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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the archives of Third World internationalist organizations and movements between the 1960s-1980s to recover an Afro-Asian social science that advanced an anti-imperialist vision of development in an era of deepening contradictions between decolonization and neocolonialism.

Paper long abstract:

Following the meeting of its Executive Committee in 1963, the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) published a General Declaration in which it resolved to draw the attention of the people of Africa and Asia to emerging “forces of imperialist domination in the political and economic domains,” so as to facilitate a collective consolidation of the gains won from political independence in the service of a comprehensive sovereignty. In the decades that followed, AAPSO and other Third World internationalist movements published a prolific corpus of political, economic, and cultural analysis that constitute what I suggest we understand as an anti-imperialist, Afro-Asian social science. In this body of work, the idea of “development” was recovered as a tool for constructing sovereignty for newly independent Third World states. This theory of development threaded the ideas of national liberation and international solidarity, underscoring that cooperation both within the Third World and globally would underpin a truly postcolonial international political economy.

Examining a range of publications from organizations and popular political currents that constituted a many-hued project of Third World internationalism, and focusing on a journal published by AAPSO in the 1970s and 1980s called “Development and Socio-Economic Progress,” this paper re-narrates the production of “development theory” by examining anticolonial ambitions for forms of sovereign development resistant to neocolonialism. I develop the concept of an insurgent Afro-Asian social science: one that clearly delineated the imperialist underpinnings of the modernization paradigm, empirically examined the historical cost of underdevelopment, and simultaneously outlined an anti-imperialist developmental path.