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CHAIRPERSON

Prof Tim Bunnell, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This paper tells the story of a unique international development program that tried to make a post-imperial geography that revolved around enrolling emerging Asian countries into three tasks: balancing flows of sterling, trusting development to science and technology, and shoring up anti-communist solidarity. This was the Colombo Plan for Cooperative Economic Development in South and Southeast Asia. Drawing on planning and foreign policy archives from the US, UK, Singapore, and HK, this paper traces the imaginative geographies around the Colombo Plan that were produced and promulgated by state elites in the geopolitical centers, as well as the peripheries, of the post-war world system. By examining the circulations, connections, and geopolitical conjunctures across Asia, and particularly as they involved actors in Pakistan, Malaysia, and Singapore, I attempt to develop a geopolitical economic analysis of the early Colombo Plan. I also reflect on what this project means for global or comparative methodologies in the inter-Asian context. This paper is part of ongoing research that examines the making of Asia as a world region through the long history of imagining, financing, and construction of large physical infrastructures.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Majed Akhter is a lecturer in Environment and Society at King’s College London. His PhD on is in Geography from the University of Arizona. Before this, Majed studied Development Economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences and Industrial Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. From 2013 to 2017 he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Indiana University. He was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and has lived and worked in Pakistan, the US, and the UK. At King’s, he lectures and researches on water development, environmental geopolitics, the politics of infrastructure, and the culture and politics of globalization – from the 20th century to the present.

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