“For a more just world”: population and politics at the World Population Conference, Bucharest 1974

Summary/Abstract: By focusing on the emergence of the document “For a more just world”, proposed by the Romanian delegation at the World Population Conference, Bucharest 1974, and adopted as its resolution, my presentation explores the relationship between the political realm and demographical sciences in defining the “population problem” at the beginning of the 1970s. I argue that the position Romania delegation professed at the WPC is the result of complex interactions between the pronatalist goals of the Communist regime and the international debate on the relationship between population and development from the beginning of the 1970s. The most important primary sources of my presentation are daily reports of the Romanian delegation, mainly identified in the Archive of the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs- UN Problem Archival Fund, and edited proceedings of the WPC.

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