History Hash Outs | Building the Future: Cold War Development in Egypt and the Gulf

Join Masha Kirasirova, associate professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi, for a talk on how Egyptians imagined the future during the decades between decolonization and neoliberal globalization.

How did Egyptians imagine the future during the decades between decolonization and neoliberal globalization? This talk explores competing visions of development in Egypt from the 1940s through the 1970s, situating them within Cold War rivalries and transregional exchanges. Beginning with the Aswan High Dam as both a material project and a powerful symbol of national progress, it traces the transformation of developmental futures from the critics of colonial economism in the 1940s through the debates about long-term planning and internationalism of the Nasser era. Drawing on archival research in Egypt, Russia, and the United States, as well as visual culture and artistic production, the talk considers how economists, engineers, and intellectuals represented—and contested—the promises and costs of modernization. By placing the developmental trajectory of Egypt within broader connections to Soviet expertise and American power, it considers economic shift as transformation in how collective futures were imagined, narrated, and visualized.