Author Archives: Stephen Macekura

About Stephen Macekura

Stephen Macekura is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia in 2013, and then was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute, where he continues to serve as the associate director of the Program on Culture, Capitalism, and Global Change. In 2014-2015, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. Macekura's first book, Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2015), analyzes how environmental NGOs struggled to implement environmental protection measures in the developing world in the 1950s and 1960s and then critiqued and reformed the development policies of the U.S. government, World Bank, and UN system in the 1970s and 1980s. He is currently researching for his second book project. It explores various critiques of economic growth since the 1960s by revealing how reformers have challenged and sought to rethink the ways in which the concept of “growth” has been defined, assessed, and measured.

On Writing the Historiography of Development

This post is part of a roundtable discussion on two historiographic articles by Joseph Hodge published in recent issues of Humanity. For more about the roundtable and all currently available posts please see this page. In early 2002, amid the growing optimism surrounding the United States’ Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, I heard on the radio an U.S. official claim that the United States’ nation-building efforts should strive to transform Kabul into Zurich. The statement struck me as preposterous and perplexing. How would the United Continue reading →