International Conference “The Business of Worldmaking: New Perspectives on Liminal Actors in Postcolonial Development Cooperation.”

On 19-20 September 2024, the Research Platform for the Study of Transformations and Eastern Europe, University of Vienna, jointly organised an international conference with the Science and Research Centre Koper, held in Koper, Slovenia. Seeking to move beyond a focus on former colonial Metropoles and Cold War superpowers, and zooming in on peripheral modernization projects, … Read more

Roundtable Participation: ‘Visions and Practices of Democracy’ at the University of Graz

On May 15, 2024, Goran Musić and Immanuel Harisch participated in a roundtable “Visions and Practices of Democracy” organized by Institute of Sociology (Ana Kladnik) & South East European History and Anthropology (Hanna Stein) at the University of Graz. The roundtable was part of the preparation of an edited volume on alternative forms of democratic … Read more

Book Launch Event: Jodie Yuzhou Sun, “Brotherly Strangers: Kenya’s & Zambia’s Relations with China 1949-2019”

On January 31st, 2024, we had the privilege of promoting Jodie Yuzhou Sun’s book “Brotherly Strangers: Kenya’s & Zambia’s Relations with China 1949-2019” at the University of Vienna. The event was organized by the Research Group New Cold War Studies at the University of Vienna and sponsored by the Research Center for the History of … Read more

International Conference CfP: The Business of Worldmaking: New Perspectives on Liminal Actors in Postcolonial Development Cooperation

Koper, Slovenia, 19-20 September 2024

Governments in Africa, Asia and South America, most of which achieved political independence in the decades following World War Two, forged a whole set of transnational developmental entanglements, with the aim of breaking with the unidirectionality of development thinking and practice that underpinned (neo)colonial dependencies and capital-led globalization. In the context of contending global visions of modernity, ‘lagging behind’ could be turned into an advantage, with newly independent countries evaluating and employing resources from various partners. In recent years, scholars have opened exciting new vistas for theorizing such alternative spaces of globalization, by highlighting cooperation in the frames of communist support for decolonization, socialist internationalism, and horizontal links between postcolonial states. Popularized by authors such as Łukasz Stanek and Adom Getachew, the concept of worldmaking has proven particularly fruitful to encompass the wealth of simultaneous and often competing practices of transnational collaboration in the peripheries during the Cold War.

Seeking to move beyond a focus on former colonial Metropoles and Cold War superpowers, and zooming in on peripheral modernization projects, this conference intends to investigate the ‘in-between’ instances of economic cooperation in the self-professed developing countries in Africa, Asia, and South America. The conference will primarily focus on those dynamic players in the postcolonial world which circumvented the habitual East-West and North-South cleavages and presented themselves as: 1) neutral (e.g. Austria, Sweden, Ireland), 2) non-aligned (e.g. Yugoslavia, India, Egypt), 3) pursuing more independent socialist course (e.g. Romania, Cuba, China), 4) allegedly not sharing the colonial past with other Western European nations (e.g. West Germany, Italy), or 5) successfully ‘catching up’ with the most developed nations (e.g. Japan, Israel, South Korea). While not excluding examples of Cold War superpowers and former colonial metropoles’ inserting themselves into this newly emerging multidirectional development consensus the conference will focus on the above described, liminal examples of bilateral collaboration and particularly welcomes contributions emphasizing tri- and multilateral efforts between ‘East’, ‘South’ and ‘West’.

We further aim to advance the state of the art in the field by inspecting how the visions of worldmaking were applied to the concrete experiences on the ground. The bulk of research looking at economic worldmaking in the Global South thus far focused on instances of collaborations in architecture and civil engineering, such as housing stock, dams, steelworks, etc. Although illuminating expert mobility and transfer of know-how, the joint work on such turnkey projects was usually of relatively short duration while their market position of natural monopolies often implied predictable economic and social impact. Moving beyond a focus on large-scale infrastructure projects, the conference encourages papers stemming from new empirically informed research on more sustained, uncertain and consumer-oriented transnational cooperation in manufacturing, agriculture, mining, transport, etc. We want to illustrate unconventional attempts of converging national economies through long-term technological cooperation operationalised in the form of joint-ventures with (para)statal companies, shared production, or joint export schemes, independently from the dominant multinational companies.

The conference seeks to bring together scholars of business, development, social and economic history tackling topics such as:

  • The role of international organizations (e.g. UNCTAD) in sustaining the business of peripheral worldmaking with credit, political networking, knowledge production, etc.
  • Forms of ownership (state, private, cooperatives) of the newfound companies in the Global South and their models of investment, profit-sharing and decision-making.
  • Challenging the conventional corporate management and business cultures through emphasis on workers’ training, workers participation, political education, changing gender roles in the workplace, etc.
  • Reconciling economic self-reliance with integration, trade balances and debt in the world market, as well as addressing the persisting structural inequalities in exchange.
  • The (multidirectional) transfer of knowledge as well as the (interconnected) mobility of people, goods, and ideas along lesser-known paths.
  • The agency and interaction of different actors involved in these projects: experts/workers and their family members, state representatives, journalists, interpreters, scholars, etc.
  • Reflections on methodology, approaches, and sources (e. g. party and company archives, etc.) when researching these liminal contacts.

