This Winter School invites scholars at a doctoral or post-doctoral level to share their work on the history of development experiences and to elaborate innovative perspectives for further research.

Since the end of World War II the coordinated leveling of global economic and social inequality has become a major field of international action. The aid endeavor has a seven-decade long track record and has thus become historical. However, academic research on the history of development initiatives is still in an infant stage. We are well informed about the succession of leading doctrines, but why paradigmatic changes happened at particular points in time is not so clear. The power function of foreign aid has been studied for major industrialized countries, but we still need to better understand, why and how development aid could at all be turned into an instrument in securing power. Also, the institutional history of many donor agencies has been reconstructed, but the ways in which these agents transcended nationally consigned action spaces and connected to global networks must be further analyzed. Only few historical studies have tracked the impact of development cooperation and aid upon socio-economic change in recipient societies.

We do not know very well, why and how a specific interpretation of European modernization was stabilized and propelled as a norm around the globe in the 20th century. To strengthen our capacities to explore this field, the Winter School offers a platform to study a diverse range of key topics, such as colonialism and post-colonialism, globalization, Neoliberalism, and post-development, and to test different theoretical and methodological approaches connected to the categories of culture, power and knowledge.

The objective of the Winter School is to map an emerging field that cannot be adequately investigated within the nationally contained framework of historiography but constantly refers to global action frames. A specific focus is on processes of trans-national entanglement. We wish to question a uni-directional sender-receiver-model of knowledge transfer and follow local complexities. The Winter School tests the added value of a cultural history approach to a research topic that has so far been largely worked upon within a framework of political history, diplomatic history and global security issues. In the terms of a cultural analysis a variety of historical questions arise: Which assumptions gained general plausibility for which groups of actors? What norms ruled the collective interpretation of social change in different societies? How did development schemes and organizations deploy socially structuring effects also by failing to reach their explicit goals?

Another objective is to link-up junior and senior researchers from all over the world and thus to facilitate the establishment of the academic discipline of development history. The Winter School is organized to endow the participants with a broader picture of their research topic and a range of possible connections to other historical development experiences. In addition to providing a platform for in-depth discussion and mentoring of the single research projects we aim at building up a new research framework that allows connecting differently structured studies on diverse geographical regions. Ongoing research shall be connected in a bottom-up procedure that takes the participants own research experience as its starting point. We wish to stimulate a process that directs currently unrelated research projects towards possible points of contact.