Dr Anna Calori

September 2020 - August 2021
Mail: calorianna(at)gmail(dot)com

 

Anna Calori completed her PhD in contemporary History at the University of Exeter, as part of the Leverhulme Trust-funded project “1989 after 1989 – Rethinking the Fall of State Socialism in Global Perspective”. She is a graduate of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL, where she completed her MA studies in 2012. She has held research fellowships at the Centre for South East European Studies, University of Graz, and the Chair of East European History at the University of Konstanz. Before joining the Imre Kertesz Kolleg in 2020, she held an EEGA Fellowship at the Global and European Studies Institute, University of Leipzig. She has also worked in the NGO-sector in Italy and Kosovo, and more recently at the International Labour Organisation in Geneva.

Research project at the Kolleg

Multilateral institutions are struggling to assert their global relevance in an increasingly polarised geopolitical environment. A major issue is how to foster multilateral cooperation, and integrate developing countries within models of global economic development, without denying them agency nor reinforcing economic dependencies. 

This project aims to inform this question by drawing upon a historical precedent: that of technical cooperation amongst non-aligned developing countries, established in order to overcome the asymmetrical economic relationship between the global North and South and assert their agency.

The goal of this project is to study the history of multilateral cooperation in the Non-Aligned Movement, with a particular attention to economic and technical cooperation between its founding members (Yugoslavia, India and Egypt) during the last three decades of the 20th century. The project employs an actors-based approach to the study of economic cooperation between the three countries, in order to understand how these sought to overcome inequalities between the developed and developing world, and to establish a “non-aligned way” to development. It relies on archival research and semi-structured oral history interviews with key participants involved in economic and scientific exchanges.

Taking the Non-Aligned Movement as a geopolitical alliance as well as a historical phenomenon, this project foregrounds the significance of East-South and South-South cooperation for the co-production of current models of global governance, thus offering a step beyond conventional narratives of Western-led development in the (post) Cold War era.