This dossier highlights the historiographical potential of technical–labor internationalism by placing it at the center of key concerns in global history through the articulation of two interrelated debates.

Debate 1: Cultures of Expertise (the “Global Thirties” / the “Global Sixties”)

In studies of the so-called “Global Thirties,” scholars such as Kendall Bailes (1978 [2015]), David Engerman (2004), and Maya Peterson (2016), among others, have emphasized the emergence of a grammar of development grounded in a veritable cult of technical expertise, conceived as a universal and ostensibly apolitical language. In contrast, debates on the “Global Sixties” have underscored how, during this period, expertise increasingly operated under conditions of intense politicization. This shift is evidenced, on the one hand, by works that draw attention to the centrality of practical applications and the everyday management of development (Chassé, 2014), and, on the other, by studies that stress the expansion of a worldview in which the separation between technical expertise and geopolitical power became increasingly blurred (Hecht, 2011; Mehos & Moon, 2011).

Building on this historiographical shift, the dossier proposes to critically examine this reconfiguration through case studies and historiographical reflections that treat technique and technical workers as central sites and agents of the disputes that shaped the twentieth century. In this vein, contributors are invited to analyze expertise as a historical regime of authority capable of producing and ordering hierarchies among subjects, territories, and forms of knowledge. In colonial and postcolonial contexts, such regimes of expertise frequently contributed to the naturalization of relations of dependence, delimiting who was authorized to “know,” “manage,” or “modernize,” and under what conditions—even when such practices were articulated through the languages of cooperation, development, or technical universalism.

Debate 2: Transnational Connections in the Cold War (Beyond Binarisms)

The second debate interrogates the nature of the transnational and transcontinental connections that made technical–labor internationalism possible. Rather than assuming that a globalization centered on the accumulation of financial capital imposed itself without contestation—as influential neoliberal approaches in parts of the globalization historiography since the 1990s have often suggested—or presuming that alternative globalizations oriented toward the welfare of the working class were entirely detached from market dynamics, the dossier calls for analyses that explore the complexity, entanglements, and hybridizations that characterized these circulations, grounded in concrete and situated case studies.

In this sense, the dossier establishes a dialogue between, on the one hand, Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels Petersson (2005), who emphasize the relative isolation of the socialist bloc from global dynamics, and, on the other, James Mark, Artemy Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung (2020), who highlight the multidirectional circulation of knowledge and specialists as a structural component of connections within socialist countries—and between them and the wider world. Avoiding interpretive binarisms and reductive readings, the dossier invites contributions that analyze how these flows of expertise and skilled labor were simultaneously shaped by selective alliances and structural asymmetries that were not merely conjunctural but, in many cases, relied on technical languages inherited from earlier colonial experiences, reconfigured within new ideological frameworks—socialist, developmentalist, or Third Worldist—yet still traversed by persistent logics of classification, tutelage, and control.