, to paraphrase Nick Cullather, they propose to use history as the methodology for studying and understanding development, rather than constructing development theories to explain history and to provide predictive models for the future.3In this two-part essay, I review some of the most important contributions that have been made over the past twenty years to this expanding field of historical scholarship. In part i, I examine what might be termed the "first wave" of writing the history of development that emerged in the 1990s during the neoliberal moment. Poststructuralist analysts were the first to set out a genealogical framework, viewing development as a discursive regime formally inaugurated by the United States in 1949, when the "discovery" of mass poverty in the Third World came to preoccupy Western policy makers and political elites. Following on the heels of postdevelopment writers, scholars in the field of U.S. diplomatic history also began to investigate the history of modernization. As they have shown, the offer of technical and financial assistance as part of a "new deal" for the underdeveloped areas of the world was invariably tied to the U.S.-led campaign to counteract communist influence in these regions during the Cold War.In part 2, I examine some of the more recent contributions that have presented an increasingly more nuanced picture of development. The postwar periodization of development, for example, has been criticized by historians who challenge the conventional starting date by calling attention to the continuities between late colonialism and contemporary development policies and practices. Others have sought to examine local development encounters and specific projects as they played out on the ground. More recently, some researchers have also begun to move away from the predominantly American-centered framework of earlier studies and to conceive of modernization as a global project. The next step, I contend, is to create a truly global and transnational history of development, one that brings together the literature on late colonialism and decolonization with the new international history of the Cold War, and that offers a more diverse, refined, and historically-informed reading of international development. …

Socialist Globalization against Capitalist Neocolonialism: The Economic Ideas behind the New International Economic Order

Abstract: Much globalization scholarship assumes that the United States and other advanced industrialized capitalist countries are the primary agents of globalization. However, when we examine economic globalization more closely and from the perspective of Second- and Third-World institutions, we can see that the Non-Aligned Movement, the Second World, and the Third World more broadly worked hard to create a global economy in the face of active resistance by the United States and other current and former colonial powers, which sought to maintain the economic status quo of the colonial system. This article explores one of the centers of global economic thought and policy for the New International Economic Order (NIEO): the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

Legal Aspects of the New International Economic Order

Abstract: The complaint of the poor nations against the present state is not only that we are poor both in absolute and relative terms and in comparison with the rich nations. It is also that within the existing structures of economic interaction we must remain poor, and get relatively poorer, whatever we do ... The demand for a New International Economic Order is a way of saying that the poor nations must be enabled to develop themselves according to their own interests, and to benefit from the efforts they made.-Julius Nyerere, 1974'IntroductionThe general neglect of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in contemporary discussions and analyses of international relations has obscured the scale of this initiative and the seriousness with which it was treated by states, international institutions, and scholars alike. The NIEO combined a powerful political campaign with a compelling moral vision of global order that sought nothing less than the transformation of the international economic system. The NIEO was presented in a number of different registers, and it emphasized the importance of mutual benefit, enlightened self-interest, interdependence, and cooperation. And yet this was in itself insufficient. Law was an important dimension of the NIEO for, as President Luis Echeverria of Mexico asserted in 1972, "It is necessary to take co-operation out of the realm of good will to crystallize it in the field of law."2 How then did the Third World attempt to use international law to make the NIEO a legal reality? In this essay I provide an overview of the political vision that inspired the NIEO, some of the key areas of economic relations that the Third World attempted to transform, the legal doctrines it sought to develop or reform for these purposes, and the different strategies it formulated in its campaign.The creation of the Organization of Petrol Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its demonstration of power through the oil embargo it managed in 1973 both inspired the Third World and alarmed the north. The assertion of Third World power-at least by some of the oil-producing nations in 1973-caused enormous concern and was characterized as an "economic Bandung."3Understandably, the NIEO was viewed with some hostility, by developed countries. The responses were varied. Irving Kristol accused the Third World of "maumauing" the West, its actual or potential benefactor; Henry Kissinger began a concerted campaign to organize the rich against the poor, and, more moderately, Willy Brandt headed a commission that eventually published the report that would bear his name, and which attempted to demonstrate how all countries, rich and poor alike, could benefit from international reform.4 The legal aspects of the NIEO campaign were inevitably contested by the developed states and the lawyers supporting their position. My interest lies, then, in examining the confrontation between the Third World and the West as it played out in legal terms.The broad argument this essay offers is, first, that imperialism was too deeply entrenched in international law to be reformed by that very same law; and second, that the Third World initiative was unable to expand its reach to regulate power within the private sphere-in particular, the activities of corporations and the vision of property, contract, and economic relations that they furthered. A conclusion considers the NIEO's ambiguous legacy.The BackgroundThe political origins of the NIEO can be traced back at least to the Bandung Conference in 1955 and its attempts to foster solidarity among newly independent countries. Given the divisions that existed among the countries that organized and participated in that event, the tensions between China and India, and the attempts of Ceylon to insert U.S. views into the proceedings, it must be recognized that the Third World project has always been marked by the challenge of establishing solidarity in the midst of significant divergences and differences. …

"In the Interests of Mankind as a Whole": Mohammed Bedjaoui's New International Economic Order

