The New International Economic Order

In this elegantly written and rigorously argued book, Paul Stubbs offers a compelling retrospective insight into a significant push from the Global South for a “new international economic order” in the 1970s. Stubbs engages in an in-depth inquiry into the NIEO, its intellectual history and origin, its contents and contradictions, and the contestations around it. Beyond a historical inquiry, Stubbs offers an insightful take on how we may re-envision NIEO in our contemporary context and the pursuit of global emancipatory struggles. The book is a significant intervention in the retrospective glance at the NIEO and lessons to be learnt from it, its strengths and weaknesses. I warmly endorse the book to a broad range of readers.

Jimi O. Adesina

South African Research Chair in Social Policy

University of South Africa, Pretoria

Paul Stubbs' The New International Economic Order: Lives and Afterlives provides a thorough assessment of a political dream that emerged out of the Third World Project, living and dying with that Project, and now being revived here and there, somewhere between nostalgia and hope. A reimagination of the global order is absolutely necessary and such a vision is slowly taking shape. Books such as this will participate in the making of that new, perhaps more just, system.

Vijay Prashad

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Santiago, Chile

This ground-breaking book offers an extremely full account of the architecture of complexity around the New International Economic Order (NIEO). Offering uncompromising historical analysis, Paul Stubbs’ deep interrogation of the political, economic and cultural assemblage that stood, in the 1970s and 1980s, behind its emergence goes far beyond addressing only the past potentiality of this counter-hegemonic worldmaking project. Suggestively hinting at the voids left behind during its initial iteration, this book compellingly shows what a ‘new’ NIEO could and should entail.

Jure Ramšak

Science and Research Centre Koper, Slovenia

Paul Stubbs has written a timely book that provides historical insights into ongoing debates about the reform of global economic governance systems skewed, since inception, against the South. The book will appeal to historians who will appreciate the rich archival sources, while scholars of development studies, international relations, development economics, and political science will find the centring of key themes, figures, and the analysis of the alter lives and afterlives of the NIEO appealing. Overall, anyone interested in these issues will appreciate the book’s skilful demonstration of the unending colonisation of the South covering themes that remain as relevant today as they were then.

Geraldine Sibanda

University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa