Blockchain Papers

Benjamin Peters

This chapter introduces the most prominent of the Soviet network projects: the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS) Project, its lead visionary Viktor Glushkov, his team, and the surrounding institutional landscape in 1962-1969 are described. The full decentralized and interactive ambitions of the project are described as first formulated, including virtual finance and automated economic planning. A snapshot of the playful even work culture of cyberneticists in Cybertonia suggests a local culture of camaraderie, resistance, and cleverness, despite the visions of building a single nationwide decentralized command economy. Initial informal institutional obstacles, including a broken alliance between two prominent research institutes, Glushkov’s Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev and Fedorenko’s Central Economic Mathematical Institute in Moscow, are also described.

Анна Олеговна Шестопалова

The high volatility in financial markets in developing and developed countries increases investors interest in new forms of investment assets. One of these forms are cryptocurrency and the most common of them -Bitcoin. The article examines the attractive features of virtual currency and crypto-technology. The article presents the statistical and comparative analysis of the spread and use of Bitcoin. The article identifies the threats and risks arising from the decentralization of the payment system.

Paruedee Nguitragool, Jürgen Rüland

Neo-functionalist scholarship has made one of the first systematic attempts to explain why and under what circumstances regional organizations act cohesively in global forums. Known as the externalization hypothesis, Schmitter (1969; 1971) and Nye (1967; 1971) have argued that with progressive regional integration member states of a regional grouping tend to develop an interest in becoming a cohesive actor vis-à-vis third states. The motivation to centralize policies towards the extra-regional world is largely defensive: to safe-guard the economic benefits reaped from closer regional cooperation (Haas and Rowe 1973: 4), to reduce external dependence of member states and, at the same time, protect their foreign policy autonomy ( ibid . 5). In a mutually reinforcing relationship, externalization is also believed to foster regional integration insofar as developing joint positions towards outsiders creates a need for increased internal consultation, communication, coordination, harmonization and, hence, institutionalization ( ibid . 6). Externalization, in other words, has a dual effect: it helps to curtail the “exogenous determination of the external conditions of regional organizations” and, vice versa, creates conducive conditions for deepening regional integration (Schmitter 1971: 244; Jorgensen-Dahl 1977: 36). In an empirical study Haas and Rowe tested eighteen regional organizations on externalization (Haas and Rowe 1973). In their research design they posited that primarily the material institutional properties such as functional specificity, homogeneity and autonomous central authority would influence the cohesiveness of regional organizations in global forums. The more functionally specific, the more homogenous the membership and the more centralized the organizational structure, they argued, the greater the likelihood is that a regional organization will act cohesively in global forums. By contrast, regional organizations with a broad functional scope, a diverse membership and a decentralized organizational structure are expected to be less united in global institutions. As the measure for cohesiveness they used the voting behavior of regional organizations in the United Nations General Assembly ( ibid .).

Dmitri Kosten

No abstract is available for this record.

Oksana Snizhko

The article is dedicated to critical analysis of competitive conceptual approaches to determining the essence of financial system. The system establishing element of the financial system resource concept is understanding finance as economic relations of formation, allocation and use of financial resource funds with the purpose of performing functions and tasks of the state/company and provision of conditions for expanded reproduction. According to this approach, the notion «financial system» is further determination of finance and shall be interpreted as the totality of relatively separated but mutually related spheres and links of relations, in the process of which centralized and decentralized financial resource funds are created and used. The institutional concept of the financial system considers finance as a social institution that organizes determined ways of interactions between individuals or their separate groups in the society. Its target purpose is to minimize transaction expenses arising at exchange of binding requirements for real resources in the economy. Under this approach, the financial system is understood as an aggregate of means — financial institutions and markets — which result from the evolution of social contracts and with the help of which intertime decisions and interactions are fulfilled and coordination of savings and investments in the economy is performed. The article shows that the alternative theoretical models of financial system contain structural elements heterogeneous by content and nature of interrelations, with various properties. The differences between them concern methodological approach to distinguishing qualitative signs which determine the essential nature and structure of the financial system; mechanism of formation and functioning of financial relations; nature of distribution and scheme of financial resources flow; the nature of functions of the financial system in the economic environment; special mechanism of effect of the financial system upon the economic system. Considering the theoretical and methodological differences between the resource and institutional concepts of the financial system, the author offers to divide them into two theoretical models — financial system concept and the concept of the system of finance

