In this episode, Peter Vale (Harvard) joins editor Marissa Moorman (Wisconsin) to discuss his research on the political economy of early postcolonial Congo. He details how the Mobutu government charted a course between policies and rhetoric extolling economic nationalism, on one hand, and moves to promote financing and investment from abroad, on the other. Vale complicates conventional narratives of the periodization and drivers of neoliberal policies in the nation: he describes how Congolese thinkers, politicians, and publics interacted with and shaped processes of economic liberalization, privatization, and decentralization in the years before ballooning state debts, exacerbated by energy crises, led to the embrace of structural adjustment policies favored by lending institutions.

Vale’s open access article, entitled “Between Economic Nationalism and Liberalization: Ideas of Development and the Neoliberal Moment in Mobutu’s Congo, 1965–74,” features in issue 65/1 of the JAH.