Date:
Location:
"Post-colonial moral geopolitics? The Swedish response to the New International Economic Order in knowledge and culture"
Attend this event via Zoom (advance registration required)
Speaker:
Carl Marklund, Visiting Scholar, Weatherhead Scholars Program. Researcher, Institute of Contemporary History, Södertörn University.
Contact:
Ilana Freedman
ifreedman@g.harvard.edu
This event is online only. Please click the "Read More" link for full instructions on how to attend this seminar.
Chairs:
Panagiotis Roilos, Faculty Associate. George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies, Department of the Classics; Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Associate Professor, Department of Classics, Department of Anthropology, and the Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University.
Remote Access Information:
To join by computer:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIvdOqgrj8uHdIAztHokJqdv7Hk8rgwuYfG
Please note: This event requires registration in advance in order to receive the meeting link and password.
Abstract:
Decolonization significantly altered global relations and posed new challenges to minor, non-colonial countries, North and South alike. In this talk, I explore how a neutral small state in the Global North, Sweden, responded to the calls for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) towards a more just and equal world market from the mid-1970s and onwards. NIEO presented risks as well as opportunities for a small, export-oriented country in the Global North such as Sweden, having profiled itself as an “active neutral,” citing its alleged non-coloniality as an asset and its welfare state as a developmental model beyond Cold War rivalries: What would post-colonial neutrality imply? How far should solidarity with the decolonizing world be extended and on what grounds? How should it be expressed, economically, politically and culturally in order to be efficient and legitimate? Revisiting how official Sweden responded to these concerns through a series of closely interrelated diplomatic activities, research programs, information campaigns and cultural policies, I show how Sweden’s relations with the Global South were communicated in terms of both “cultural affinity” as well as “small state solidarity” in what can be tentatively theorized as a form of post-colonial moral geopolitics.
