Spaces of interaction

Towards a new understanding of East-South relations - A case study on the Institute for World Economics

Abstract

Socialist global entanglements in the context of the Cold War constitute an open field of research, which brings together a wide range of studies dealing with the various political, economic, social, cultural and academic interactions. In this context, after briefly unfolding some of the main processes, practices and projects of socialist global relations and also shedding some light on how the political, ideological, and economic rationalities underpinning these relations changed over time, the current paper shifts the focus of analysis to specific academic spaces being responsible for the acceleration of interconnectedness between the socialist bloc and the Third World. Arguing that the “thick description” of these spaces could help us sketch a better overall picture on the nature of East-South relations and, in this case, more particularly on the circulation of economic knowledge and practices, the following pages zoom on the Institute for World Economics and its predecessor, the Centre for AfroAsian Research in Budapest and aim to provide a micro-historical view on how discourses of development (and more generally of economic
knowledge) were transferred, adopted and even reinterpreted within these particular spaces. The paper furthermore endeavors to take a closer look on actors being active in these institutions and show how they sought to position themselves beyond the dichotomies of the Cold War and attempted to function along the specific logic of own their fields of expertise.