THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION AND THE SOCIAL POLITICS OF DEVELOPMENT , 1938-1969

Abstract

From the ashes of the First World War, the ILO emerged to address the plight of industrial workers. Yet, by 1952, the organization had embarked upon an ambitious multilateral enterprise aimed at peasants in the Andes Mountains, known as the Andean Indian Program (AIP). My dissertation confronts the paradox of the ILO's postwar turn toward rural "development." Tracing the formation of an international technocracy (ITC), I argue that this group became the principal foot soldiers of the International Labor Organization's Andean Indian Program and propelled it to the center of postwar discussions of social and economic "development." I examine the intellectual history of the AIP, as the international experts who managed the program encountered the apparatus of regional states and the Andean communities targeted for "reform" in order to decompose the strategies and practices deployed by the ILO and the AIP. I argue that despite the deployment of a "universal" model of development by the ILO, the Andean Program was a "zone of contact" between the ITC's universalizing discourse and a social politics of development. Bringing into focus the pivotal actions of particular individuals, institutions, and states, I argue that the logic defining the Andean Program cannot be found only in the adherence of powerful actors to a shared universalizing "discourse," but also in the relationship of that discourse to United States' hegemony during the Cold War. My work reveals that the international technocracy's efforts to de-politicize development provided an important avenue for the exportation of U.S. models of social and economic organization.