Mario Cimoli

During import substitution, the institutional structure was attributed to support for the industrialization process, production needs and investment for the development of large projects. In the 1970s, once the industrialization phase had been consolidated, highly specialized sectoral institutions prevailed, providing solutions to new management requirements for scientific personnel and supporting critical industrial sectors – electric and nuclear energy, oil and water – at the same time driving the scientific and technological activities schedule within national institutions. Government policies were important in order to carry out specific projects, considering both the operational and financial aspects. Liberalization policies, privatization of public enterprises and public subsidy to support demand for technological services have modified the modes of linkages and interaction between production system and institutions. During the 1980s and 1990s new institutions appeared and the older ones changed their activities and organizational configuration. Given this, particular attention is dedicated in the present chapter to the bridging institutions. These institutions are dedicated to support services for firms and other institutions (such as standardization, quality and certification, particularly to SMEs) and the reinforcement of inter-management activities. Bridging institutions have several origins, and financing can be public, private or mixed. The analysis is also devoted to the role played by the SEP-CONACYT Centres, a research system formed by different specialized institutions and decentralized in different regions of the country. Its regional distribution and linkages with a high heterogeneity of firms contribute to shape a specific intermediate structure supporting the innovation process. Within this institutional framework, our principal interest is the nature of networks that have been created and the features of the linkages generated by institutions and firms.

