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The Effort to End Global Poverty: Then and Now

International development – the effort to reduce poverty and inequality around the world – employed millions, affected billions, and spent trillions. It held the hopes of the former colonies to create an economic independence to match their newfound political one – and the plans of wealthy countries to build an enduring economic order. Anticipating David Engerman’s new book, Apostles of Development, our panel discusses past and present development efforts.

David Engerman’s Apostles of Development offers a bold new history of the effort to end global poverty – through the lives and work of six of its most innovative practitioners. In our current moment, when major development agencies like USAID are being shut down, and many governments are reducing development budgets, Engerman joins in conversation with various experts to discuss the history and current state of development efforts.

About the speakers

David C. Engerman is a scholar of twentieth-century international history ad Leitner Professor of International History at Yale University. He also researched and has written on a variety of topics related to the history of development assistance, including a co-edited volume, Staging Growth: Modernization, Development and the Global Cold War (U-Mass Press, 2003), and most recently a monograph, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Harvard UP, 2018).

Peter van Dam is professor of Dutch history at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the history of civic initiative and activism as well as the history of historiography. He coordinates the research group ‘Environment & Society: contestation & governance’, which explores how we have thought about the relations between humans and nature, and how people campaigned and negotiated around environmental issues and climate change. He is also a co-founder of Seven, the UvA’s climate institute.

Esther Miedema is Senior Lecturer International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Miedema received her doctorate from the Institute of Education, University College London. Prior to that, she worked for the United Nations and in the NGO sector for almost 18 years.

Artemy M. Kalinovsky (moderator) is a historian and leads the ERC project ‘Building a Better Tomorrow: Development Knowledge and Practice in Central Asia and Beyond.’ He is the author of Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell, 2018) and A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard, 2011).