Abstract: International lawyers, it is often said, are exceptionally, even ridiculously, fond of "universality." And this fondness, bordering at times on the obsessive, manifests itself in a variety of forms, the most nebulous and notorious being the idea of "jus cogens norms"-general principles from which international lawyers are willing to permit no deviation, even in the form of supposedly iron-clad treaties with directly countervailing provisions. Like principles of nonaggression and sovereign equality, prohibitions of piracy, slavery, and genocide are regularly ascribed jus cogens status, typically as part of an effort to win approval for one or another "social" model of international legal order.1 Less frequently recognized, though, is that the kind of farreaching universalism to which international lawyers typically commit themselves has underwritten a variety of proposals for the reorganization of international legal and economic relations.Arguably the most ambitious such proposal was the project for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the 1970s.2 Spearheaded by the nonaligned Third World and drawing heavily upon the rhetoric of universalism, the NIEO underscored the need to facilitate technology transfer, regulate foreign investment, supervise transnational corporations, encourage debt-relief and development assistance, and bolster sovereignty in respect to use of natural resources and formulation of economic policy-all with a view to restructuring north-south relations for an age in which many had become suspicious of the trade and investment regimes fostered by the post-1945 class compromise often characterized as "embedded liberalism."3 If the wave of decolonization that swept through Asia, Africa, and the Pacific during the third quarter of the twentieth century produced a large number of formally independent states, the NIEO sought to consolidate and expand the scope of this transformation in the name of a genuinely inclusive international order-an order in which power would be redistributed on a global scale and de jure sovereignty would be reinforced with full-scale economic development.4 From the fortification of the principle of selfdetermination to the articulation of a right to development, from the augmentation of the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources to the development of a "common heritage of mankind" doctrine, the NIEO's central claims were clothed in a particularly effusive form of universalism, one that would inaugurate a new, generously "social" conception of international affairs while doing away with the last vestiges of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century classical international law.This essay revisits the work of Mohammed Bedjaoui, the Algerian jurist and diplomat who played a key role in coordinating efforts to garner support for the NIEO before accepting a seat on the International Court of Justice.5 Focusing upon his principal contribution to the movement, Towards a New International Economic Order (i979), I will analyze Bedjaoui's account of the Third World as an agent of reform in international law and organization.6 Specifically, I will examine the way in which Bedjaoui attempted to ground his call for a structural transformation of the world order in a sustained defense of legal universalism and closely related critique of legal formalism. Further, I will argue that this insistence on a wholesale reconfiguration of international life-so pervasive and all-encompassing that it occasionally threatened to overwhelm the text in utopian idealism-can only be appreciated against the back- ground of Bedjaoui's decades-long engagement with the Third World, including, crucially, his involvement in the Algerian war of national liberation.Beyond "the Third World de trop"7As a lawyer and politician with strong roots in both Algeria and France, Bedjaoui's trajectory is illustrative of a series of broader intellectual and professional developments during the Cold War. …

The New International Economic Order, Interdependence, and Globalization

Abstract: This article examines two competing visions of global economic “interdependence” during the 1970s. The first was a hopeful vision proclaimed by the advocates of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), who saw interdependence as an opportunity to bring about greater economic equality between developed and developing nations. The NIEO’s critics argued for a more pessimistic view, emphasizing the way that interdependence transmitted economic shocks between countries and gave all nations a stake in maintaining the stability of the existing order. Despite their disagreements, however, both these visions shared the assumption that the global economy was governed by political rules and could be managed by collective state action. That assumption was increasingly challenged after the 1970s, leaving the NIEO debate as an important window into an era before more purely market-oriented visions of the global economy took hold.

"Under the Aegis of Man": The Right to Development and the Origins of the New International Economic Order

Abstract: On September 23, 1966, the Senegalese foreign minister Doudou Thiam gave an impassioned speech to fellow delegates assembled in New York for the opening of the 21st Session of the United Nations General Assembly.1 It began as a reflection on the preceding twenty years of UN history. Despite some modest progress that the UN had achieved in meeting its three primary objectives-the maintenance of peace; the liberation of colonized peoples; and the economic and social development of mankind-this period was more notably exemplified by failures and setbacks: the war in Southeast Asia; the failure of decolonization in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa; and the failure to meet the goals of the UN's first "Development Decade."2It was on this third point that Thiam ruminated for the remainder of his speech. The achievement of political and legal sovereignty by newly decolonized states did not resolve the existing imbalance of power between the developing and developed worlds. Thiam cited growing inequality in the share of global income between developed and underdeveloped countries: in 1938, the income disparity was 15:1; by 1966 it was 35:1, and projected to be 40:1 by 2000.Thiam insisted that this phenomenon of underdevelopment was not determined by geography or race; it was mobile, moving about in time and space. Western prosperity vis-a-vis the Middle East, India, and China was historically recent, and the socalled poor nations were not as poor as they were said to be: in 1963 they held 50 percent of the world's petroleum, nearly half the copper and manganese ore, and 70 percent of the world's diamonds. The same was true of their share of agricultural commodities.The problem, Thiam argued, lay in the inequitable international division of labor and deterioration in the terms of trade since 1950. In the postwar global economy, the underdeveloped countries had taken on the role of producers of raw materials and importers of finished goods: "In theory, the old colonial pact was doubtlessly abolished at the end of the last century, but in practice it has been maintained for a long time . . . An actual pillage of the developing countries has been organized on a worldwide scale."3Thiam called upon developing countries to act: the time had come to organize an "economic Bandung Conference"-a reference to the 1955 Afro-Asian summit that exemplified a newly emerging spirit of postcolonial unity and solidarity. The last part of Thiam's speech is worth reproducing in its entirety, for it introduced a novel and revolutionary concept:What is our task? We must lay the foundations for a new world society; we must bring about a new revolution; we must tear down all the practices, institutions and rules on which international economic relations are based, in so far as these practices, institutions and rules sanction injustice and exploitation and maintain the unjustified domination of a minority over the majority of men. Not only must we reaffirm our right to development, be we must also take the steps which will enable this right to become a reality. We must build a new system, based not only on the theoretical affirmation of the sacred rights of peoples and nations but on the actual enjoyment of these rights. The right of peoples to self-determination, the sovereign equality of peoples, international solidarity-all these will remain empty words, and, forgive me for saying so, hypocritical words, until relations between nations are viewed in the light of economic and social facts. From this point of view, the facts contradict the principles. The new world vision which the Charter of the United Nations held out to us is still only a vision. It has not yet become an international reality. The economic Bandung Conference that we are proposing should enable us to formulate a new world economic charter. We shall attend, not in order to present a list of complaints, but to demand and claim what is ours, or, more precisely, what is due to man, whatever his nationality, his race or his religion. …

Competing for the Last Utopia?: The NIEO, Human Rights, and the World Conference for the International Women's Year, Mexico City, June 1975

