Chapter 3 considers intellectual conversations relevant to modern womanhood, digging deeper into the interplay between development logics and Tunisian nation-building in scholarship on rural populations. Knowledge about the rural interior, farming, fertility, and family structures was essential to economic planning, whether agricultural reform, public works, or otherwise. The need for local data facilitated a partnership between the state and scholars eager to shape national policy, while research in rural spaces allowed them to demonstrate expertise. It was also a space of advocacy, consciousness raising, and a feminism concerned with women’s lives and local knowledge. In fields such as demography and sociology, Tunisian academics engaged with theories of population and development, worked with international organizations, and attended conferences on multiple continents. In their approach to contemporary debates, their scholarship centered national and local contexts. Through their work in rural areas and advocacy to state agencies, the UNFT brought rural women into economic planning. Academic and policy writing operated within the political limits imposed by the single-party state and its Western alliances, avoiding explicit contestation. Yet collaborations between urban and rural women challenged the male bias of development discourse, opening possibilities of cross-class solidarity that redefined what it meant to be Tunisian.

Chapter Three focuses on how the network of connections established by the sent-down youth movement provided rural leaders a way of bypassing state planning policies to obtain directly from Shanghai materials and equipment they desperately needed to establish small local industries. At a time when state planning policies favored large industrial centers such as Shanghai, most remote rural counties had almost no way to acquire resources, in spite of Mao’s advocacy of rural industry. Were it not for the sent-down youth movement, these county leaders would have had no connection to Shanghai, nor would agencies in Shanghai have had reasons to donate materials to places unfamiliar and irrelevant to them. Now, when rural local leaders issued requests for equipment, officials in Shanghai hustled to identify bureaus that could satisfy them, as the otherwise far more powerful Shanghai municipal government found itself dependent on small and peripheral local governments to take care of the city’s youth.

This chapter focuses on the discourse emanating from developing countries regarding international economic law, particularly as it relates to liberalization and development. It highlights tensions between narratives of cooperation among developing countries and domestic realities of diverging interests and priorities. With respect to cooperation, the larger, middle-income countries and some regional groupings emphasize mutual respect for sovereignty and domestic political economy choices. Investment relations among them are ostensibly in support of domestically designed developmental projects and needs. South–South trade groups seek to unlock regional potential free from the political constraints that often accompany North–South trade relations. However, a closer consideration of the domestic discourse and political economy models of Brazil, China, India and African countries (in the context of regional groupings such as SADC- and African Union-sponsored initiatives) denotes significant divergences in objectives for trade and investment relations, as well as in the degree and means of economic liberalization.