The conference is jointly organized by the University of Vienna – Research Platform for the Study of Transformations and Eastern Europe and Science and Research Centre Koper within the framework of their respective research projects ‘A Socialist Workplace in Postcolonial Africa: A Connected History of The Yugoslav Workforce in Zambia’ (FWF, P34980) and ‘Being European and Decolonial: Utopian Realism of The Yugoslav Nonaligned Internationalism’ (ARIS, J6-50187).

The conference will be held in the Northern Adriatic town of Koper, in the recently renovated Gothic palace ‘Tiepolo-Gravisi,’ premises of the Science and Research Centre Koper’s Centre of Humanities. Koper is an apt location for discussions of worldmaking in the postcolonial era. Situated just across the border of Trieste, Italy, it remained in the shadow of the most important seaport of the Habsburg Empire for almost the entire modern era. Yet, in the aftermath of World War Two, Koper with its new port became one of the most important commerce hubs that connected non-aligned Yugoslavia with the world. Today, this university town is also well connected with its hinterland and within two hours’ drive, it is easily reachable from the international airports in Venice, Trieste, and Ljubljana.

Given the topic of the conference, applications are particularly encouraged from scholars based in the Global South in both in-person and hybrid forms. Limited funding is available to offset the costs of travel for those without adequate institutional support. Accommodation in Koper will be provided by the organizers.

We invite scholars to send abstracts (250-500 words) and a short biographical statement to businessofworldmaking@gmail.com by 29 April 2024. Selected presenters will be informed by 29 May 2024. The working language of the conference is English.

Conference Programme Committee: Goran Musić (University of Vienna), Jure Ramšak (Science and Research Centre Koper), Immanuel Harisch (University of Vienna), Anna Calori (University of Glasgow) and Rory Archer (University of Vienna).

Project panels at the 2023 ASEEES annual convention (Philadelphia, 30 November-3 December 2023)

For the 2023 annual convention of ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies), in Philadelphia, Jelena Đureinović and Goran Musić (University of Vienna), and the project team collaborated with a number of other researchers to form a series of four well-attended panels on the theme of Yugoslav Non-Aligned Encounters in the Global South. … Read more

Dr. Immanuel Harisch receives the 2023 Walter Markov Prize

Yuworkzambia Team Member Immanuel Harisch receives the 2023 Walter Markov Prize of the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH) for his outstanding dissertation entitled Great Hopes, False Promises. African Trade Unions in the World of Organized Labor. Institutions, Networks, and Mobilities during the Cold War 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on an extensive corpus of sources from trade union and party archives … Read more

YuWorkZambia at the ECAS Cologne and the University of Potsdam

Goran Musić and Immanuel Harisch presented the early findings from the research project at this year’s European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) taking place in Cologne between the 31 May and 3 June 2023. The event gathered 2000 participants from 80 countries under the theme “African Futures” presenting a great opportunity for meeting other colleagues … Read more

Yu-Zam Team presents research at the University of Zambia, Lusaka

On 4 May 2023 our research team had the privilege to present the project in front of Zambian colleagues at the Seminar Series of the University of Zambia’s Department of Historical and Archaeological Studies, Lusaka. Immanuel Harisch, Joy Phiri and Teckson Njovu spoke about the general aims and the current progress of the research for … Read more

Workshop: Life-Work-Infrastructure Transformations in (Post)Colonial Southern Africa

March 17th, 2023, 14‒19:30 hDepartment of African StudiesSeminarraum 2Hof 5.1Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Wien Organizers:FWF Project: A Socialist Workplace in Postcolonial Africa: A Connected History of the YugoslavWorkforce in Zambia (Research platform “Transformations and Eastern Europe”)Research Team: Goran Musić, Immanuel Harisch, Rory Archer and Anna Calori (for further details, contact: goran.music@univie.ac.at) Program: 14:00 ‒15:30 Approaching Yugoslav … Read more

Mining in Utopia? White Mineworkers on Zambia’s Copperbelt

Lecture by Duncan Money Monday, 20 March 2023, 6 PMDepartment of African StudiesSeminarraum 1Hof 5.1.Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Wien “Paradise for the proletariat” was the awe-struck assessment of one visitor to the mines in Central Africa in the 1950s. Miners drove Jaguar cars, sailed yachts, swam in Olympic-sized swimming pools, played polo and some even owned … Read more

Participation at the ASEEES Convention (Chicago, 10-13 November 2022)

Goran Musić and Anna Calori participated at the recent Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Convention, held between 10-13 November 2022 in Chicago. Together with Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu (University of Vienna) and David Tompkins (Carleton College) they presented their current research on a panel entitled “Fragile Connections? (New) Institutional Variations in Global … Read more

Participation at Microsocialism: Yugoslav Comparisons (Pula, 27-28 October 2022)

Goran Musić and Rory Archer participated at a project conference on the topic “Microsocialism: Yugoslav Comparisons” at the Centre for Cultural and Historical Research of Socialism, University of Pula, Croatia on 27-28 October 2022. Goran presented ongoing research about Yugoslav selfmanaging socialism in worker communities in Zambia (with a presentation delivered in Serbo-Croatian (Samoupravljanje u … Read more

30 Month Postdoc Researcher in Social History of Southern Africa

ASA - African Studies Association

The research project ‘A Socialist Workplace in Postcolonial Africa: A Connected History of the Yugoslav Workforce in Zambia’ aims to break new ground in labour history, development history, and critical race studies by connecting two domains that social history still separates, postcolonial Africa and state socialist Europe. As a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, … Read more