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Earlier research on Cold War resource politics has not focused significantly on the interests of smaller, non-colonial industrialized states. This paper examines the iron mining company LAMCO in Liberia, dominated strategically and operationally by Swedish actors and interests, between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s. It argues that the creation of LAMCO must be understood in the context of the early Cold War and its international politics, and that the enterprise's subsequent development was characterized by a specific technopolitical dynamic resulting from the encounter between the Liberian government's development strategy and the Swedish investors' need to mitigate political risks both in Liberia and at home. The findings help clarify the conditions under which actors from an ostensibly non-aligned and non-colonial country could gain access to minerals in Africa. They also contribute to our understanding of iron mining in Liberian political history, showing how LAMCO developed in close association with particular developmental policies in Liberia that sought to promote national development while simultaneously increasing the power of the Liberian presidency. Though it initially served this purpose successfully, its operations also generated a string of unexpected outcomes that eventually made the company a serious problem for the Liberian government. ; QC 20190902

The engagement of Swedish industry in the Liberian American–Swedish Minerals Company (LAMCO), which mined iron in Liberia between 1963 and 1989, was the largest Swedish commercial investment in Africa during the Cold War. In this paper I investigate how political and administrative actors of the Swedish government conceptualized the link between private and public interests in the context of LAMCO's operations, and how this shaped Swedish government policy towards the company and Liberia. I identify two phases: a phase of almost unanimous political support for LAMCO and close Swedish–Liberian relations from ca. 1955 to 1965, and a more fragmented phase following 1965, during which LAMCO was increasingly understood as a political liability. My findings show how business interests could figure into Swedish foreign policy during the Cold War, highlighting the coherence with which Swedish industry and government acted in relation to the commercial interests in Liberia before ca. 1965, but also the lack of coherence – between government and industry as well as within the state apparatus – that followed the turn to a more activist policy after the mid-1960s. ; QC 20180620

Agrarian expertise has been employed in the context of Swedish development aid since the 1950s. Throughout this time, the Swedish institutions of higher agrarian education—the Agricultural College, the College of Forestry, and the Veterinary College, in 1977 merged to form the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences—have played important roles. In this dissertation I consider three problems with respect to these institutions' involvement in development aid: (1) How and why did actors at the three colleges begin framing their expertise in a development context? (2) How did Swedish agrarian experts approach the problem of development in contexts about which they had little prior knowledge? (3) How and why did a long-term institutional collaboration evolve between the agrarian institutions of higher learning and the Swedish development aid authorities, and what were its characteristics? The study follows actors and their standpoints through three different aid projects: international courses in animal reproduction at the Veterinary College first planned and held in the mid-1950s; the planning and implementation of the Chilalo Agricultural Development Unit in the 1960s and 1970s; and SLU's support to higher forestry education in Ethiopia in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. It also examines the growth and subsequent decline of a continuous institutional collaboration between the institutions of higher agrarian education and SIDA, the Swedish government agency responsible for development aid. Based on my findings, I argue that the framing of Swedish agrarian expertise as relevant to the developing countries—particularly at the Agricultural College in the 1960s—was part of a broader attempt to widen the scope of agrarian science in Sweden in response to social change at home. At the same time, the development strategies proposed by the Swedish experts were anchored in the particulars of the Swedish agrarian context. This made them attuned to the local adaptation of technologies and to the value of practical knowledge but less sensitive to the societal contexts and social effects of their interventions. Their attempts to bring their knowledge to bear on the developing world also helped create a long-lasting institutionalized relationship between SLU (and the three colleges before it) and the Swedish development aid authorities, through which SLU exercised influence on much of Sweden's agrarian development aid from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s.