Brochure - International History at the Graduate Institute, Geneva

INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

Maison de la paix, home of the Graduate Institute, Geneva.

CONTENT 3 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30

Understand the Present, Prepare the Future Penser l’histoire transnationale – Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou Transnational Africa – Aidan Russell Birth Control in the Twentieth Century: Transnational Movements and Local Contexts – Nicole Bourbonnais The History of International Governance and Systems – Jussi M. Hanhimäki World Hunger, Agricultural Development and the Food and Agriculture Organization – Amalia Ribi Forclaz Cities, Decolonisation and Globalisation – Cyrus Schayegh The What and the Why of Environmental History – Susanna Hecht Connecting Histories – Gopalan Balachandran China and the Flawed International “Liberal” (Western) Order – Lanxin Xiang Rethinking the History and Meanings of Time-Space Compression – Carolyn Biltoft Night on Earth: Interwar Humanitarian Programmes in the “Faultlines of Western Civilisation” – Davide Rodogno Globalisation, Inequality and Cities – Michael Goebel International Finance in History – Rui Esteves Why Study International History at the Graduate Institute?

CONTACT Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies Chemin Eugène-Rigot 2, 1202 Geneva, Switzerland Ms Valérie Von Daeniken Tel +41 22 908 58 58 Email valerie.vondaeniken@graduateinstitute.ch

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graduateinstitute.ch/international-history

INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

UNDERSTAND THE PRESENT, PREPARE THE FUTURE

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he International History Department of the Graduate Institute offers a unique first-rate graduate education at the heart of international Geneva to study and research today’s global challenges from a multiplicity of historicallyinformed perspectives. The Department is uniquely located to monitor and examine the making of international policies and the global history that stands behind them.

International Geneva is where national, transnational and international, public and private actors operate and meet constantly. Here, peace agreements are signed, international IT protocols are negotiated, environmental advocacy, public health policies, financial, economic, conflict and security issues are imagined, Professor Ould Mohamedou Head, International History debated and enforced, between and beyond Department nations. This has been the case for one hundred years and continues actively shaping the future.

The Master Programme in International History and the PhD Programme in International History both explore the contemporary world through these transnational histories and taking into account a multiplicity of perspectives. This education opportunity is offered to students of quality concerned with the drivers of contemporary global governance challenges and their historical undercurrents in the areas of politics, development, conflict, environment, humanitarianism, commerce and finance, health and culture.

Why Study International History?

The International History Department of the Graduate Institute – the oldest school of international relations in Europe located in Geneva, the site of historical international organisations and historically of the League of Nations – enables students to pursue historical research and analysis in the context of the Institute’s anchoring in both the humanities and the comparative analysis of contemporary policy and governance. The particular contribution of the International History Department is to bring a historical methodology to the study of international affairs, including policy-making, political systems and institutions. These methods – including qualitative and textual analysis, archival

research and attention to structural change and continuities over time – allows students to coherently link history, politics and the contemporary environment.

The Department’s mission is to encourage dynamic and cross-cutting historical approaches to understanding, contextualising and situating current international politics and policies. Faculty teaches and researches governmental and non-governmental actors and organisations; human rights, humanitarianism and humanitarian actions/interventions; development politics, policies and ideologies; nationbuilding and state-building; civil society and social movements, gender, women and public policies, labour, employment and trade unions; international and global public health; environment and environmentalisms, climate change and political ecologies; immigrants, refugees and diasporas; international finance and economy; conflicts and international security issues, political violence and terrorism; transnational actors, institutions, histories and processes; and foreign policies, multilateral diplomacy, negotiations and co-operation, regional integration, and North-South relations. The Department hosts a diverse community of distinguished professors and researchers with deep knowledge of today’s global challenges and expertise on many regions of the world and with a great sensitivity to diversity.

From academe to diplomacy to the corporate sector by way of the media, effective analysis and practice of current international affairs need the contribution of an appropriate historical contextualisation and knowledge and this is what we offer to our Master and PhD students helping them secure that quality advantage. Studying International History at the Graduate Institute means acquiring a quality of training, an international network and a practical experience.

It also means living in a city, Geneva, where international cooperation happened, happens and will continue to happen. Past and present cohorts of Master and PhD students have been extremely successful and are now employed in the private and public sector.

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INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

PENSER L’HISTOIRE TRANSNATIONALE Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou Professeur d’histoire internationale Responsable du Département d’histoire internationale

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’étude de l’histoire constitue t-elle une discipline dont les contours demeurent invariables ou peut-elle se prêter à des mises à jour ?

Comment établir le bien-fondé de celles-ci et s’assurer que leur aspect empirique vienne enrichir la discipline ?

Au cours des dernières décennies, la question de l’histoire transnationale est apparue avec acuité. Le développement de ce tropisme concerne principalement l’étude de la mobilité et du déplacement des acteurs, des idées, des mouvements sociaux et des organisations, ainsi que des individus eux-mêmes qui sont de plus en plus transnationalisés.