Scott R. Paeth

The paroxysms of economic pain through which the world has been suffering for the past four years offer any number of possible vectors for analysis—from economic theory, to public policy, to sociology, to international affairs. An examination of the economic crisis through any of these lenses would reveal a great deal both about how we've come to be here, and how we might (or might not) find our way out of it. The “Great Recession” is almost unique in modern political economics: a large-scale, catastrophic global economic meltdown, which may well persist for some time to come.1There have, of course, been other economic crises, recessions of greater or lesser duration, as well as global crises, such as the so-called “Asian Flu” of the mid-1990s, but the Great Recession has come to be so named because its impact has been unlike anything the world has experienced since the 1930s (see Krugman 2008; Reich 2010; Stiglitz 2010). And given the increasingly interconnected and codependent nature of the global economic system, the negative effects of this downturn are affecting a much greater proportion of the world's population than the Great Depression. The reverberations continue, as we see in the ongoing European financial crisis; but the epicenter of the earthquake, in September of 2008, was the result of a conscious set of decisions and policies that led inexorably to a wide-scale economic meltdown. And the singular characteristic of that set of decisions and policies was the belief that economics had surpassed the realm of the merely human, to become a transcendent mode of thought, capable of near-omniscience regarding human actions and their consequences—Issac Asimov's “psychohistory” come to life, and given breath at Princeton and the University of Chicago.2This moment of economic crisis has intersected with another moment, one of renewed interest in the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr's wide-ranging intellectual curiosity touched frequently on questions of ethics and economics, particularly during the period of his own economic crisis in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash. Niebuhr's insights during that period, which formed the core of what came to be known as his “Christian realist” approach to issues of Christianity and public morality, have something to say to us as we grapple with the questions of justice, economics, and social reform in the wake of the 2008 collapse.In the aftermath of the economic crisis, and in response to its ongoing depredations, two mass movements (each boasting greater or lesser degrees of authenticity) have emerged on the American stage. The first, dubbed the “Tea Party” movement, emerged as a reaction to policies pursued by both the Bush and Obama administrations to solve the financial crisis—in particular, by offering relief to the banking and mortgage industries. Strongly libertarian in its ideological motivation, and often rooted in a particular vision of small government, states' rights, and nationalism, this movement directed its hostility primarily toward the Obama administration, seeing in many of its policies the roots of an incipient totalitarianism.3At root, the Tea Party's ideology is a reaction to what it sees as an overreaching federal government, which is believed to have caused the financial crisis of 2008 by coddling irresponsible and unreliable home buyers on the one hand and subsidizing a venal and corrupt culture of Wall Street traders on the other (see Berlet 2011). There is a vital streak of middle-class resentment that runs through the Tea Party movement, which sees itself as representing “ordinary” Americans who work hard, pay their debts, and don't ask for government handouts.4 Demographically, it is predominantly white, male, and older (Ashbee 2011, 159–60). From the perspective of its adherents, the financial crisis was the result of government redistribution of wealth to the underserving, either in the form of social services and subsidies for the poor or in the form of bailouts to the financial industry (158). Additionally, there is a strong theme of personal antipathy toward Barack Obama and doubt about the legitimacy of his presidency (157).While it is difficult to pinpoint one branch of the Tea Party movement that could be said to speak for the whole, the movement does seem to coalesce around a set of general principles and positions. One concise expression of these positions is illustrated by the “Contract from America” (2009; not to be confused with the 1990s' Republican Party “Contract with America”). The document begins with an expression of a set of very broad principles, encapsulated as “Individual Liberty,” “Limited Government,” and “Economic Freedom,” and then moves on to a set of specific agenda items including requiring all federal legislation to include a statement of constitutional authority requiring a balanced budget amendment, a cap on government spending, and a repeal of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.What is particularly striking about this agenda, given the Tea Party's claim to be a reform movement emerging from outside of the corrupt infrastructure of both political parties, is the virtual identity of its agenda with that of the libertarian wing of the Republican party.5 This is not to suggest that the Tea Party necessarily works well with the Republican establishment. On the contrary, as Edward Ashbee observes: The Tea Party movement is largely drawn from independent conservatives or “debranded” Republicans. The clashes between the movement and the Republican “establishment” around some of the institutional arrangements that govern the party and structure electoral processes have added to the anger and rage that the movement feels towards the Obama administration. (2011, 164) Nevertheless, rather than embodying a movement of the politically disaffected, the Tea Party looks much more like a set of organizations designed to co-opt and appropriate the genuine disaffection of many American voters and channel that disaffection toward the standard issue Republican policy goals—if not necessarily toward the Republican party itself—at least in economic matters.6 Its ability to do this largely relies on the coupling of legitimate economic grievances in the wake of the financial crisis with an essentially libertarian economic philosophy, heavily seasoned with class and racial resentment (Bertlet 2011, 13–14).The second movement, which has come to be known as the “Occupy Wall Street” or “99%” movement, emerged in the summer of 2011 as a direct challenge to the perceived oligarchy controlling the key policy makers in both political parties.7 The Occupy Wall Street movement's origins can be traced to a campaign by editors of the magazine AdBusters, who sought to capitalize on the Tahrir square protests in Egypt to launch a similar movement of nonviolent resistance in the United States. The target of the protest was, as they saw it, the corporate manipulation of democratic institutions (Schwartz 2011).Spreading quickly via social media, the initial Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan gave rise to an expanding circle of protests around the United States, and ultimately around