A bold idea from the 1970s is back in focus. In a recent lecture, Dr Paul Stubbs revisited the New International Economic Order, adopted by the United Nations in 1974 to create a fairer global economic system for the Global South. Although the initiative faded over time, its ideas about economic justice and global equality remain highly relevant today.

It was either forgotten or glorified, but rarely understood. Nevertheless, the New International Economic Order (NIEO) still has something to teach us.

This is the view of Stubbs, emeritus senior research fellow at the Institute of Economics in Zagreb (Croatia), who addressed the audience at a recent public lecture hosted by the DSI/NRF SARChI Chair in Social Policy in the College of Graduate Studies.

Adopted on 1 May 1974 at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly, the NIEO marked an ambitious attempt to reshape the global economic system and challenge the entrenched neo-colonial structures that kept the Global South dependent on the industrialised North.

In his lecture, The New International Economic Order: lives, alter-lives, and afterlives, Stubbs traced the initiative’s origins and its complex journey through the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the G77, showing how the struggle to maintain unity among developing nations still echoes today.

Drawing on his book The New International Economic Order: Lives and Afterlives, he explained how his research into socialist Yugoslavia and the NAM led him back to the NIEO.

Yugoslavia’s once-celebrated deep ties with the Global South had faded into what he calls "useless history" and stories that disappear because they unsettle dominant narratives. His mission, he said, is to turn that "useless history into useful history",  not to replicate the 1970s, but to recover the lessons and hope embedded in that moment.

Those lessons begin with NAM’s early efforts to build solidarity among newly decolonised states. From the landmark 1955 Bandung Conference to the 1970 Lusaka Summit, NAM pushed for a world order that recognised sovereignty, equality and economic justice. Its lobbying helped establish UNCTAD in 1964, giving the Global South a platform to challenge unfair trade structures and articulate a shared economic agenda.

By the early 1970s, these ideas converged with the rise of the G77 and the geopolitical shock of the 1973 oil crisis. Suddenly, the Global South had leverage and a vision. The NIEO called for fairer trade, control over natural resources, industrialisation and a more democratic global economic system. Imperialism, it declared, was the central obstacle to development.

However, the project was never without tension. Critics questioned whether it went far enough, while scholars like Mohammed Bedjaoui argued that international law itself remained structurally colonial.

The NIEO’s momentum was short-lived. By the late 1970s, the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, the spread of neoliberalism and the Global South debt crisis pushed the project to the margins. Structural adjustment programmes rolled back state capacity and deepened the inequalities the NIEO sought to dismantle.

Nonetheless, Stubbs insists, the NIEO’s afterlives matter now more than ever. Its debates about sovereignty, global governance, environmental justice, migration and the democratisation of international institutions echo in today’s struggles, from the BRICS to renewed calls to decolonise global systems. For South Africa and the wider Global South, he argued, revisiting the NIEO is not nostalgia but necessity: a reminder that alternative futures have been imagined before, and can be imagined again.

Watch a recording of the lecture on YouTube

* By Hanli Wolhuter, Communication and Marketing Specialist, College of Graduate Studies