Abstract: In the mid-1970s, the United Nations hosted a dramatic attempt to totally transform the world economy, which appeared to be on the cusp of victory at the Sixth Special Session of the General Assembly in April and May 1974. In a moment that represented the highest tide of southern self-confidence, the Group of 77 (G-77), unleavened by the language of compromise, demanded global redistribution as a matter of right. The manifestos of this revolt of sovereigns were the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), adopted in May 1974, and its sister document, the Charter on the Economic Rights and Duties of States (CERDS), passed in December 1974.1 Although both texts held an ideological lineage dating back to the 1950s, the NIEO flowered in a period of disruption and found purchase in a moment when Western intellectual and political currents ran to the abstractly global and planetary.2 It repositioned an older generation of Third World claims within the new vocabulary of the interdependent and pluripolar world system, submerging the older terms of economic sovereignty under the new slogans of justice and solidarity. The NIEO's brief ascendancy unfolded in the same habitat of pretended international moralism that hosted the "breakthrough" of human rights activism.This essay addresses the interaction between the NIEO's claims and the language and philosophy of human rights, with a focus on the year 1975. Coincident almost precisely with the "breakthrough" phase of global human rights mobilization, the NIEO presented a competitor vision of universal justice. As did advocates of the nascent transnational human rights movement, proponents of the NIEO advanced a utopian program, explicitly global in ambition. Yet the NIEO's central object was an augmentation of the southern state, deploying the internationalist language of rights and solidarity to enhance the status not of the citizen but of the sovereign. The NIEO involved an emphatic deployment of terms and categories from the human rights milieu: equality, solidarity, and improved material conditions. These sat under an insistently globalist rhetorical carapace, placing the NIEO program proximate to the conceptual territory of human rights. This pidgin globalism facilitated a level of cooption and confusion of human rights terminology quite unlike the bald instrumentalist quests of antiracism and anticolonialism that had preceded it in the 1960s. Often, NIEO language was human rights language, merely with different chirality: its primary axis aligned to state and peoples. Fractionation of these two lexical isomers required serious introspection among movements that had taken a cluster of terms around development, freedom, equality, solidarity, and justice for granted. Foremost among those engaged in this haphazard process of differentiation was second-wave feminism, which was among the first to encounter the NIEO in full force in 1974 and 1975TheStatist Road to MexicoAfter a meteoric rise through the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the General Assembly, the implications of the totalizing quest for the NIEO became apparent across the second half of 1974, as it consumed first the World Conference on Population (August), and shortly afterward, the World Conference on Food (November).3 Hosted by President Nikolai Ceau§escu, the world's most notorious champion of coercive pronatalism, in a sweltering Bucharest, the Population Conference demonstrated both the UN's endless facility for locational irony and the NIEO's capacity to exsanguinate the meaning and purpose of a thematic summit. Paternalist Western technocrats were stunned as Algeria, the PRC, the Soviet bloc, and a Latin American group shepherded the proceedings away from population questions and toward the more pressing matter of the NIEO. The rising feminist star Germaine Greer and the established face of the second wave, Betty Friedan, attended. Although the two had discovered their mutual dislike while on a joint tour of Iran, conducted on the invitation of Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, twin sister to the shah, both were appalled by their first experience of a UN conference in operation. …

North/South: The United States Responds to the New International Economic Order

Abstract: Launched in 1974, the Group of 77’s appeal for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) challenged the liberal international economic order that the United States had built during the 1940s and still superintended. This article follows the responses of U.S. policymakers in the mid-1970s to the NIEO and its proponents. U.S. officials, it argues, concurred that the NIEO was a challenge to the postwar status quo but disagreed as to how that challenge should be met. Within the Ford administration (1974–77), Secretary of State Henry Kissinger favored prudent appeasement; others preferred to confront the G-77, resulting in a confused and partial policy. While the Carter administration (1977–81) proved more inclined to conciliate the G-77, its efforts, too, encountered significant obstacles, with the result that its response to the NIEO proved no more constructive than the Ford administration’s had been.

Atrocity Photographs, Dignity, and Human Vulnerability

Abstract: . . . the dignity of the victims cannot be ''given by the photographer'' . . . ; it must inhere in their own stoicism or defiance, and it is, in a sense, their gift to us.-John Benthall1Harrowing images of death, injury, and of people in various states of distress, terror, and vulnerability circulated by humanitarian organizations, memorial museums, and exhibits seek to encourage empathy with disempowered victims. Such images, in the form of amateur snapshots, photojournalism, and art photography of atrocities, are now pervasive.2 Critics contend that these images ''constitute political space'' and that they fashion the suffering global humanity with whom Western spectators are supposed to feel solidarity.3 There exists a great deal of commentary on atrocity photography-especially on those images most formally accomplished-because of its centrality to politics, although the relationship between images and politics is vexed and the subject of considerable debate. Much of this discussion seeks to link affective response (by which I mean often unconscious response filtered through the cognitive processes by which feeling may be articulated) and political recognition in a variety of ways: from the instrumental methods by which Western media shape responses to distant others to theoretical discussions about the way that photographs make human rights claims in a Kantian aesthetic tradition that calls upon viewers' faculties of judgment.4The purpose of this essay is not to take sides in these kinds of analyses or to interpret photographs. Rather, I wish to explore the fundamental assumptions that underpin discourses on atrocity photographs, including most centrally the idea that images objectify photographed subjects or traumatize viewers.5 My aim is thus to analyze the mostly unexamined presumptions that construct these discourses, in particular the affective investment in a particular concept of human dignity as bounded, whole, and metaphorically upright. All the discourses about atrocity photography assume that images of violated human beings are ethically problematic in some basic way, and their arguments, including affirmative views of such pictures, proceed from their interpretation of this problem. The bridge from affect to political recognition is fragile and always complicated by the specter of aversion, recoil, and numbness. Discourses on atrocity photography thus pit important if recent concepts of photography's ostensibly transformative if vexed political function-to ''bear witness,'' ''never again''-against an aversion to the display of violated human dignity whose sources are psychic and cultural. It is impossible even to conceive a ''genre'' or ''genres'' of atrocity photography in the post-1945 period without exploring the basic cultural assumptions that construct the terms of discourse about the images.In what follows I will use these critical discourses as a surrogate for the collective body of Western spectators and their perception of the meaning of human dignity, and in the process I will synthesize a wide array of work at its most general level in order to draw out similarities in otherwise radically different arguments about diverse kinds of images. I examine how critics interpret atrocity photos' rhetorical and affective dimensions. My aim, again, is not to reiterate or contribute to the debates I synthesize about what constitutes a dignified image but to examine the conditions underlying such judgments, and in so doing, to address what the debates suggest beyond what they articulate explicitly. I thus wish to demonstrate that debates about atrocity photography are part of a mostly unacknowledged cultural discourse about humanity in which some narratives emerge and others are repressed. That is, they participate in the historical and cultural constitution of what we call ''global humanity'' beyond the role they play in debates about photography's status in aesthetic theory. In closing, I discuss an essay by Judith Butler on photographs of Abu Ghraib to ask how she conceives atrocity images in terms of repressed narratives. …

