220060 The practice of international development cooperation in 20th-century Latin America (S) (WiSe 2021/2022)

During the last decade, scholars have revisited the history of international development cooperation: Instead of writing the history of development discourses or the histories of supposed donor-institutions, they turn to the actual practice of development cooperation looking at how people on the spot experienced and shaped it. This perspective enables us to analyze the history of development cooperation not only as a unilateral transfer of money, concepts, and experts from the Global North to the Global South, where actors from the "developing" countries count mainly as passive recipients. On the contrary, the current research frames development cooperation as a multifaceted process which is not ultimately shaped by local, regional, and international actors and their practices and ideas in a certain historical and spatial context.

Applying a multi-perspective view on the historical practice of development cooperation in Latin America throughout the 20th century, this seminar aims to underline the role of the agency of different local and regional actors and their ideas and practices in international development cooperation. Students are welcome to elaborate their presentations and term papers throughout the seminar, e.g. on the history of particular development projects, regional and local groups of actors or regional perspectives on international cooperation.

This allows us to discuss the length to which we can interpret international development cooperation as a historical means of economic and epistemological hegemony of the Global North over the Global South or, rather, as an entangled practice between multi-level actors from the Global North and South with multifaceted and often unintended consequences.

Bibliography

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Morgan Hodge, Joseph (2016): Writing the History of Development. Part 2: Longer, Deeper, Wider. In: Humanity: an international journal of human rights, humanitarianism and development 7 (1): 125–174.

Acker, Antoine (2017): Volkswagen in the Amazon. A Tragedy of Global Development in Modern Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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