Authors

Discussion

The industrial complex in Darkhan, Mongolia was a large-scale project of socialist assistance, started in 1962. Defined as Joint Construction project (JCP), it was developed within the cooperation of six socialist countries and coordinated by the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. With the focus on this multilateral project, this paper aims to reconceptualize common analytical dichotomies of dispatcher and receiver operationalised in the literature on development assistance. Instead, with the case of a project involving multiple actors, it foregrounds on the questions of collaboration, coordination, and international division of labour. Arguable, collaboration at JCP was marked by these hierarchical relations and engrained an unequal, racialised division of labour. Infrastructures, constructed as part of JCP engrained a highly asymmetrical dynamic of power and reinforced dependency between the North and the South.