Race and the Limits of Third World Internationalism

This paper explores how race figured into the Third World movement for economic self-determination in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Buoyed by the Group of 77’s (G-77) emerging majority, postcolonial representatives sought to maintain cohesion at the United Nations in order to capitalize on their strength in numbers. Despite their best efforts, the international spaces associated with the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the New International Economic Order (NIEO) remained deeply unequal—and sub-Saharan African issues and personnel were often sidelined in favor of their counterparts from Latin America and the Middle East. This paper examines the fissures that emerged as a result of this asymmetry, as well as the regional networks and organizations African intellectuals and diplomats turned to over time to combat the continent’s most deep-seated issues of underdevelopment. By focusing on the Third World Forum and the Economic Commission for Africa—housed in Dakar, Senegal and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia respectively—it illuminates the Africa-centric perspectives which by turns complemented and departed from the G-77 orthodoxy and offered compelling counter-narratives to those propounded by development officials operating in the international institutions of the United Nations.