In this session, Paul Stubbs will discuss work in progress on, and some of the dilemmas of, his proposed book-length manuscript exploring aspects of socialist Yugoslavia’s relations with the Global South during “the long 1970s.” The long 1970s are conceived as an “interregnum” or “open historical period” in which the collective voice and agency of the Global South was increasingly assertive and cohesive in global governance and geopolitics at a time when a global capitalist order built upon neoliberalism, structural adjustment, and a move away from the UN towards international financial institutions was beginning to take shape. As well as outlining the proposed structure of the book, Stubbs will concentrate on two chapters in particular: 1) the introduction, outlining the “intermesticity” of socialist Yugoslavia’s policies in a global conjunctural context, and 2) the changing nature of support for decolonial liberation movements in the 1970s, including support for the Palestinian struggle and against apartheid in Southern Africa. One of Stubbs’s key concerns is how to fit Yugoslavia’s own ”long 1970s”—arguably the period in which the Non-Aligned Movement was most influential—into a more global form, stretching roughly from the student protests of 1968 to the debt and austerity of the 1980s, encompassing the 1974 constitution, the death of Tito, the second oil crisis, and the crisis of developmentalism.
Paul Stubbs is a UK-born sociologist and activist who has lived and worked in Croatia since 1993. He is an emeritus senior research fellow at the Institute of Economics in Zagreb. Stubbs’s work focuses on policy translation, decoloniality, international actors in social policy and social development, new green-left municipalism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the history of Yugoslav socialism. He edited the book Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Imaginaries (McGill-Queens University Press, 2023) and is the author of The New International Economic Order: Lives and Afterlives, published in September 2025 by Routledge.
Dino Pašalić, Europe’s Futures Project Director will moderate the discussion.