African Socialism and the Limits of Global Familyhood: Tanzania and the New International Economic Order in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract: In November 1963, Julius Nyerere, president of the newly independent East African country of Tanganyika, delivered a stirring speech to open a conference of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome. He began by commending the rise of an "almost wo rid-wide recognition of the common humanity of man, and a growing sense of human brotherhood," affirming that "the existence of the FAO is indeed one of the expressions of this feeling of involvement in each other's welfare." Yet Nyerere's speech quickly departed from this sanguine language of global fraternity and mutual concern as he turned to the subject of economic development. "Economically there are still two worlds, not one," he declared. Decolonization was giving rise to "an atmosphere of ever rising expectations among the poor of the world," but "the gap between the haves and the have-nots of the world" was "widening on a progressive scale." At the heart of the problem, he insisted, was the nature of the international political and economic order itself, with its philosophical basis in "multilateral free trade theory" and attendant disregard of the pronounced hierarchies ordering the community of supposedly equal nations. To correct the growing trend of developmental divergence and achieve basic economic justice for underdeveloped countries like Tanganyika, Nyerere asserted that isolated commodity agreements and occasional disbursements of aid were insufficient; a "World Economic Development Plan" was essential. "The FAO must either have the power to plan world food and agriculture, both production and marketing, or it will remain what it is now; a charity organization," he concluded incisively.1Nyerere's speech simultaneously highlighted both the importance and irrelevance of international development organizations in their existing form, eschewed technical discussions about agricultural modernization in favor of explicit reckoning with global inequalities, and argued that atomized policy prescriptions for national development could not succeed without countering the forces of uneven development inherent in the ideologies and practices regulating the world economy as a whole. In doing so, it invoked two contrasting (although not mutually exclusive) models for conceptualizing the global community: a humanistic, harmonious vision of transnational familyhood structured by the principle of mutual obligation, on the one hand, and a more confrontational, Marxist-inflected image of a world increasingly divided-along national lines-into the two polarized groups of profiteers and the poor, on the other. These paradigms alternately animated Third World activism on a global scale during the mid-to-late twentieth century, variously translating into calls for increased solidarity or unity and demands for substantive structural reforms.Temporally positioned at a midpoint between what scholars have taken to identifying as the bookends of the Third World movement-the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference of 1955 and the New International Economic Order (NIEO) call of 1973- Nyerere's 1963 lecture serves as a useful point of departure for an examination of the roots of the NIEO, particularly given the broad resonance of his bid for a "World Economic Development Plan" with the G-yys later proposal.2 Returning to this earlier moment helps illuminate the broader dynamics of Third World activism as it transitioned from its Bandung-era incarnation-emphasizing cultural or racial bonds and promoting cooperation (in very general terms) among participating countries-to its NIEO one-joining these same players in the formal institutional setting of the United Nations to stage precise, concrete economic and legal demands on what they referred to as the global north. More specifically, it helps account for how and why specific forms of activism became imaginable, compelling, and impossible at particular stages of this trajectory.Revisiting Nyerere's 1963 address also serves as an important reminder that the NIEO was not "of marginal relevance" to sub-Saharan countries, and neither was sub-Saharan Africa a marginal player in the making of this movement. …

The Search for Justice: NGOs in Britain and Ireland and the New International Economic Order, 1968–82

Abstract: The rapid expansion of the international humanitarian NGO community in the long 1970s brought with it much soul-searching on how NGOs could move beyond charity and towards genuine solidarity with the Third World. Drawing on evidence from non-governmental organizations in Britain and Ireland, this article examines the role played by the NIEO and the pursuit of global economic and political reform in shaping those debates. It argues for the enduring importance of the liberal economic paradigm in shaping Western attitudes to justice, but concludes that we should pay more attention to the role of the Third World and the Christian churches in shaping the worldview of humanitarian NGOs.

Corporations at the United Nations: Echoes of the New International Economic Order?

Abstract: This article traces the history of the UN Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations as a way to index the shifting geopolitical and economic landscape on which the NIEO played out. By the time the Code of Conduct was abandoned in 1992, concerns about the role of multinationals in the development process had been replaced by debates regarding its responsibility for promoting human rights. In 2003, a Sub-Commission of the UN Commission (now Council) on Human Rights proposed what might be regarded as a new code of conduct: the Draft Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights. Comparing the Draft Norms to the NIEO-era Code of Conduct illuminates a dramatic transformation in the development imaginary; The Draft Norms sought to limit corporate power, but within a broader human rights framework centered on the individual rights-bearer, whereas the Code of Conduct, and the larger NIEO project, was geared towards the realization of what the G-77 understood as a collective right to development, vested in the state.

