Creating the Third World: Anticolonial Diplomacy and the Search for a New International Economic Order, 1960-1975

My dissertation explores the making of the New International Economic Order (NIEO)—and the demands for economic sovereignty and a “right to development” it embodied—from the perspective(s) of sub-Saharan Africa. Plagued disproportionately by food shortages and low standards of living, postcolonial African states viewed the imperative to redress inequalities in the global economic system as crucial to the process of decolonization. By examining the development strategies left-leaning states like Ghana, Tanzania, and Kenya employed in the 1960s and 1970s, I argue that Africa ideas and diplomacy laid the foundation for the burgeoning NIEO movement.