the world. While inspired by the AdBusters appeal, the participants in the Occupy protests did not organize themselves around any set of leaders or institutions, but rather strongly and self-consciously resisted such formal organizational trappings, refusing for the most part to even offer any demands or proposals. Rather, they organized around a widely shared sentiment of a fundamental conflict between the interests of the “99%,” those disenfranchised and excluded from genuine participation in the institutions and structures of governance, and the “1%,” the very wealthy and powerful who have the ears of the president, the Congress, and the economic institutions of society.The refusal to issue demands or to propose particular policies was to a large extent rooted in the belief among many of the protest participants that the ultimate solution to this conflict was to destroy capitalism root and branch, replacing it with … something. What that something might be was, of course, never specified. And the organizational structure of the Occupy protests was such that it almost by definition couldn't be specified, since the kind of consensus required to develop plans for genuine alternatives was to the organizational of what was may a and movement was 2011). social in the of among movements in from around the world. And any participants and small out in a from to public to both and the of 2011, the Occupy protests had to a as the and of the in the financial of many of the of the was with to the protests the and their ability to in large in many the to and on their to they with and that in some led to This is in striking to the Tea Party which both more in and more and to the that in some the the for this in may have been from the perspective of policy it that the of the two in the Tea Party directed its primarily toward political institutions, seeing the of the social as the root of the economic crisis, the Occupy movement directed its anger primarily at economic institutions, seeing and as an of the of the Occupy movement sought to the from particular and sought to itself as an way of as a in modern way of that in to both the economic and political of oligarchy and that they have come to social life, both in the United and the world. There was, in the Occupy movement, a about human social that was in both its organizational structure and its the Tea Party a form of social and resentment in both its and is a of two two strongly movements that have emerged in response to a genuine and both as to the Great ultimately to offer a of either the or the to the economic While of the rooted in very and political principles, both the to both the and the for that are emerging from the moment at is in this way that Reinhold Niebuhr's thought can offer The of the past years has his the public but in to issues of policy and the of the United in the international is not for that one of the key of the has been his of American which the of an American of its own in with the Niebuhr's touched on many of social life, and much of his was given to the of questions of economic in the of the Great of the from that period, with his of human and political life, can offer some possible for a response to the Great many the Great Recession those that are at the of Niebuhr's The Great Recession came about as the result of and on the part of the political and economic who to the and of the and for a life, in to themselves at the time those for a and to for the very they themselves and they to a financial that for those who had the least in the of the the for the mortgage crisis all the themselves from the of their actions through the of (see 2011, a given by on the crisis in the mortgage had been to the on to because the at in the thought they … they all and the for an the of it for Wall Street to their mortgage and ultimately the The … was that most of the participants had much more to the than to the was a of economic and the was the was in had at an and the global financial was on the of 2011, The of the time is in the of a who the financial The is about to the … in the of all these necessarily all of the of those And of course, the did the was never to a that could for any of time in the but to a structure that would the financial services industry to home for it could And this structure was designed to a the to the with the own And the of their in as the banking industry was out to the of was to be to in to in the that they would the of who in of the do they the and it in the of that the financial in the a at in an for the how about their the have to their own as the come is don't of any but the and and to even they are not the or the most with the in to these heavily by American the banking and financial services industry has from the economic of the of the through the period of economic downturn since that the crisis has two movements as similar and as the Tea Party and the Occupy a similar set of at in his own of the from that period, often heavily by is of the of both political and economic in on the of an The political in any is by the which the most of it be economic or the ability to the processes of the the is to to this of an in itself as the government, a and a of it is to the of the of the to its and it The either itself to be or at to the that it either by some or by an of the to the of in and to the of the The ability of a to its political on the of its claim to government and the of to that the Great and the financial crisis from in which economic to claim a of for their of political for their own (see 2010). the intellectual of a of economic and political policy makers has been the of a at by to both and of the since a all the in wealth to the of the past years has been for (see during of and it was to this course, many did during that period, and many came to themselves to be as they their and the of their by and in the aftermath of and increasingly economic crises, in the crisis of September 2008, it was possible to such a that in small to the that both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street the of and the of perceived social with even the and the to a great for as as the could be that a market could not all of us to with of economic it the interests of those who themselves by of the of at the of the great of participants in the that in the of a ideology of the had to be rooted in a vision of both the of human in the social and a of its genuine in response to by to and then claim for an that an industry that such social be as a of for the of the social of our This is a for our of libertarian financial The us is how we may to the of our in to between economic on the one and those that offer ultimately social on the is to of some of the in Niebuhr's work that are of in the of the ongoing financial crisis, and to what they may as we in the of emerging from to Niebuhr's was the of as a in all human social his was an not of human for While may have themselves the to rise their and are for the of human and to the of those of and that form the root of social Niebuhr's of is particularly given the in the to the financial it in The and of There is a of in which the human its and and itself all does not the and of its and itself to be the of its