Between North and South: The World Bank and the New International Economic Order

Abstract: The New International Economic Order (NIEO) was among the more notable aspects of the 1970s, a decade that scholars have begun to view as a critical period in contemporary history.1 Although anticolonial leaders, dependency theorists, and others had long advocated reforming the international political economy to spur more rapid development of the global south, the attempt to enumerate and codify these proposals under the auspices of the United Nations was unprecedented. So too was the fact that, for a time, northern governments entertained some of the demands.A unique confluence of events created the conditions for the NIEO. The success of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in increasing world oil prices convinced many developing country leaders that the time was right to demand changes to the international system, at the same time that higher energy costs made economic restructuring a necessity for many oil-importing developing nations. Cracks in the Western alliance, the cooling of East-West tensions that accompanied detente, and a desire to curry favor with postcolonial states also created space for northern governments to engage in discussions over global economic reform.Ultimately, divisions within the southern bloc and the opposition of the U.S. government doomed the NIEO. The outbreak of the international debt crisis in the early 1980s presented an opportunity for northern governments to ignore the demands of developing countries and begin pushing on many of these nations a set of free market reforms focused on trade liberalization, debt service, and fiscal austerity. Less than ten years after the UN General Assembly passed the Declaration for the Establishment of a New International Economic Order in 1974, the world economy was being restructured in radically different ways.2In retrospect, the NIEO stands as a high water mark in developing countries' efforts to influence the commanding heights of the world economy. The NIEO demands were wide ranging and dealt with questions that continue to animate debates over globalization, such as the role of the state in promoting growth, the regulation of multinational corporations, and sovereign debt relief. Underlying it all was a view that politics and economics were deeply intertwined. To NIEO adherents, market forces had replaced colonialism in restraining the development of the global south. In order to rectify this state of affairs, developing countries argued that they needed greater control over the institutions and processes structuring the world economy. Aware that these ideas had drawn the ire of northern governments in the past, the NIEO Declaration, as well as the Charter of Economic Duties and Rights of States that the General Assembly passed a few months later, sought to ensure that powerful countries respected the sovereign right of nations to promote development in their chosen way.3 Without greater economic autonomy, the argument ran, political independence meant little.Despite its importance, our understanding of the NIEO remains limited. Studies of the NIEO's intellectual lineage, the politics of the negotiations, and relations within and between the northern and southern blocs have given us better sense of the reasons that the NIEO played out the way it did.4 Yet scholars have not examined fully the NIEO's origins, evolution, and consequences.5 As a result, a critical chapter in recent international history remains unwritten.This essay furthers our understanding of the NIEO by approaching it from a previously ignored perspective: that of the World Bank. The response of the Bank, a multilateral organization established in 1944 to promote postwar reconstruction and economic development, to the NIEO presents something of a paradox. On one hand, the Bank should have been a key player in the debates over global economic reform. The Bank was the world's preeminent development institution, and many NIEO issues, particularly with respect to development assistance and sovereign debt, intersected with its work. …

From Boumedienomics to Reaganomics: Algeria, OPEC, and the International Struggle for Economic Equality

Abstract: In the first satellite pictures taken from the Apollo 17 in 1972, Earth was shown as a weightless sphere covered in clouds and unified by the blue oceans. The picture came with an important message, appearing as it did in the same year as the Club of Rome Limits of Growth report: humanity had common interests and these interests lay in the need to preserve the limited natural resources of the planet from the danger of overexploitation and overpopulation. An even more important image of the Earth was produced only some months after the Apollo 17 pictures. In May 1973 the German historian Arno Peters presented a new world map that was supposed to revolutionize the, up to then, widely used Mercator projection. Peters accused Mercator's 1569 projection of being too "Eurocentric" and remarked that it distorted the geometry of the world in favor of the European colonial masters of the time. He argued that his own projection, which gave prominence to the global south, and in particular to Africa and Latin America, was much fairer to the Third World. In his "equal area" projection Peters effectively redistributed land from the global north to the global south and in so doing embodied much of the spirit of the age: the struggle for equality and redistribution in favor of the poor.1Henry Kissinger had fantasized that 1973 would be remembered as the "Year of Europe" and of a renewed Atlantic partnership. It ended up being the "Year of the Global South" and of the cooperation between oil producers and the rest of the developing countries. The main reason that 1973 turned out to be quite different from what Kissinger had dreamed-closer in fact to Kissinger's nightmare-was the quadrupling of the price of crude oil in December 1973. This pivotal episode, widely known and vulgarized in the industrialized countries as the "oil shock," is better known in oil-producing countries as the "oil revolution."The unilaterally imposed oil price revolution was seen by the developing countries of the south as the economic equivalent of the Vietnamese military success against the apparently invincible U.S. army. It was a victory of the poor against the superior technological and economic power of industrialized countries. Even though non-oilproducing developing countries should have been extremely concerned for their worsening trade balance, the solidarity with oil-producing countries was next to unanimous in the aftermath of 1973. Mahbub ul Haq, the Pakistani economist and Word Bank director, a key voice for the south in international economic institutions, recallsthe rather gloomy, despairing days of late 1972 and early 1973 when the concerns of the Third World were being summarily brushed aside from the crowded agenda of the powerful and the rich nations. We were not aware at that stage how quickly the environment would change by 1974, as a result of the OPEC action.2Well before 1973, certainly since the creation of the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964, developing countries had come together to voice their concern for the structural inequality between poor and rich countries and against the increasingly harmful terms of trade against the products of the global south. But up to 1973, even though the "struggle against imperialism" slogan had achieved a wide audience, especially through the actions of the youth movements and NGOs, the Third World seemed stuck because of its lack of negotiating power. After 1973 a new age of international cooperation and fair redistribution of global wealth seemed imminent.If 1973 was to be the dawn of the age of equality between north and south, and oil a key weapon in the struggle for worldwide redistribution of resources, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a raw materials organization created in i960, found itself-mostly unwillingly-at the very center of the struggle. Within OPEC, Algeria and its ruling Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) elite was the relentless motor of international cooperation to change the terms of trade in favor of the south. …

Albert Hirschman and the Social Sciences: A Memorial Roundtable

Abstract: Albert O. Hirschman (1915–2012) is recognized as one of the most well-rounded and interdisciplinary social scientists of the postwar era. After fleeing Germany as a young opponent of the Nazi regime, he moved across countries, languages, and disciplinary boundaries. He was a pioneer of development economics and other social sciences, to which he contributed with exemplary analyses of the processes and mechanisms of political, economic, and social change. Following Hirschman’s own interdisciplinary approach, Nadia Urbinati, Ira Katznelson, Victoria De Grazia, Jeremy Adelman, and Michele Alacevich will explore the milestones of his incredibly rich intellectual journey.

