The 1970s saw a major effort by the members of the Non-Aligned Movement and other "Third World" states to use international organizations to decolonize the international order. The most famous aspect of this effort today is the demand at the United Nations for a "New International Economic Order." Less well known is that project’s cultural counterpart: the promotion, at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), of a "New World Information and Communication Order" (NWICO). NWICO expressed the idea that truly decolonizing the international order required the wholesale reorganization of the international media structures, dominated by the global North, through which most of the world got its news and information. This idea excited broad enthusiasm and fierce hostility, not least from the United States, which withdrew from UNESCO in 1983, effectively killing the project. Before NWICO’s collapse, however, the broader radicalism that it reflected fueled related projects, pursuing visions of a decolonized international media and cultural landscape. This panel explores several of these visions, applying a diverse set of methodological perspectives in order to revisit UNESCO’s radical 1970s in the context of decolonization—understood here not primarily as a time period, but as a set of political, cultural, intellectual, and socio-technical projects.

One such UNESCO project was the effort to create National Information Systems (NATIS): a mechanism for the national-level coordination of all information-related services. Ismay Milford explores the application of NATIS in East Africa, a region of the world where its implementation was imagined to be most transformational, in order to probe the relationship between the global debate over the "free flow" of information and the reach of the state in the early 1970s. Later in the decade, as the technological breakthrough of fiber-optic glass began to revolutionize global communications, postcolonial officials, technocrats, academics, and media professionals used the platform offered by UNESCO to imagine an alternative to what would become the internet. Drawing on UNESCO records of these efforts, as well as the papers of the American think tanks and corporations that opposed them, Sarah Nelson reconstructs this anticolonial cybernetics, which sought to secure communications sovereignty across the developing world.

The debates NWICO triggered in and beyond UNESCO touched on controversial questions related to the nature of sovereignty and the significance of "culture" for newly independent national states, as well as about the meaning of decolonization itself. Taking advantage of the recent digitization of key UNESCO texts, Benjamin Martin uses digital methods of text analysis to explore the changing relationships among some of the key concepts of the era as revealed by comparing textual trends in the minutes of UNESCO’s meetings, in its standard-setting instruments, and in the pages of UNESCO’s journal Courier. Insofar as NWICO sought to decolonize the global systems by which individuals around the world gained access to information and culture, the project envisioned a coordinated effort to decolonize minds. Maurice Jr. Labelle explores the intellectual implications of the NWICO debate, arguing that it helped reorient understandings of the phenomenon of decolonization itself.