About the project
Labor, Development, and Solidarity
Third World Cosmopolitans is a historical research initiative and digital platform dedicated to the study of labor, activist, and technical networks that articulated the so-called Third World during the late Cold War. The project is driven by a central concern: to understand how actors from the Global South constructed agendas of activism and development grounded in work, social justice, and international solidarity, in contexts shaped by struggles for decolonization, attempts at socialist transition, and persistent structural inequalities.
Rather than conceiving development as a technocratic, vertical, or imported process, the project approaches it as a social and political practice produced by workers, technicians, professionals, intellectuals, and activists who moved across national, linguistic, and cultural borders. These actors actively shaped autonomy-oriented and transformative ideals, contributing to the material, institutional, and symbolic reconstruction of societies marked by dependency. Third World cosmopolitans thus appear as historically situated subjects whose practices of activism, expertise, and solidarity redefined the meanings and trajectories of development.
The project advances the concept of Third World cosmopolitanism to describe a form of openness to the world grounded not in privilege, neutrality, or uncritical consumption, but in the lived experiences of work, activism, and global inequality. This cosmopolitanism was forged through South–South networks (and connections between the South and other parts of the world), and was expressed as a relational ethic shaped by a commitment to development, emancipation, and the radical transformation of societies.
Third World cosmopolitans are analyzed through five interrelated dimensions
→ Workers in circulation
First and foremost, they were skilled workers, technicians, and professionals whose mobility was tied to concrete projects of cooperation, reconstruction, and local capacity building. Their movement constituted a material experience of labor, negotiation, and conflict, and formed a central component of socialist and postcolonial development projects.
→ Political subjects
These actors articulated diverse agendas—antiracism, anti-imperialism, anticolonialism—understanding development as inseparable from political struggle. Their action extended beyond formal institutions, taking shape in everyday practices, political education, collective formation, and informal networks of solidarity.
→ Racialized and Classed Lives
Far from an neutral cosmopolitanism, these actors operated within racial and social hierarchies inherited from colonialism. Their engagement with development was shaped by experiences of racialization, inequality, and exclusion, which in turn structured their trajectories as well as their forms of authority, recognition, and legitimacy.
→ Communicators and intellectuals
Third World cosmopolitanism was sustained through infrastructures of circulation, including newspapers, newsletters, correspondence, training materials, personal archives, as well as conferences, workshops, and other spaces of collective debate and intellectual articulation. Through these media and forums, actors produced, translated, and contested political and technical languages, connecting local experiences to global horizons of transformation and forging durable transnational communities of practice.
→ Carriers of memory
Third World cosmopolitans were carriers and producers of memory. Their trajectories, archives, and testimonies preserve experiences of development, labor, and international solidarity that are often absent from official narratives, constituting a field of historical and political contestation over the meanings of decolonization and the Cold War from the Global South.
As a digital platform, Third World Cosmopolitans seeks to make these networks, trajectories, and memories visible through tools for mapping, visualization, and open access to sources. The project combines rigorous historical research with digital experimentation to offer new ways of thinking about development—not as an abstract promise, but as a lived experience, produced by concrete subjects in motion. In this sense, the project intervenes in debates on the global history of development, the Cold War, and labor, advancing a perspective from the Global South that foregrounds the ethical, political, and material commitments of those who imagined and practiced alternative futures.