For most of the Cold War, the international Left mainstreamed issues and problems relating to the Global South, then known as the Third World. Whether it was through the Soviet Union and China providing financial and moral support to Vietnamese guerillas or independent socialist movements fund-raising for Cuban revolutionaries, leftists of various tendencies shaped the terms of “Third World solidarity.”
The attachment to the anticolonial movements of the non-developed world came amid the ossification of Soviet socialism and popular disillusionment with Stalinism. Certain countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa became new centers of revolutionary imaginaries. Nevertheless, the divisions of the Cold War ensured that Third World revolutionary movements became beneficiaries of Second World largesse. The remaining prestige of “actually existing socialism” in the USSR was hinged on perceptions of its continued anti-imperialist foreign policy, despite decay from within. Although officially neutral, many of the states at the 1955 Asia-Afro Conference in Bandung exhibited more sympathy for the Soviet Union than the Western powers. The anti-colonial imagination was implicitly tied to older Marxist, revolutionary traditions.
This conference seeks to investigate the Third World, now the Global South, after the period of three worlds. The end of the Cold War not only marked the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it also saw the ebb of revolutionary zeal in Communist China. With the weakening and collapse of revolutionary “fatherlands,” how has solidarity for revolution in the Third World changed? What is the global historical conjuncture that anti-imperialist, socialist, and social justice movements in the Global South find themselves in? In asking these questions, the conference seeks to understand how global political trends transform local realities.
This conference seeks to address these questions through paper contributions from scholars from different disciplines who are working on the following topics:
- Case studies of guerilla and revolutionary movements in the Global South
- Marxism and socialist theory in the Global South
- The international political economy of Third World solidarity
- Alternative conceptions of the Third World/Global South after the Cold War
- Global and international activist networks
- South to South solidarity and dialogue
Abstracts of proposed papers should not exceed 250 words. Panel proposals should provide abstracts of individual papers as well as a 100-word rationale for the panel.
Please email abstracts to Arjan Aguirre at aaguirre@ateneo.edu. The deadline for abstracts and panel proposals is 15 October 2015. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 15 November 2015.
Selected papers that pass the refereeing system will be published in Social Transformations: Journal of the Global South.
Registration fee (inclusive of lunches, refreshments, and conference materials)
Until 8 January 2016: US$85
From 15 December 2015 to 8 January 2016: US$100
After 8 January 2016: US$120
Inquiries as well as panel and paper proposals can be addressed to:
Dr Jose Jowel Canuday <jcanuday@ateneo.edu>
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
School of Social Sciences, Ateneo de Manila University
Telephone (632) 4266001 extn. 4619
Social Transformations: Journal of the Global South is an outlet for critical but engaged knowledge about social justice, collective well being, and sustainable development within and across the Global South, a region we take to refer to societies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific that are economically, politically, and culturally marginalized. Such studies trace interrelations and solidarities between and among peoples, states, and movements, while acknowledging tensions and contradictions within the South, as well as the legacies, manifestations, and trajectories of the North's dominance. We support work that analyzes and enables positive change emerging from social movements, development paradigms, policies, and community and grassroots-based interventions. We publish interdisciplinary empirical and conceptual contributions from the different social and human sciences. We also encourage writing that is accessible to specialists and nonspecialists, avoiding both excessive theoretical abstraction and unreflexive empiricism. The journal is published twice a year on February and August.
This journal is dedicated to the Global South and published in the Global South.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
http://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/ST/about/editorialPolicies#custom-1