The Yearbook for the History of Global Development (YHGD) is inviting submissions for a volume dedicated to the history of international organizations and their role in the post-socialist world.
The YHGD is a serial publication centrally dedicated to the study of past developmental theories, policies and practices, including those with a direct bearing on present-day challenges. Thereby, it serves as an arena for fresh research on the history of development, broadly understood, providing a forum for a variety of historical perspectives on and understandings of development. Relevant perspectives include, for instance, development as a long-term process of different countries that determined their trajectories in world history; as a field of international and global political, economic, technological, cultural, and intellectual interaction; as an aspect of North-South and East-West relations in the context of imperialism, decolonization, the Cold War, and globalization; as a significant domain of international, non-governmental, and research organizations; and, most generally, as the study of the entire spectrum of concepts, discourses and policies related to ways in which countries or regions could and should evolve. Its first volume, dedicated to concepts of and perspectives on the history of development, and its second volume, with a focus on health and development, have already been published: https://www.degruyter.com/serial/yhgd-b/html?lang=en#overview. The third volume on international organizations will be published shortly.
The purpose of the volume Development and Transition is to historicize the period of the “transition” in Eurasia across the 1989/1991 divide. Yet just as post-socialist states and international development organizations have been forced to deal with the physical legacies of socialism, their approaches to economic development, welfare provision, and governance have been shaped by the socialist past. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, former Soviet republics and East European socialist states invited international institutions and foreign donors to help them achieve prosperity and transition to a market economy. At the time, most development institutions and national governments subscribed to the so-called “Washington Consensus” which emphasized financial discipline, minimum state regulation, and open borders. The region under consideration was, and is, heterogenous: institutions like the World Bank and USAID brought their experience of working on the “developing world” to a region whose status seemed ambiguous - developed in terms of infrastructure and levels of education, but, in the case of Central Asia and parts of the Caucasus, predominantly rural with a large informal sector and few institutions to guide a market.
The volume will be organized by the team of the ERC sponsored project Building a Better Tomorrow: Development Knowledge and Practice in Central Asia and Beyond. The purpose of this volume will be to shed light on how development paradigms change over time by following economists, activists, specialists, and government officials who straddled the socialist/post-socialist divide by going to work in national and international development organizations and institutions before and after independence. Studying these individuals and the legacies of their work will allow us toinvestigate how ideas and practices of economic and cultural development and welfare provision were shaped and reshaped at the local and international level. The project will uncover how international development transformed the post-socialist world, and how the encounter with post-socialist states transformed paradigms and practices of international development. We are seeking original submissions grounded in empirical research that will make an innovative scholarly contribution to understanding the legacy of socialism, the history of economic development, and the global history of development.
While Building a Better Tomorrow is focused on Central Asia, the geographical scope of the special issue will be broader, however, and we are actively looking for original, research-based contributions on all of post-socialist Eurasia. We are also open to contributions dealing with earlier efforts at transition, for example in Vietnam or China in the 1980s. Although they proceeded under different circumstances, these transitions from state planning to market-based systems involved dilemmas similar to those later faced by East European and Central Asian states, including that of balancing development and social welfare goals, how to draw on and interpret advice from the IFIs, and how to orient production to the world market.
The Building Tomorrow ERC team will organize a workshop in Amsterdam to review draft papers before submitting the manuscript to the Yearbook. The workshop will take place in March 2025, with the date(s) to be determined. The organizers will cover economy-class travel and two nights at a hotel.
Submission guidelines and timeline:
- Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words, along with a CV, to historicizingtransition@gmail.com not later than January 31, 2024.
- You will be notified of the acceptance or rejection of your submission by February 27, 2024.
- Authors whose submissions are accepted will be expected to submit article-length (approximately 9-12 thousand words) manuscripts by January 30, 2025.
- Final revisions will be due by April 15, 2025. All of the pieces will then undergo peer review.
If you have any questions, please contact the editors, Artemy Kalinovsky and Eva Rogaar, at historicizingtransition@gmail.com.