own the of its own and of its own The is in an form in all human but it to greater among those and who have a more than of social to the which to the of either the or some of human and is the for which has as its The does not and for more in to itself does not itself as or or and to its in nature and in The financial crisis is a of the that the of and can do it is that in large on the of of between those with great and those with our is to our own at the of such as large the to the is the of of to the and the toward is much to to more than anything to a movement for financial one that traders for and that they have a financial in the in the of their The ability to become by around with or even for the has us a set of among the most Niebuhr's of the of with the of is the human to that or one has in is the result of own work and the suffering of is never the result of or but is and the result of their own that this is fundamental to the of in The of the and are by and The and conscious of their interests with general interests and … is in the of The are more than is that can be in of the of by that it something to the of the of are greater than could be the of is to the of of the that and that general interests are the they The of this in their own is the belief that the are to for their own the other hand it has been the of to the for the of and then to of what they have been the to was illustrated in the of the Tea Party movement, the by on the of the in that the government was by for policies to their and that the government the to those who can the of the was by many of the traders on the which is given their for the that it was the government and the home buyers who for the crisis, rather than traders who had of such as to be to a in The that these are what the of in the never the for and his the core of is the that it is a to us from the of our own the that those like to the what they to that the crisis was but their their of course, both and there are of from those on the political as its and refusal to many have Occupy Wall Street as a and set of it is possible that the refusal to is rooted in the of in a very many Wall Street traders to their own in the The belief that one even is on the and of the is not a of but of the it be that what and the Tea to is a of legitimate The of by out and was a very issue in the aftermath of the And the has been in a way by the Occupy as the government was on part an this us to another the of the of a economic the of the it is possible to one that is to a greater or lesser in which the and the of are shared in a is not at all that this has been given the it in our political the on economic in the Occupy movement has the for the about this the to such questions be One that form of can be in is because the of are to the which they are the of any particular in the of on the interests and at in the to it. be in What the Occupy movement can be given for is the about what the demands of be the both in the United and While one may at some of the more of social in the Occupy these protests the for the about that was to the of the And this was from by the political of the to and including Barack of Niebuhr's most are at the of with which was during the as this was by to be rooted in and of with the of the human particularly regarding questions of class interest and social While many for the of the poor and a to a more and they believed that the way to do so was through the of rather than through the of in An of The of the to the of to is a of and The that to by the of and that as well as to that that do so than but that the the which is to the has not it but that it has and more that the of the is not in but the to to the and this to the by are politically as as they are the had had and more its approach to the political would have been and to the social never the between and the of an seem to that even in the there is a in his which the that is in his this form of in a political which ultimately that movements for reform and and that the in a that the to in the of even a and could a of in political by specific policies designed to can these of Christianity by the of political that have been at the of much of the Occupy Wall Street all of the movement's its and refusal to any specific demands or it be by one or the other political a the ability to genuine policy agenda to it for political or economic institutions to to or to many of Occupy Wall there to be interest in genuine social reform than in their own fundamental in to the corrupt institutional of government and economic such of may be they ultimately the political and economic structures the movement and the in would be to ask how such a set of one on a more than one who is to a genuine policy even with the of the political and economic with the of a set of social for those who have been by the of the economic While an in us of our for it ultimately the and become politically those who the more of it is to grapple with the of the political and economic as they find theme has to do with the between and the of This is a of which Reinhold was given the of many during the to the of or that the in never their because they are Rather, be through the of by the form of has to with the of the of social and political in on the of an that in political a of is to that even the most political policy to of a conflict of and of interests in which is because are a does not the root of conflict which is to be in the corporate of as the and nature of is not something in human a and more social a more social be to all of and conflict in human This has been one of the of the Occupy Wall Street movement its in a of and has that it has not been to for the of specific policy many of the movement, this has been as a and the it has to the that the of the the Occupy movement has about economic and oligarchy on the movement's ability to itself the the of its and its refusal to with questions of the of its ultimate was a that the Tea Party either quickly or from the The Tea Party was on by powerful political who saw in the ideological of the Tea Party an to themselves or their own a the Tea Party very quickly both among in government is not given that they merely the of the to as well as financial and may be of the Occupy movement to such of out of a not to be such come with a very strong at the of the the movement have been a in the the political to legitimate for social an that can the of in the of a more more and more for the in on the of an of the American class of his become conscious of its and its a to the of and to develop a This of and and is may be for this that a such as the are to have to the The class may many its ultimate because its social has not become and because its is either in or in intellectual ultimately to be we from the Great Recession a more and or and what these two protest movements in that The small toward economic experienced in may us that reform is or that we to with the of the financial services the market may so to and the economic and we do not deal with the of what for the of a we find much time has in the of the another economic The is not but and we the and political to to the of the financial crisis there is to that we be to do so in the

