1st Edition

The New International Economic Order Lives and Afterlives

By Paul Stubbs Copyright 2026
226 Pages
by Routledge

226 Pages
by Routledge

The New International Economic Order (NIEO) was an attempt, underpinned by the agency of the Global South, to articulate global economic and social rights consequent upon political rights gained through processes of decolonisation. The New International Economic Order: Lives and Afterlives situates the NIEO within the interregnum of the 1970s, addressing its core features, intellectual... Read more

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

Acknowledgements

List of Acronyms

 

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1: Decolonial Worldmaking: Exploring Conjunctural Political Economy

 

PART ONE: LIVES

Chapter 2: What Was the New International Economic Order?

Chapter 3: Fragments of an Intellectual History

Chapter 4: Unity and Fragmentation: Support and Opposition

 

PART TWO: ALTER LIVES

Chapter 5: Gender, Development, and the NIEO

Chapter 6: Social Rights and Migration: Connecting the National, the Transnational, and the Global

Chapter 7: Environmentalism, the Global South, and the Climate Crisis

 

PART THREE: AFTERLIVES

Chapter 8: NWICO and the Struggle Over Global Communications

Chapter 9: A New Non-Aligned? Multipolarity and the Shadow of BRICS

Chapter 10: A New NIEO? Global Economic Justice and Planetary Boundaries

 

CONCLUSION

Chapter 11: Worldmaking and its Discontents

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Biography

Paul Stubbs is Emeritus Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Zagreb. His research focuses on the anthropology of policy; left-green municipalism; international actors in social policy; and the history of socialist Yugoslavia. He edited 'Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political and Economic Imaginaries' (2023).

In this elegantly written and rigorously argued book, Paul Stubbs offers a compelling retrospective insight into a significant push from the Global South for a “new international economic order” in the 1970s. Stubbs engages in an in-depth inquiry into the NIEO, its intellectual history and origin, its contents and contradictions, and the contestations around it. Beyond a historical inquiry, Stubbs offers an insightful take on how we may re-envision NIEO in our contemporary context and the pursuit of global emancipatory struggles. The book is a significant intervention in the retrospective glance at the NIEO and lessons to be learnt from it, its strengths and weaknesses. I warmly endorse the book to a broad range of readers.

Jimi O. Adesina

South African Research Chair in Social Policy

University of South Africa, Pretoria

Paul Stubbs' The New International Economic Order: Lives and Afterlives provides a thorough assessment of a political dream that emerged out of the Third World Project, living and dying with that Project, and now being revived here and there, somewhere between nostalgia and hope. A reimagination of the global order is absolutely necessary and such a vision is slowly taking shape. Books such as this will participate in the making of that new, perhaps more just, system.

Vijay Prashad

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Santiago, Chile

 

This ground-breaking book offers an extremely full account of the architecture of complexity around the New International Economic Order (NIEO). Offering uncompromising historical analysis, Paul Stubbs’ deep interrogation of the political, economic and cultural assemblage that stood, in the 1970s and 1980s, behind its emergence goes far beyond addressing only the past potentiality of this counter-hegemonic worldmaking project. Suggestively hinting at the voids left behind during its initial iteration, this book compellingly shows what a ‘new’ NIEO could and should entail.

Jure Ramšak

Science and Research Centre Koper, Slovenia

 

Paul Stubbs has written a timely book that provides historical insights into ongoing debates about the reform of global economic governance systems skewed, since inception, against the South. The book will appeal to historians who will appreciate the rich archival sources, while scholars of development studies, international relations, development economics, and political science will find the centring of key themes, figures, and the analysis of the alter lives and afterlives of the NIEO appealing. Overall, anyone interested in these issues will appreciate the book’s skilful demonstration of the unending colonisation of the South covering themes that remain as relevant today as they were then.

Geraldine Sibanda

University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa