As this introductory study argues, state socialist experts dispatched for Africa during the Cold War were an important current in global transfers of knowledge. The paper introduces the scholarship on socialist experts and their relations to international organizations, modernization theory and the concept of development.
Furthermore, it also delves into the personal experience of the experts in the place of their positioning and how they affected and were affected by the environment they were sent to. The paper thus summarizes the state of art and explores the possibilities of where the research might go from here.