‘Le Savoir et le Faire’: Decolonisation and Geneva as a Third World Development Studies Hub, c. 1961-1981

Under the impression of post-WWII decolonization, the Swiss authorities in 1961 set up the Geneva Centre for the Training of African Managers, later renamed the Geneva Africa Institute and then the Graduate Institute of Development Studies (IUED). Convinced that education was pivotal, IUED’s ostensible purpose was to transmit Western knowledge and values and thus contribute to newly independent countries’ development efforts. Yet, some of the people that frequented IUED and Geneva defied its original purpose and carved out their own space. For them, works such as Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre (1961) had left an irreversible mark, announcing the need for radically new beginnings. Indeed, relatively soon after its inception IUED would gain a reputation as a meeting point for various anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian activists linked to for instance FRELIMO (Mozambique) or the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. Along with countering what they deemed imperialist discourses at the International Organizations, they forged new solidarities with like-minded people across racial and national boundaries.

I study the people that populated IUED, their ideas and trajectories, and the socio-political context in which they worked. My work demonstrates how encounters and discussions with Third World thinkers and activists at IUED led to a de-centering of mainstream development thinking, questioning its underlying Eurocentric assumptions. Building on archival material from IUED such as letters, course materials and oral history interviews, I study how studying at IUED proved and provided a transformative experience for both students and teachers alike. In particular, my dissertation contributes towards a better understanding of development in the wake of decolonization by mapping the worlds of people from and concerned with the Third World, who formulated new development strategies beyond economic growth to overcome socio-economic and political injustices. I thus seek to deepen our understanding of academic development thought produced in the Long Sixties by revisiting these ideas, largely forgotten today. This way, my study also sheds light on one of the milieus from which a major current of post-development emanated, culminating in Gilbert Rist’s Le Développement: Histoire d’une croyance occidentale (1996). This book belongs to a wave of scholarship that sought to get rid of development altogether, rather than reforming it. Lastly, since many of the people that frequented IUED were also practitioners and activists, I argue that thinking with IUED’s archival material is an original way to overcome the often-assumed dichotomy between development ideas and practice. Practice and activism informed writing and teaching at IUED. This dialectic also was a primary concern in a foundational IUED publication, Le Savoir et le Faire (Bungener 1975), which posited that development thinking and practice were fundamentally ethnocentric and ignored cultural difference and plurality.

My project is funded through a grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).