Johannes Weyer

The paper deals with hybrid systems, where human actors and non-human agents meet and interact. Different from most of the literature on autonomous technology, which mainly deals with the question of agency of non-humans, the paper puts forward the assumption that the release of smart technology may lead to a deconstruction of order or even a regime change, thus raising the question of how order emerges in hybrid systems. Discussing different sociological concepts, the paper identifies two modes of governance: central control and decentralized selforganization. However, smart technology allows implementing different system's architectures, some of which may go beyond this traditional distinction. Referring to a case study on collision avoidance in aviation (and especially the mid-air collision at Ueberlingen in 2002), the paper shows that hybrid systems create new opportunities, but entail new risks as well. The release of smart technology seems to intensify well-known problems of automation, especially when systems get out of control. Aviation is one of the societal fields, where experiments with new modes of governance currently take place that combine features of central control and decentralized self-organization.

Andrea de Giorgio, G. Ingravallo, Claudio Roveda

No abstract is available for this record.

B. Balamurugan, T. Poongodi, M. R. Manu, S. Karthikeyan · 5 authors

The moving image archive of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) includes a copy of the film The Double Day (1975), cataloged in the series Moving Images Relating to International Development Programs and Activities, 1979–1991, a collection of more than eight hundred titles “created to provide information on assistance programs supported by the Agency for International Development (AID).”1 Yet, The Double Day does not, in fact, directly depict or engage with any specific development or aid initiative. Instead, the film—directed by US-based Brazilian filmmaker Helena Solberg as part of the International Women’s Film Project collective and described as “the first Latin American feminist documentary”—examines the gendered dynamics of paid and unpaid labor through the testimonies of women from Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico.2 Its presence in the USAID archive is likely a consequence of its funding history, having received support from the Inter-American Foundation, a USAID-affiliated entity; the development agencies of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; the United Nations Development Program; and US philanthropist Calvin Cafritz.3These transnational funding structures not only enabled the film’s production but also determined its archival destination, which renders legible its place within the history of international development.4 The Double Day’s institutional trajectory reflects the shifting configurations of aid, gender, and media during a historic moment when women were being repositioned at the center of what Arturo Escobar has described as development’s “regimes of visuality.”5 Especially relevant to The Double Day’s production and exhibition was the international institutional framework of Women in Development (WID). Emerging in the early 1970s and culminating in United Nations’ proclamation of 1975 as International Women’s Year, WID emphasized women’s participation in the global economy as both an index and mechanism of development. Indeed, The Double Day premiered at the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, held in Mexico City.6 Within this context, the film forms part of a broader trajectory of media use by international organizations that intensified during the 1970s—as best exemplified by Media Habitat, a collection of 236 documentary films commissioned by the United Nations to represent urban and rural development initiatives for the 1976 Habitat Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver. As a policy-shaping initiative, Media Habitat primarily featured films from the Global South intended not only to illustrate but also to help codify standardized audiovisual markers of “underdevelopment” that determined access to the emerging global economic order and to international aid.7Framed in relation to these international institutions and their operations, The Double Day could similarly be considered “development media”—exemplifying the type of nonfiction media produced and distributed outside of the commercial film circuits whose aspects and subcategories have been variously described in scholarship as nontheatrical, useful, sponsored, institutional, industrial, educational, or nonprofessional/amateur.8 Scholars working in this area have emphasized the institutional contexts of such media’s production and exhibition infrastructures as shaping its instrumentalized effects. From a feminist perspective, such an approach is crucial to grappling with the broader question of how “gender impacts [these works’] shape, content, and trajectories.”9 Yet we also argue that, taken in isolation, the institutional and infrastructural contexts are insufficient to account for the complex relationship between media and development, potentially not only limiting our understanding of the reach and impact of development but also distorting our interpretive conclusions. For example, to categorize The Double Day as “development media” is to overlook the film’s place within Solberg’s directorial oeuvre, as well as within the histories of both transnational women’s filmmaking and radical Latin American documentary cinema to which it simultaneously belongs. Such exclusive framing is especially limiting given that women globally were disproportionately engaged in nonfiction production throughout the twentieth century—sometimes by political choice but more often due to structural exclusions from fiction filmmaking. Even in nonfiction historiography, however, institutional media has remained particularly marginal, reinforcing hierarchies that separate such works from the aesthetic and authorial frameworks through which film history has been constructed.10 This marginalization not only tends to erase women’s contributions but also presumes a “weak” or derivative authorship, rendering these films unworthy of the interpretive attention needed to apprehend their aesthetic and political complexity.11 The same dynamic is likely to structure assumptions about “development media” as well.Categorizing The Double Day exclusively within this category would further prompt us to assume top-down institutional analyses that have been characteristic of both institutional media methodologies and the scholarship on development at large. This, in turn, would risk obscuring this film’s radical Marxist approach to women’s labor as well as its concrete contribution to activism and its attendant grassroot structures. In Mexico City, The Double Day became a catalyst for feminist solidarity in practice when one of the film’s protagonists, Bolivian activist and trade unionist Domitila Barrios de Chungara, was invited to participate in the Tribune of Non-Governmental Organizations held alongside the official UN conference.12 There, Barrios de Chungara challenged Western feminist priorities by reframing the debate around labor, class, and imperialism, helping to articulate a shared Third World feminist agenda that significantly departed from the developmentalist vision of the United Nations and USAID.13 Seen through the lens of activist media, The Double Day helped forge transnational solidarity networks by enabling information