The article looks at the entanglement of the international ecumenical movement and Latin American Protestantism in the ‘long 1960s’. It investigates the influence and significance of Latin American liberation theology for the churches and theology around the world. During this period, it was particularly the World Council of Churches (WCC), a worldwide fellowship of Christian churches, which strengthened the efforts of churches from the ‘Third World’ to identify their own theological issues and questions. In this way, the WCC strongly supported Latin American Protestant church leaders and theologians in giving specific attention to their own context. The article argues that the ‘boom’ of Latin American Protestantism within the WCC in the 1960s and early 1970s brought into the global ecumenical movement both new theological concepts, such as revolution and liberation, and individuals exiled from Latin America. Yet this contextual and emancipatory approach revealed at the same time fundamental differences and conflicts between churches of the North and South.

The nationalist Welsh colony in Patagonia, Y Wladfa, offers a peripheral vantage point from which to reconsider core assumptions about settler colonialism and the British World. Taking a fresh approach to settler colonial studies, this article both pays close attention to settler motives before embarkation and also analyses the case from a global perspective. It foregrounds the role of unequal power relations in Britain, the British World, and the global arena in shaping social relations at home and in the colony, as well as locating Y Wladfa within a constellation of Welsh sites and influences around the world. Analysis reveals the Welsh to occupy a complex position within such global hierarchies, and to be colonizing Patagonia from a colonized position. As such, this case at the margins of settler power reveals important ambiguities, tensions, and affinities that challenge assumptions in settler colonial theory, and open spaces that might enrich and deepen analysis of this fundamentally global relationship of power.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as the US launched the Point Four initiative of overseas technical assistance programmes, a number of American officials, academics, and analysts saw valuable global lessons in the US Bureau of Indian Affairs’ development interventions among Native Americans. These interests culminated in a suite of professional training experiments, involving trainees from around the world, which emphasized cross-cultural development methods and used certain south-western Native American communities as field ‘laboratories’. A foundational seminar programme, coordinated by Cornell University social scientists, inspired additional training initiatives, tied to Point Four projects abroad, which brought foreign government officers from South Asia and the Middle East for similar training in New Mexico and Arizona. These training experiments not only placed Native American situations at the centre of significant transnational conversations about development, but also reinforced and widely circulated particular ideas regarding ‘underdevelopment’, ‘experts” prerogatives, and the politics of development relations.