Author Archives: Patrick Sharma

About Patrick Sharma

is a J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School and holds a doctorate in history from the University of California, Los Angeles.​ ​His first book,​ Robert McNamara's Other War: The World Bank and the Remaking of Development in the 1970s (​University of Pennsylvania Press​, ​forthcoming), ​examines the transformation of the World Bank during the presidency of former U.S. secretary of defense Robert McNamara.​ His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History and ​Review of International Political Economy.

The Rich Countries’ Substitute for the NIEO

April 13, 2015 by
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This is one entry in a roundtable on the NIEO, featuring posts by scholars who contributed to Humanity’s recent special issue on the topic. Be sure to read other posts by Johanna Bockman and Kevin O’Sullivan. Last October, the Chinese government announced the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The AIIB is intended to rival the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), which are dominated by the United States and other developed countries, in providing financial assistance to countries in Asia. Continue reading →

Between North and South: The World Bank and the New International Economic Order

March 19, 2015 by
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The New International Economic Order (NIEO) was among the more notable aspects of the 1970s, a decade that scholars have begun to view as a critical period in contemporary history.1 Although anticolonial leaders, dependency theorists, and others had long advocated reforming the international political economy to spur more rapid development of the global south, the attempt to enumerate and codify these proposals under the auspices of the United Nations was unprecedented. So too was the fact that, for a time, northern governments entertained some of the Continue reading → Continue reading →