Mossadegh Madness: Oil and Sovereignty in the Anticolonial Community

Abstract: The emerging literature on the New International Economic Order (NIEO) has the spare conventions of a new topic in contemporary history. The narrative typically begins by identifying its origins as a historical intermingling of national and international, political and economic, and social and cultural factors. A sketch beginning at some point in the twentieth century follows, delving into some combination of these elements, their tensions sometimes fecund but, most likely, ultimately harmful. Then the story flows on in a more or less chronological fashion, finally assessing the success or, more likely, the failure to achieve its goals.This essay follows that plan with an emphasis on two themes. The first is the rendezvous of elites from the oil-producing nations with anticolonial thought. The second, more broadly, is the transnational alliance formed between anticolonial elites that permitted their ideas a prominent place in the political world of decolonization. The aim here is less to narrate that history through an oily lens than to illuminate these linkages. But the fact that the 1973-74 energy crisis was the tripwire for the NIEO is undoubtedly important. Thus, this essay is also a study in the creation of a political movement and some of the conditions that made for its international influence among a particular group of actors in the earliest days of the energy crisis.The rising price of oil worried U.S. officials in the early 1970s, but in public they often downplayed the quickened vigor of the oil-producing nations. "Oil without a market, as Mr. Mossadegh learned many, many years ago, does not do a country much good," Richard Nixon told reporters in September 1973. Invoking the 1951 Iranian nationalization and the 1953 Iranian coup was a thinly veiled threat. If the leaders of the Organization for the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) continued to increase prices, Nixon said, "the inevitable result is that they will lose their markets."1 Reality gave the lie to such affirmations and U.S. officials changed their tone. Between October 1973 and February 1974, the oil producers shook what one State Department official had called "Mossadegh Madness," raising prices fourfold.2 Echoing earlier biases leveled against Mossadegh, American policymakers criticized the group as "theological," "irrational," and "demagogic," disapprovingly comparing OPEC behavior to their own more sober and responsible assessment of the international economy.3OPEC's recklessness distorted the proper global economic structure, according to U.S. treasury secretary William Simon. "Oil is now over-priced for one reason and one reason only," he told business executives. "A small group of countries have joined together to manipulate the price."4 Within that story, the OPEC members were bereft of any political culture except perhaps for a commitment to improve the bottom line.In fact, the energy crisis was awash in ideas, some of which had been central to oil elites and other anticolonial diplomats for a generation. One important school of thought held that entrenched imperialism remained the great problem of the international economy and that international law had the mission to uproot it. The oil elites were part of that alliance-based movement of subaltern internationalism. That point warranted explanation for the Algerian ambassador in New York. When asked why his president, Houari Boumediene, had called for a Special Session of the UN General Assembly in 1974, he answered that "oil prices and the energy crisis are but one element of a much wider problem-to bring about an equitable economic relationship between the wealthy nations and the poorer ones."5 The most arresting manifestation of this critique was a preoccupation with "permanent sovereignty over natural resources," or the inherent right of nations to invalidate contracts deemed unjust.6 In declaring that right as part of the New Order, the delegates of the Sixth Special Session built on a quarter-century of labor in the United Nations, regional economic commissions, and the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as work among oil elites. …

From Commoditizing to Commodifying Human Rights: Research on Forced Labor in Dominican Sugar Production

Abstract: In this essay, "commoditization" and "commodification" refer to two distinguishable aspects of the relationship between human rights knowledge and the commodity form. Commoditization happens when human rights is marketed like a commodity, whether by packaging information in standardized and easily consumed numbers, icons, and graphics or "branding" human rights-monitoring organizations and their campaigns. Commodification happens when human rights information actually becomes a commodity, such as when rights investigations are done under contract, at times through international information supply chains, while possibly also subject to intellectual property restrictions. While commoditization is an issue, my primary focus is on the commodification of human rights investigation and what that implies for the information's accuracy and its conduciveness to public debate.Commoditizing human rights, through celebrity endorsements, building brandname value for organizations, and other techniques closer to marketing than to documentation is now a familiar means of promoting public support for the defense of human rights. The wider trend, toward the mass marketing of social justice, human rights, and humanitarian appeals, prompts critical concerns. Can human rights' "moral and politically contested issues ... be meaningfully expressed in commercial culture using commercial language"?1 Can Internet-mediated "slacktivism" ("the desire people have to do something good without getting out of their chair") and other forms of low-intensity appeal do more than create "a political culture of narcissism . . . that renders the emotions of the self the measure of our understanding of the world at large"?2Beyond mass marketing, questions have also been asked about the institutional tensions generated by the professionalization and standardization of humanitarian relief and human rights investigation. Particularly relevant is the trend toward governance of these interventions through bureaucratically managed "economies of compassion," which Erica Caple James defines as "spheres of economic transfers that articulate with . . . commodity economies in the form of public and private charitable gifts and grants with humanitarian goals."3 James and others investigate what happens as practices of compassion, conventionally governed through ethics of religious and secular service, fall under market, bureaucratic, legal, and technical logics.4Novel recombinations are also at work in the story I tell, which begins with "selling" human rights in a metaphorical rather than a literal sense (through the use of representational techniques borrowed from advertising and news) and culminates in the commodification of information and the outsourcing and even "offshoring" of investigation ("outsourcing" referring to the contracting out of government services within the United States, and "offshoring" to the contracting of work abroad).5 One step in this story involves the reduction and standardization of information of variable texture and uneven quality into uniform and easily transferred and consumed numbers, icons, and mappings. The next step is the outsourcing of follow-up research through an open-bid process to an independent not-for-profit, non-governmental organization (NGO), followed by the offshoring of informationgathering to a social justice advocacy and research organization based in the global south.A transition, from commodity-like to commodity-proper, is just the latest chapter in a longer story, in which thresholds between the unseen and the visible, the textual and the visual, publicity and evidence, and government and NGO worlds are repeatedly crossed and recrossed. In that larger story, an allegation that had first surfaced through monitor group reports more than thirty years ago springs out of dormancy via two celebrated video documentary films. Then it shifts from that medium to another to take the shape of numerical rankings and infographics via U. …

The Banality of Goodness: Humanitarianism between the Ethics of Showing and the Ethics of Seeing

