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Through the 1990s, “human development”—a form of economic development focused on enabling people to access their human rights—steadily emerged as the dominant paradigm of United Nations (UN) development. Multilateral, international organizations, such as the UN, supported many of the scholars theorizing “human development” and the bureaucrats implementing these new development programs. In 1972, Kéba Mbaye, a Senegalese lawyer working as UN Commissioner on Human Rights (UNCHR), argued for “the right of development as a human right.” Mbaye’s version of “right to development” is more than an intellectual evolution of earlier collective ideas on human rights. He was worldmaking. He was envisioning a new future by bridging Third World thought and denouncing authoritarian modernization with the goal of building a new international system that placed at the forefront anti-imperialism, but not at the expense of people’s humanity. Rather than charting “right to development” as another vapid Third Wordlist attempt in the 1970s and the 1980s on the inevitable path toward neoliberal development and human rights in the 1990s, this chapter focuses on UN bureaucrats working in the field with Africans on UN missions and projects after the Nigerian-Biafran War by using mission and progress reports, and narrative accounts from field workers. In these development projects, a bureaucratization of indifference emerged within UN development circles while UNCHR experts and Igbos struggled with experiences of famine and ethnic cleansing. By envisioning “right to development” as historically bound with both UN projects and missions, as well as Third Worldist intellectual and diplomatic lobbying in the UN, this chapter emphasizes the contentious spaces in which Third World theory ran into the difficulties of practice. Therefore, “right to development” in 1972 was both a culmination of Mbaye’s intellectual work and the failures of intertwining the experiences of famine and death during the Nigerian-Biafran War into Nigerian development projects after 1970.

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Envisioning a Third Worldist Future: Kéba Mbaye, the Nigeria-Biafra War, and Right to Development, 1968–1972

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年

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  • Ryan Glauser

摘要

Through the 1990s, “human development”—a form of economic development focused on enabling people to access their human rights—steadily emerged as the dominant paradigm of United Nations (UN) development. Multilateral, international organizations, such as the UN, supported many of the scholars theorizing “human development” and the bureaucrats implementing these new development programs. In 1972, Kéba Mbaye, a Senegalese lawyer working as UN Commissioner on Human Rights (UNCHR), argued for “the right of development as a human right.” Mbaye’s version of “right to development” is more than an intellectual evolution of earlier collective ideas on human rights. He was worldmaking. He was envisioning a new future by bridging Third World thought and denouncing authoritarian modernization with the goal of building a new international system that placed at the forefront anti-imperialism, but not at the expense of people’s humanity. Rather than charting “right to development” as another vapid Third Wordlist attempt in the 1970s and the 1980s on the inevitable path toward neoliberal development and human rights in the 1990s, this chapter focuses on UN bureaucrats working in the field with Africans on UN missions and projects after the Nigerian-Biafran War by using mission and progress reports, and narrative accounts from field workers. In these development projects, a bureaucratization of indifference emerged within UN development circles while UNCHR experts and Igbos struggled with experiences of famine and ethnic cleansing. By envisioning “right to development” as historically bound with both UN projects and missions, as well as Third Worldist intellectual and diplomatic lobbying in the UN, this chapter emphasizes the contentious spaces in which Third World theory ran into the difficulties of practice. Therefore, “right to development” in 1972 was both a culmination of Mbaye’s intellectual work and the failures of intertwining the experiences of famine and death during the Nigerian-Biafran War into Nigerian development projects after 1970.