Calls for the reform of global governance institutions persist, some seventy years after Bandung; fifty years after the introduction of Special Drawing Rights; nearly thirty years after a worldwide movement for a debt Jubilee; and amid today’s renewed calls for a New International Economic Order and reform to institutions like the International Monetary Fund. How should we understand the apparently perpetual push for reform within global governance institutions? What were the technical, epistemological, and political forces that motivated, or impeded, reform efforts in the past? And how should we assess these many historical cycles of reformism and their results for the global governance system we have today?

As part of our Histories and Futures of Global Governance Reform initiative, on Friday, February 21 from 12-1:30PM ET we will host an online conversation between Adriana Abdenur, Richard Kozul-Wright, Jamie Martin, and Quinn Slobodian on whether and how institutional reforms can be made meaningful. We’ll discuss what historians might learn from the concerns of today’s policymakers and reform advocates, and what reformers might take away from longer-term historical analyses. Please register to attend.

Speakers:

Adriana Abdenur is Co-President of the Global Fund for a New Economy. She has served as Special Advisor (International Affairs) to the President of Brazil and was co-founder and Executive Director of an independent non-profit institute dedicated to issues of climate change and international affairs, with programmes in climate justice, global governance and international cooperation. She has also worked for or had research and teaching assignments with other organizations, including non-profit organizations, the United Nations University, Sciences Po (Paris), Catholic University (Rio de Janeiro) as well as Columbia University and New School University (New York). Presently Dr. Abdenur serves on the ECOSOC Committee for Development Policy.

Richard Kozul-Wright is a Senior Fellow at the GDP Center, Boston University and a Professor of Sustainable Structural Transformation at SOAS, University of London. He previously worked at the United Nations in both New York and Geneva where he was Director of the Globalisation and Development Strategies Division in UNCTAD. He holds a Ph.D in economics from the University of Cambridge UK. He has published widely on economic issues, most recently in The Case For a New Bretton Woods (with Kevin Gallagher).

Jamie Martin is assistant professor of history at Harvard University. He is a historian of capitalism, empire, and international order and the author of The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Harvard, 2022), a political history of the origins of the first international institutions to govern the world economy in the early decades of the twentieth century. He is now writing a global history of the economic consequences of World War I. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, London Review of Books, n+1, The Nation, Bookforum, and Dissent.

Quinn Slobodian is the Co-Director of the History & Political Economy Project. He is professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He is the author of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard, 2018), and his most recent book is Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Metropolitan Books, 2023).