Revista CIDOB d'Afers Internacionals

No. 120
Call for papers
"Rethinking Development Using the History of International Cooperation: Alternative Critical Approaches"

Barcelona, October 2017

Timetable of the call:

November 30th 2017: Submission deadline for abstracts (300 words) and a short biographical note (100 words).
December 15th 2017: Authors are notified of the results of the selection.
March 2018: Submission deadline for completed articles (see instructions for authors).

All written correspondence should be sent to the CIDOB publications email address: publicaciones@cidob.org

Monograph coordinators: Rafael Domínguez Martín, Director of the COIBA Chair, Faculty of Economics, University of Cantabria (Spain) and Simone Lucatello, Lecturer-Researcher, Instituto Mora, Mexico City.

According to the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC), international development cooperation is an "area of public policy that includes the provision of development assistance within an international system called ‘aid architecture’". This is configured by "the set of rules and institutions governing aid flows to developing countries". Both cooperation policies and the aid system/architecture have been path dependent since their beginnings in the early 20th century. Nevertheless, they lack historical memory, as is shown, for example, by the recurrent proliferation of the performative terms "association" and "policy coherence"; the rediscovery of "new instruments" such as budget support, which was already part of the debate on planning in the 1950s and 1960s; the celebrations of the incorporation of "new actors" which, like the countries of the South, were also already present in the 1950s – and even earlier in the case of the private sector; and the lists of development goals on the Club of Rome’s "reconfigured" international agendas in 1976 and 20 years later on those of the DAC (1996), which gave rise to the MDGs (2001-2015) and SDGs (2015-2030) of the international development agendas.
It would appear that this lack of historical memory around cooperation policy and its international system is the product of a recurring process of erasing the past, which can be explained by two factors that connect the academic and political, and which make the limits clear of most conventional analyses of this international regime by the academic industry:

- The first factor is the predominance of a positivist (problem-oriented) approach to problem solving, which lacks critical reflectiveness and is the heir to colonial and racialised studies – as part of the epistemological imperialism of mainstream International Relations theories – and from which Development Studies has barely been able to free itself.
- The second factor is a result of the first and relates to the fact that aid recipients’ negotiation experiences and economic demands have not been taken into account. Recipients tend to focus more on net public financing for industrialisation and reducing income gaps (convergence), as opposed to donors' much more political offers.

In issue 120, Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals seeks to launch a new critical examination of international development cooperation as a public policy that is sui generis – given the presence and conditioning of private interests from the outset – as well as of the paradoxical international assistance system, which, though weak and imbalanced in nature, also shapes the superstructure of international relations or meta-regime. And this is taking place at the very time of an anniversary of two milestones in international cooperation: on the one hand, the 75th anniversary of the creation of the Institute of Inter-American Affairs in 1942, which that laid the foundations for the policies of Truman's "fourth point"; on the other, the 70th anniversary of the Marshall Plan, a model of international cooperation to which many countries who became independent during the decolonising process that began in the early 1950s aspired.

In this sense, among others, contributions of original work – empirical, comparative or theoretical, and with a critical approach – will be welcomed on:

1. A historical perspective on aid as seen from the recipient countries (with analyses that are national, regional or sectoral, and on modalities, actors or instruments).
2. Alternative theoretical-conceptual approaches to solving the problems with Development Studies and its interdependent, donor-centric framing.
3. The history of South-South cooperation, transcending the technical cooperation approach between countries in development to analyse the diverse attempts to create coalitions to change the international economic order through economic cooperation.
4. The history of cooperation of and between the countries of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance during the Cold War.
5. The prospects for the DAC in the light of the construction of an alternative international system by China and other emerging countries which, to a large extent, means a return to the concepts of the 1960s and 1970s.

Proposals will be accepted in Spanish (preferably), English and Portuguese.

The editorial board of the magazine - coordinated for this issue by Rafael Domínguez Martín and Simone Lucatello - will be responsible for the final selection of the articles to be published in the last issue of 2018 (December 2018).

Created in 1982, Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals is a scientific publication on international relations that publishes original work. Each issue is a monograph, coordinated by an expert, which provides in-depth analysis of an aspect of the international state of affairs from a multi- and trans-disciplinary perspective. The articles pass through an external double-blind peer review process and are indexed and summarised in the main academic social sciences databases, such as Scopus and Thomson Reuters. The publication is aimed at the academic community and the interested public in general. It is published in print and digital versions.