Abstract: The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of PostHumanitarianism Lilie Chouliaraki Cambridge: Polity, 2013. ix ^ 238 pp.The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence Susie Linfield Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. xiii ^ 321 pp.Contemporary forms of humanitarianism began to emerge in Europe and the Americas in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, originating from a mixture of religious and Enlightenment ideas.1 In a context marked by the rapid rise of industrialization, urbanization, and market expansion, and the development of modern nation-states, various intellectuals, politicians, jurists, and members of the clergy adopted the language of humanitarianism to advocate social and political reforms and to push for public intervention to alleviate suffering and restore society's moral basis.2 At the time, charity for the poor, regulations regarding child labor, the end of the slave trade, and mass education were the main ideas championed by humanitarian activists.Today, in the twenty-first century, in the words of Michael Barnett and Thomas Weiss, ''the terrain on which humanitarians walk is nourished by the forces of destruction, production, and salvation.''3 What the authors call the ''forces of destruction'' include the media imagery that has increased public awareness, which, in turn, has created a demand that something be done in the face of suffering that shocks the conscience. In response to them, the last several decades have seen the configuration of the ''forces of salvation,'' which concern moral discourses, religious beliefs, ethical commitments, and international norms that generate an obligation to help distant strangers. Finally, the ''forces of production'' include capitalism and the global economy, neoliberal ideology with respect to the state's role in society, and the funding environment.4The link between these modern forces and the emergence of humanitarian consciousness is what distinguishes the two books under review here. Focusing on the communication techniques used to represent distant suffering and especially to generate solidarity between the spectator and the suffering subject-what we may call with Richard Wilson and Richard Brown ''the mobilization of empathy''-Lilie Chouliaraki's The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism and Susie Linfield's The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence represent significant advances in our understanding of contemporary humanitarianism, and they provide order to a dizzying array of case studies and several theoretical approaches.5Mediated Solidarity between Past and PresentWith different methodologies, both books begin by recognizing the origin of this secular humanitarian narrative, which continues religious-salvational narratives of rescue, in the literature and liberal sentimental education that cultivated the noblesse oblige of the powerful (rights holders) toward the powerless (those who cannot enact their human rights on their own). Moving beyond this starting point, the two books explore the intimate connection between international human rights consciousness and visual images that has manifested itself since the early days of humanitarian movements.6Since Henri Dunant's call for the establishment of a permanent system of caring for wounded soldiers after witnessing the Battle of Solferino in 1859, images have played a key role in making international public opinion sympathetic to the misfortunes of fellow human beings. Pictures of the Holocaust and the concentration camps, images of the Nigerian-Biafran War, and the stories of a generation of children starving to death picked up by newspapers all over the world, as well as the media stories about famine in Ethiopia and other parts of the Sahel region of Africa, have been central in making an audience empathize with the fate of complete strangers. In 1969, as Philip Gourevitch argues, stick-limbed, balloon-bellied, and ancient-eyed, the tiny, falling bodies of Biafra had become as heavy a presence on evening news broadcasts as battlefield dispatches from Vietnam. …

Bookend to Bandung: The New International Economic Order and the Antinomies of the Bandung Era

Abstract: The opportunity to rethink the historical record of the 1970s from the perspective of the developmentalist aspirations of the global south is welcome. A decade often cast as a historical exception and interruption-wedged between the development orthodoxy of the 1960s and the neoliberal turn of the 1980s-the 1970s now increasingly appear to mark the dawning of a sustained crisis of accumulation in the capitalist world system. Undoubtedly, the 1970s witnessed utopian aspirations for the developing world, as evidenced by the "Third Worldist" tenor of the 1974 New International Economic Order (NIEO henceforth) with its calls for aggressive redistributionist policies and increased national autonomy. It can be tempting to read such aspirations as a novel political experiment in international power-ffom-below, undercut, lamentably, by the turn to neoliberalism at the end of the decade. However, despite the important currents of ambition and innovation within NIEO (rightly elaborated in many of the other contributions to this issue), I argue that the NIEO is better understood as the final expression of a period that might be called "the Bandung era."1 Such a periodization, I contend, enables us to consider the dynamic relationship between the state and capital in the era of decolonization and during a period of considerable capitalist expansion.The 1974 UN Resolution declaring the establishment of a New International Economic Order envisioned a rebalancing of global power relations and a reconstitution of the institutional role of the United Nations. Flushed with enthusiasm from the wave of decolonizing independence movements throughout Asia and Africa, the state managers from across the so-called Third World understandably turned to the UN as a site where a new internationalism might emerge. I will argue below that a contemporary critical reexamination of the NIEO and the 1970s can offer, among other things, a complicated example for theorizing the relation between capital and the state. For now, however, let me simply say that although an economic order of the sort envisioned by the NIEO would have certainly been new, the proposal outlined in the resolution was not; both the framework and the specific demands itemized in the NIEO Declaration passed by the UN General Assembly should be understood as an evolution and more precise articulation of a Third Worldist program that can be traced back to the 1955 Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, if not earlier.2The 1974 UN resolution establishing the NIEO benefited from nearly twenty years of historical hindsight following the Bandung gathering. This two-decade period witnessed an extraordinary (and, in the mid-1970s, still ongoing) wave of political decolonization giving rise to a heterogeneous array of new nation-state formations across the Third World. By way of illustration, the anticolonial struggles in Vietnam-from the enthusiasm about Dien Bien Phu in 1954, to the potent but rather darker U.S. evacuation from Saigon in 1975-offer a parallel chronology to the one I trace below, suggestive both of underlying continuities within the period and the sense that, by the mid-1970s, the utopian aspirations of decolonization had begun to founder against a growing disillusionment within and about the postcolonial world. Perhaps more extraordinary, this same era witnessed an unprecedented period of global economic expansion under the broad leadership of the United States. The years immediately preceding the NIEO, however, were marked by an unsettling series of economic crises symptomatically visible as oil shocks, the dissolution of the Bretton Woods currency regime, rising national inflation and unemployment rates, and more. Buoyed by their awareness of both boom and crisis, the drafters of the NIEO resolution could offer a relatively more precise articulation of both underlying principles and concrete political/economic measures that might lead toward an equitable redistribution of wealth and power than could their counterparts at Bandung. …

Neither Right nor Left: Interwar Internationalism between Justice and Order

Abstract: This essay examines three recent monographs on the history of interwar humanitarianism and legal internationalism. Together, these three works consider how the shock of World War I accelerated prewar European trends in the fields of humanitarianism, international criminal law, and the institutionalization of international society. They indirectly point toward the surprising politics of interwar humanitarianism and legal internationalism, suggesting the exceptionality of the interwar era in the history of internationalism. The essay argues that more careful investigation of the particular motivations and ideologies of the internationalist actors and their projects would yield greater insight into the recasting of international order after the First World War and the legacies of the period for the moral history of the twentieth century.

