Using long-form oral history, this chapter explores two decades in the career of an individual, the American transnational advocate Winifred Armstrong. Armstrong was an unofficial African affairs consultant for John F. Kennedy and political economist for the American Metal Climax mining company, who managed to operate inside organs of American empire as both an advocate for nationalist claimants and as a connector to spheres of US political and economic interests. By focusing on a single individual enmeshed in global networks of anticolonialism and resource extraction, this chapter deepens and complicates narratives of progressive national liberation, neo-imperialism, and the role of the corporation in decolonization.

This chapter traces the evolution of Iran’s international relations from the oil nationalization episode until the outbreak of the 1978–1979 revolution. Iran’s oil nationalization was met with the stiff opposition of Britain and the United States, culminating in a CIA-sponsored coup that reinstalled the Shah back to power and placed Iran firmly in the Western camp. Practically every presidential administration in the United States paid special attention to Iran as a central component of its Cold War strategy against the Soviet Union, an attention which the Iranian government used to its advantage in order to receive large amounts of military hardware from United States. Seeing Iran and the United States as “natural allies,” the Shah assumed that Washington would rescue him from the tide of revolution. Long after his overthrow, the Iranian monarch felt abandoned and betrayed by his American allies.

A study of Elliot Carter reception history primarily in the postwar, Cold War period, also addressing postmodernism and disability studies.

This introduction sets forth the puzzle of North Korean development trajectory, namely its initial successes, its collapse in the 1990s, and its subsequent recovery since then. It engages with existing theories of development and with the critique of methodological nationalism in the field of Development Studies and International Political Economy. It argues that liberal economic and dependency theory fail to account for the specificity of the country’s experience, or indeed projects of national development in general. We put forward an alternative framework of the ‘development-geopolitics nexus’ through a reinterpretation of the global history of national development, examining three geopolitical moments that have shaped that history, namely colonialism, the Cold War, and the rise of China. The discussion of the legacies of colonialism sheds light on the emergence of developmental nationalisms in the (post)colonial world and how the material legacies of colonialism aided or hindered post-colonial development; the analysis of the Cold War sheds light on how the US and the USSR sought to facilitate late development within their respective spheres of influence; the analysis of the rise of China examines the extent to which China’s influence can be said to reflect a process of neo-colonialism or win-win mutual benefit.