Brokers-of-NAM · Brokers of Non-Alignment: Biographical and Network Approaches to the Making of the Third World

Brokers-of-NAM will make a groundbreaking contribution to the literature on the Cold War by analyzing the history of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) through the lens of transnational political networks and relying on an innovative methodological approach combining biographical and network analysis. It will study the lives of five characters who played a central part in the global politics of non-alignment by crafting political networks across Latin America, the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, and by mobilizing political parties, movements, and trade unions on the basis of common ideas of neutralism, anticolonialism, and international solidarity during the Cold War. Drawing on personal archives, writings, photographic collections and the press, Brokers-of-NAM will study their biographies, produce structured data about their political networks, and draw on network analysis to analyze how they were composed and structured, and how they shifted over time and across multiple geographies. The project will produce a truly polycentric narrative of the NAM from the perspective of actors who participated in the making of non-alignment and who have nevertheless remained anonymous. It will change our understanding of the politics of the Cold War by showing how local agents shaped a global movement through transnational connections. It will bring about a groundbreaking leap in the methodological toolkit of Cold War history, introducing the best practices in digital history, facilitating cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer and implementing a data model and a methodological approach that will help increase data interoperability and reusability in future digital history projects.