Conscience in the Datasphere

Abstract: Much of the anxiety concerning “privacy” in contemporary conditions of data immersion—which I here characterize as “life in the datasphere” —may be better understood by reference to the neglected notion of conscience. This article undertakes an historical inquiry into this rich concept to reframe the debate on privacy, law and technology. To simplify, “conscience” has historically articulated an impulse either to hide from an omniscient moral authority (“bad conscience”) or to act righteously according to informed reason (“good conscience”). Originating as a powerful premodern governing principle combining personal with public morality—notably in the medieval notion of synderesis—the personal and political content of conscience were each effectively critiqued by, respectively (in the examples I investigate here), Freud and Hobbes. The concept itself became ultimately marginal to public life. In this article I suggest that conscience in both guises returns forcefully under conditions of data ubiquity, pointing to broader shift in political settlements.

When We Talk about Human Rights

Abstract: This essay explores the ways scholars of human rights, from various disciplines, contend with—or overlook—problems of consistency and precision in their subjects’ invocations of rights. Through its review of Lora Wildenthal’s The Language of Human Rights in West Germany and William Armaline et al.’s Human Rights in Our Own Backyard , the essay considers the strengths of two related analytical approaches: treating human rights as a political language; and treating human rights as an ideology rooted in a local history of ideas that shapes the way those rights operate in a particular society.

An Interview with Gregory Mann

Abstract: For Humanity , Janet Roitman, and Ken Harrow interviewed Gregory Mann on some of the major themes of Mann’s book From Empire to NGOs in the West African Sahel: the Road to Nongovernmentality . Key points of debate include NGO activity and foreign Human Rights engagement in West Africa, the meaning of “government” in the region, the nature of African sovereignty in the neoliberal era, and the capacity of the discipline of history to contribute to an understanding of contemporary Africa.

What the Holy See Saw—and Didn't See

Abstract: “What the Holy See Saw – and Didn’t See” reflects on and historically contextualizes selected images from the virtual exhibition mounted by the nascent Palestinian Museum on the occasion of Pope Francis’s 2014 visit to the Holy Land with particular reference to photography in Palestine and current debates over Palestinian cultural politics.

From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: An Introduction

Abstract: Gregory Mann's new book, From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Nongovernmentality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), is excerpted here, as a prelude to an interview with the author.*Frantz Fanon was growing angry. It was 1960, and he was deep in Mali, a vast country, ''fervent and brutal,'' a place where there was ''no need of great speeches.'' The country had just gained independence from France weeks before, and its new president, Modibo Keita, ''ever militant,'' had assured him of his support. Everything was set. Fanon and his colleagues, Algerian revolutionaries seeking to open a southern front for the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), had already avoided prying French eyes in Bamako and dodged what they took to be a kidnapping attempt in Monrovia. They were headed east and north, to Gao, Aguelhoc, Tessalit. So how to account for the road block, the intransigence?At Mopti, a snag. On the way out of town: a gendarmes' roadblock, and the sentries demand our passports. Difficult discussion because, in spite of the document from the Minister of the Interior [Madeira Keita], the gendarmes want to know our identities. Finally the commanding officer arrives, and I'm obliged to introduce myself. But it seems we're faced with a man who's after intelligence. He wants to know the nature of our mission and the roles of my companions.1In the end, Fanon and his comrades get out of it. ''Promising absolute secrecy,'' the officer lets the militants go, but that's not the end of their troubles. ''The road from Mopti to Douentza is a joke,'' Fanon tells us.2 Decades later, when I traveled it on a small but sturdy motorcycle, that joke wasn't funny anymore. But along that same road, some forms of political power were visible to the naked eye, just as in Fanon's roadblock experience. What struck me then, and stays with me still, was the immobility of the state, represented by the somnolent gendarmes manning scattered checkpoints, and the humming power of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), whose white Toyota Land Cruisers shot like arrows the length of the country. Neither Fanon nor the two Keitas could have imagined such a future, but they'd seen something like it in the past.3 From the saddle of the motorbike, the easy conclusion was that the state was weak, the NGOs strong. That was wrong.In 1960, people living in the West African Sahel became citizens of newly independent states. At the same time, many of those living along that long, thin band of arable land limning the Sahara found themselves foreigners in states to which they had long ties. In less than a generation, Sahelians would become the subjects of human rights campaigns and humanitarian interventions. From Empires to NGOs looks beyond the familiar political formations that came into being at the end of colonial rule-new nation-states and ex-empires-to consider newly transnational communities of solidarity and aid, social science and activism. In the two decades immediately after independence, precisely when its states were strongest and most ambitious, the postcolonial West African Sahel became a fertile terrain for the production of new forms of governmental rationality realized through NGOs. I term this new phenomeon ''nongovernmentality,'' and argue that while its roots may lie partly in Europe and North America, it flowered, paradoxically, in the Sahel.4 In this book, my question is not simply how African states exercised their new sovereignties, but how and why NGOs began to assume functions of it in a period when it was so highly valued.5From Empires to NGOs attempts to break out of the colonial and postcolonial frame in which much of contemporary African history is situated. It does so by encompassing the decades of postwar economic growth punctuated by imperial reform (1946 - 60), African independence (after 1960) and coups d'etat (notably in Mali in 1968 and in Niger in 1974).6 No less significantly, it does so by looking east-west, along some of the many vectors tying the Sahel together as a coherent space, in addition to north-south, within the frame of the former European empires. …