In 1961, immediately after Yuri Gagarin’s historic space flight, U.S. President John F. Kennedy congratulated the Soviets for their “impressive scientific accomplishment.” The United States had “made some exceptional scientific advances in the last decade,” he remarked. But “if we could ever competitively…get fresh water from salt water,” it “would really dwarf any other scientific accomplishment.” In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson similarly claimed that American success in the field of desalination was “just as important as space.” Across the 1950s–1970s, the U.S. government dedicated millions of dollars and thousands of manhours to advance the research and development of desalination technology. How can we explain this significant amount of funding and support?

This paper argues that American policymakers’ interest in desalting was a part of a broader Cold War doctrine of “strategic humanitarianism.” To U.S. officials, the cultivation of American desalination expertise not only appeared to offer a viable solution to the world’s growing demand for fresh water, but also a way to strengthen the West’s moral-strategic position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Animated by an ideology of “high modernist nationalism,” American strategists realized that by deploying desalination specialists to arid regions across the globe, Washington could stake a claim to international scientific leadership and demonstrate its ability to “master” nature, while simultaneously showcasing the strength of its capitalist system and gaining geopolitical influence at the enemy’s expense. To Washington, water security was a critical “front” in the Cold War. The ocean was indeed a “new frontier.”

In 1961, under the impression of decolonisation, the Swiss authorities set up the Geneva Africa Institute, which later became the Graduate Institute of Development Studies (IUED). Established with the conviction that Switzerland could contribute to the development efforts of newly independent countries through the educational formation of their elites on ‘neutral’ terrain, IUED’s purpose was the transmission of ostensibly apolitical knowledge. Yet, the people who frequented IUED and Geneva defied its original purpose and made the place their own. IUED would gain a reputation as a meeting space for various revolutionary activists – e.g., those linked to FRELIMO (Mozambique) and European solidarity movements, such as the one against South African apartheid. For them, authors and activists like Fanon, Illich, Freire or Georgescu-Roegen called to radically question and re-imagine existing (developmental) paradigms.
This paper, the third chapter of my PhD project, traces the evolution of critical thought at IUED between 1961 and 1986. It started with cautious attempts to conceive of modernisation as a socio-cultural process that went beyond economic growth and required interdisciplinary research. The emphasis on culture led to a concern with ethnocentrism and self-reflection, as well as the questioning of the value and belief system undergirding Western ideas of modernisation. Eventually, some scholars like Gilbert Rist (professor at IUED) rejected development in itself. As such, this paper sketches a partial intellectual pre-history of post-development and degrowth thought.

This paper focuses on how postcolonial India envisioned a “peaceful atom” through its normative and developmental imperatives in the global nuclear order of the 1950s-60s. Harnessing peaceful applications of atomic energy held a great promise in postcolonial India’s quest to further scientific progress and bolster diplomatic engagement with the West in the global Cold War. Not only did Indian scientists distinctly shape the atomic age by being the “standard-bearers” of radiation techniques. They also aided its circulation in the developing world through technical assistance programs. Using archival evidence from specialised UN agencies, this paper will narrate stories of various atomic energy development projects as the modernist imperatives of the Indian state in conjunction with its global circulatory politics. It contends that the peaceful atom and its promise of “man-made evolution” – inducing desired crop mutations and detecting pathways of tropical diseases – played a vital role in India’s developmental efforts while safeguarding strategic interests amid the backdrop of the Cold War. This paper argues that the saga of the peaceful atom offers a more diverse and inclusive narrative of the atomic age in India, as well as its links with global histories.