exchange across the diverse voices that shaped its making—from the women featured in the film to the activists who circulated it—revealing a considerably more dynamic interplay between institutional and grassroots or contingent media practices.Moreover, the film’s Latin American context—reflected in Solberg’s formation in Brazil as the only woman in Cinema Novo, its focus on women from across the region, and its premiere and key reception in Mexico City—requires grappling with the regional specificities of the very notion of development in its multiple iterations.14 Far from being an epistemological and political framework imposed solely by the Global North, both the practices of development and the theoretical foundations of developmentalism (understood as a broad and polysemic set of discourses) were shaped through the active participation of Latin American economists.15 Within this iteration, underdevelopment, as a constitutive notion of developmentalism, became central to a distinctly critical strand, which by the late 1960s became known as the dependency theory.16 This same approach is reflected in some of the best-known Latin American radical film manifestos of the time, arising precisely from the same milieus to which Solberg belonged.17These various considerations of the film’s history illustrate the methodological challenges confronting feminist scholars seeking to assess the impact of development on media projects, theories, and practices. To disregard the developmentalist context of such works by emphasizing their political aesthetics and affects risks reproducing a romanticized narrative of heroic resistance (albeit from a feminist perspective). Yet to engage exclusively with their institutional and material infrastructures risks naturalizing developmentalism’s political and epistemological foundations at the expense of the goals and beliefs of the many women who participated in these projects. The contradictions and ambivalences that animate such histories call for feminist frameworks capable of holding both institutional complicity and radical possibility in view.This challenge resonates with ongoing debates about the politics of the archive and what Allyson Field has termed “the practice of informed speculation.”18 As she reminds us, feminist, queer, and decolonial methodologies have long taught us to “press at the limits” of the archive to “inoculate our scholarship against our evidence’s afflictions.”19 The concern that the evidence we draw on in our analysis reproduces the very structures and blind spots of the dominant ideology and therefore shapes and delimits our interpretation becomes particularly urgent when engaging the developmentalist media corpus. Informed speculation offers an alternative by inviting the experimental, creative, and speculative rewriting of history, mobilizing the archive “in a project that runs counter to the original purpose, or the imperative to preserve, or the conditions that led to erasure.”20 Yet, as Field cautions, such speculative gestures must remain grounded in a deep and “intimate familiarity with the archive” that we are working with and against. Building on this imperative, we suggest that the developmentalist archive, in particular, demands expansion and critical reconsideration in ways that unsettle the very disciplinary frameworks through which it has been studied as well as the larger institutional contexts for such knowledge production.Our focus on The Double Day in the opening of this introduction thus foregrounds the entanglements of institutional and grassroots forces, local and international contexts, structural and interpersonal relations, and creative and economic factors that have shaped not only this film but the broader ecosystem of development media projects—and their preservation—over time. Addressing such a constellation involves transgressing methodologically entrenched divisions between political economy and aesthetics, between material infrastructures and affective regimes; reckoning with divergent periodizations across film history and world economics; and situating these within the local specificities of women’s movements and international institutional programs. It also demands attentiveness to the coexistence of multiple, and sometimes competing, understandings of development—each historically, geographically, and ideologically situated.We imagine this special issue as an opening toward a critical dialogue, not only about how such an approach might be enacted in practice but also about the far-reaching ways development paradigms have shaped both our objects of study and the contours of the field itself. The decision to center institutionally sponsored films across all the essays in this issue is deliberate and enables us to highlight institutional critique as a vital methodological imperative within our analytical framework. Created within the frameworks of international organizations, state agencies, or NGOs, these films’ histories make legible the institutional logics that underwrite their production. Yet our critique does not stop at these specific entities. Rather, we argue for a broader interrogation of the political conditions and institutional infrastructures that shape media and knowledge production more generally. This includes contemporary corporations embedded in the digital platform economy, from streaming services to the rapid expansion of AI. Equally critical is a reflexive examination of academia itself, where departments of economics, political science, and centers for development have played a formative role in producing and legitimizing developmentalist theories and policy frameworks. While the humanities and arts have at times offered critical alternatives, they have also frequently mirrored and reinforced many of the same developmentalist assumptions. A feminist analysis of the nexus between development and media must therefore unsettle not only dominant archives but also the institutional and disciplinary foundations of our own scholarly practices.As scholars, we share the complex position of navigating the same tensions between institutional complicity and emancipatory aspiration as many of the media-makers whose work we study. Mirroring our subjects is also the transnational, collective mode of this special issue’s own production as it emerges from an ongoing informal working group we have sustained over several years. While relying on institutional and disciplinary affordances—such as university funding for conferences or access to academic publishing platforms—we have been working toward creating a community that exceeds, and often resists, the prevailing logics of our academic institutions. Our aim has been to create a space for shared inquiry and mutual support that pushes back against disciplinary siloing and technocratic neoliberal assessment modes of both labor and knowledge production—and this certainly extends to our experience collaborating with the journal editors throughout the publication process. Our goal has been to examine both the persistence and variability of developmentalism, understood as what Gustavo Esteva calls a “powerful but fragile semantic constellation,” as a conceptual formation that has historically inspired, legitimized, and mobilized media projects across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.21 And gendered biopolitics, from population control to gender mainstreaming, have remained integral to development policies and media practices, recurring across formats from institutional newsreels to film