Anticolonial world-making: racial justice and global communication governance

This chapter challenges the accepted wisdom that the New World and Information and Communication Order (NWICO) was an episodic moment of Third World resistance against US institutional capture at the tail end of the Cold War. Instead, we offer an alternate periodization within the longer twentieth century of ‘anticolonial world-making’ (Getachew, 2019). Drawing from archival sources, we trace the racial/civilizational hierarchies at play within seemingly technocratic and ‘race neutral’ multilateral organizations. Our analysis shows that consistent calls for postcolonial economic and technological sovereignty were strategically pathologized as political corruption by ‘technologically backward’ third world actors. In revisiting this history of global governance, we do not wish to romanticize the clear limitations of many postcolonial state actors on the domestic front. Nonetheless, we hold that neoliberal telecommunications reform of the 1990s and beyond should be understood as a racial reordering in a long lineage of civilizational/racial justifications for colonial extraction and discipline.