The World United in Studying Itself? Data and the Coloniality of the International Geophysical Year, 1957–1958

The International Geophysical Year (IGY, 1957–1958) pioneered worldwide collaborative research by uniting sixty-seven national committees in a data-gathering exercise across sixteen subdisciplines of the earth and environmental sciences. This essay seeks to offer a fresh perspective on its history by looking into the IGY planning meetings and focusing especially on talks regarding its data-collection strategies. It contends that, given the importance of IGY data for the advancement of the earth and environmental sciences (but also for related applied research tasks), the representatives of a few scientifically developed countries lobbied to host all the IGY data centers and deliberately evaded calls to make data more widely available to participants through a different distribution of these centers. The article examines especially US interventions in Latin America, of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, of Western European powers in sub-Saharan Africa, and of Japan in Asia. This essay thus contends that if, as stated at its launch, the IGY united “the world in studying itself,” the collaborative exercise also presented power asymmetries and inequalities, giving rise to relations of coloniality that have been overlooked thus far in the available literature.