Between Faith and Critique traces the history of the Institut Africain de Genève (IAG) across three decades, from its founding context in 1961 to the intellectual rupture of the mid-1980s. Geneva’s political and academic elites launched the Institute as a gesture of solidarity by a neutral Switzerland that claimed distance from empire, designed to educate a postcolonial elite and bind it to a Western liberal order. However, both teachers and students appropriated that space and made it their own. They forged a vibrant communauté de pensée that recast development as liberation from economic and epistemic domination. This milieu drew anti-colonial activists and dissident intellectuals into what one UN observer called “an island of the Third World.” My dissertation studies the people that populated the Institute, their ideas and paths, and the socio-political context in which they worked. I explore what these histories can tell us about the larger meaning of decolonisation and development in this period.
The thesis spans an arc from faith in development to development as faith. A first generation of ‘engaged’ Christians sought to actualise Christianity and politicise development as liberation. A younger generation then turned their theological literacy against development and denounced it as a secular form of religion, and its adherents as (misguided) believers.
My research weaves together social, intellectual, and institutional histories, building on archival materials such as correspondence, course descriptions, and reports, but also oral history interviews. I interviewed 25 former students and faculty members in five countries: Switzerland, Brazil, Chile, the United States, and Mexico.