festivals.We share the conviction that, far beyond the history of nonfiction institutional media, development (as both a broad ideological project and a network of material and institutional practices) and developmentalism (as a set of discourses and theoretical models associated with development) have exerted a far-reaching influence on film and media cultures at large. As such, they must be treated as a major force in shaping global film and media systems and also the many ongoing assumptions behind their critical discourses. The discipline of communication studies was founded on modernization theory governed by Cold War goals of dissemination of Western liberal democracy around the world, while “an area studies framework allowed compartmentalizing Western and non-Western outcomes of technologies that were always claimed to be universal.”22 Despite critique from postcolonial and critical race studies, many of these frameworks have remained foundational for media theory.23 In historical scholarship, as we increasingly move beyond “modernity” as a dominant conceptual anchor, engaging with practices and discourses of development opens more precise analytical pathways. These film and media’s entanglements with the logics of and economic and the associated with as well as their conceptual underdevelopment, and impact in as diverse as and of media aesthetic and paradigms in film and film and funding are developmentalist assumptions to the they to underwrite the narrative and logics of and global media from the structure of the film to the cultures of argue that a examination of the historical entanglements between film and developmentalist aesthetics, modes of as well as infrastructures and critical the and that our contemporary media is a of the historical contours of development as a field of inquiry embedded within a of some of the methodologies by the featured in this special a of this complex history, to the larger at in media, development, and gender all its development a it as an of be with practices as divergent as and in In as we work on this the of the of the USAID the ideological that have the history of international the and of this on the global its a from development as a global practice and as an institutional and which over the has as a with its own media Yet or does not erase the historical impact of these the contradictions they have reflected and over the as the of development several crucial to the economic theories of development initiatives to and through the of the development an international policy framework at from the Global to the of the Global the by the political role of and the of the International the on was challenged by dependency theory and at development as global structural the neoliberal of the the Programs by the and World imposed and as conditions for and forms of assistance became known as the major markers for international development development has moving beyond economic to such as the Human Development and the Development and from international organizations such as the United Nations to a broader network of These frameworks increasingly of and liberal of and with what in many ways to various while the of the to development’s epistemological more scholarship has toward a of its and material the field has to a of and critical by and scholars, which development as a dynamic of conceptual and political to these the studies in this special issue call for sustained analysis in place of In we draw from a of and that in of of gender and to this special issue engage that and from Mexico to contemporary specific local historical of global distinctly feminist methodologies as well as attention to studies that this issue a in the global history of development on and documentary work in Mexico how early women infrastructures as of while US films an early of state and transnational on a outside the Global as the of developmentalist both the and markers of development media, its to the and Latin central grounded in archival also women’s in transnational and the methodological of archives on study of the series to a a digital media not by but by women not as but as subjects and within circuits of neoliberal and the aesthetics and of how development’s has models of to contemporary neoliberal paradigms of and analysis how digital and gender and practices, discourses on and their of these essays the of some of the historical of developmentalist as the question of the role of the state within such on a notion of economic as a and the dominant of development that the state as the for and through infrastructural projects. This understanding of development was shared across both of the as well as in the Third The United and the increasingly mobilized international in the of the modes of international at the postcolonial of policy and ideological These programs were at the expansion of their and of while with the and decolonial of The conceptual between modernization and development that the Cold in of and hierarchies of that long and As an of postcolonial their role as of international aid concern about the of Western development projects. In alternative across the Global South that to structural between and through policies of and In many they were further the global structures. In Latin for example, this approach was through organizations such as the United Nations for Latin and the both developmentalist projects and their have taken many forms historically, and they have and they have been to a of projects, and postcolonial and development has been and in ways and with frequently political While many of these alternative frameworks the embedded in dominant Western they often technocratic and assumptions. gender and gender as for the of to be shaped by This becomes particularly in the media that of development where women frequently a crucial associated with and women were as both the subjects and of their participation in the and labor often as the index of In this study of from the 1970s how women were as of this as these about women’s urban and recurring and of a within the own of and critique that official examination of archives and enables a feminist interrogation of their mobilizing a of the in the of contribution to this issue similarly the of a dynamic within as well as across ideological the of women’s and the media of the and as active in labor and as integral to the technocratic women became of as their labor remained a of and analysis and archival with attention to the specific of and It also transnational that as a and affective a nexus of and practices through which gender, media, and developmentalism one film not as a but as part of the of alongside and work a broader concern of this special media as a of developmentalist projects. 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The an by this dynamic as of the from the Global South are to engage with the developmentalist assumptions funding models that their similarly the as a in developmentalist media history by the of and centers on the Film a between of and the attention toward the and labor by and work was foundational the of and the of audiovisual aid, as both a of development projects and a critical for their the in this issue argue for a with media, gender, and developmentalism as an field of that is and shaped by feminist and methodologies and that challenge the entanglements between academic knowledge production and and technocratic development And while methodological these dynamics at the structural the of feminist in media and cinema by this the very a