Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to provide a critical theoretically and historically informed response, with reference to a number of international case studies. UNESCO's work in the South during period of modernisation largely took the form of technology transfer and the promotion of a one-way flow of both hardware and content. The main impetus for this came with the waves of decolonisation and the shift in the composition of the organisations membership with the entry of the newly independent nations in the 1960s and 1970s, who soon became a numerical majority. The calls for New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) and an agenda of decolonisation proved too divisive, however, soon came to be replaced with an alternative, depoliticised agenda called globalisation. The Universal Declaration is prefaced in this spirit by the hope that it can become an outstanding tool for development, capable of humanizing globalization.