Si, à la faveur de la mondialisation, l’aspect transnational de l’histoire a indéniablement pris une ampleur grandissante, il est important de noter que cette approche existe depuis longtemps. On ne saurait, en effet, établir une simple symétrie entre histoire contemporaine et transnationalisme sans perdre de vue les dimensions qui se sont manifestées à travers les périodes antérieures. Pour autant, les époques précédentes et leurs

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voyageurs, entrepreneurs et autres commerçants ne se dénotent pas par cet aspect grammatical prononcé de ce qui se joue depuis la fin du XXe siècle, à savoir un repositionnement de l’histoire sur un échiquier global de spatialités en coalescence.

L’accent est désormais cumula­ tivement mis sur trois aspects : la connectivité grandissante des acteurs, l’intercontextualisation des récits et la transcendance des frontières. La transnationalité se décline donc spécifiquement autour de cet axe fertile entre lien et évanescence. Et c’est toute la difficulté de construire des méthodes d’analyse de ce qui, de par sa nature, échappe à la fixité.

Aussi, le défi qui se pose aujourd’hui est celui de l’étoffement scientifique d’une approche qui, jusqu’à peu, faisait plus sens intuitivement que cliniquement et qui doit maintenant nous aider à comprendre la redéfinition des espaces et des identités. Si Ibn Khaldoun, Arnold Toynbee et Fernand Braudel s’inscrivaient déjà en ce sens, l’historien du futur devra néanmoins regarder un peu plus l’avenir pour

comprendre le présent afin d’expliquer le passé.

L’émergence de l’Etat-nation avait donné naissance à une approche de l’histoire qui s’était naturellement centrée sur les interactions entre Etats et les développements en leur sein ; puis l’histoire comparative prenait ancrage dans ces mêmes dichotomies.

Désormais, les Etats eux-mêmes participent de ce transnationalisme en manifestant toujours plus en avant l’extraterritorialité militaire, financière et juridique. L’histoire se déploie de nos jours en mettant en scène des ordres étatiques et sociaux qui sont influencés in situ à la lumière immédiate d’altérités lointaines, là où cette influence était précédemment différée ou imposée par un narratif préalablement mûri ailleurs. Aujourd’hui, les patterns de migration, la santé, l’économie, la conflictualité, la technologie, les réseaux sociaux, l’environnement, les diasporas, le terrorisme nouveau, la société civile internationale, les mégavilles, l’ordre et le désordre, la notion d’empire, la diplomatie elle-même menée activement sur le front des

PAYS-BAS. Commerçants et hommes d’affaires circulant à cheval.

Chromolithographie de la fin du XIXe siècle Collection privée © ISADORA/ LEEMAGE

médias sociaux, toutes ces dimensions se prêtent de plus en plus à une étude qui à l’avenir devra reconstituer des communications et contre-communications virtuelles, fluides et contingentes.

Dire l’histoire transnationale, c’est donc aborder des nouvelles catégories d’analyse qui permettent de faire sens de la fragmentation du monde et sa reconstitution sur d’autres versants.

contemporain des soulèvements de par le monde, de l’« Occupy Wall Street » américain aux « Indignados » espagnols en passant par le « Maïdan » ukrainien et le « Balai citoyen » burkinabé. A quoi peut ressembler un agenda intellectuel mis à jour en ce sens ? Premièrement, la notion de trajectoires devra nous aider à cartographier la déterritorialisation

« Si, à la faveur de la mondialisation, l’aspect transnational de l’histoire a indéniablement pris une ampleur grandissante, il est important de noter que cette approche existe depuis longtemps. » Là où le « Printemps des peuples » de 1848 demeurait confiné à une par­tie de l’Europe, le « Printemps arabe » de 2011 a inspiré par mimétisme

de l’Etat-nation dans un contexte plus large. Deuxièmement, la notion d’ hybridité accompagnera celle d’échanges. Les interactions

trans­nationales sont plus qualitati­ vement pénétrées, et donc transformées en retour. Enfin, la direction du monde – Nord-Sud, Occident-Orient – se doublera d’une représentation post-Mercator multidirectionnelle où l’audience est continuellement élargie et nul acteur ne se prévaut d’une influence permanente.

Si le terme est encore par trop imprécis et une théorie générale du transnationalisme fait encore défaut aux sciences sociales, le transnationalisme n’est toutefois pas le cosmopolitisme. C’est, autrement, une codification systémique d’une histoire émergente de la dispersion qui ne se déploie plus de façon unidirectionnelle et où les différences et similitudes n’existent plus sous formes cloisonnées, interagissant minimalement.

Forcerait-on le trait ? La discipline classique de l’histoire aura-t-elle péché par une association excessive avec l’Etat-nation ? Doublement non, et l’histoire transnationale ferait assurément faux pas si elle cherchait à marquer des ruptures narratives de posture et à remplacer ou corriger l’étude classique de l’histoire. Il s’agira plutôt d’ajouter une contribution suivant laquelle la concentration préalablement enserrée sur la contiguïté d’un Etat ou d’un territoire pourra aussi traiter la dimension transnationale en tant qu’influence potentielle.

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INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

TRANSNATIONAL AFRICA Aidan Russell Associate Professor of International History

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he modern world is one of movement. In Africa we see it all in remarkable contrast. Western professionals fly in from Geneva and elsewhere as expats, Europe obsesses over crises of migrants from across the Mediterranean, South Africa suffers xenophobic riots targeted at immigrants, and media images dwell on the suffering of refugees.

The image is easily mistaken. The few people who attempt to cross the Mediterranean are vastly outnumbered by those who move within Africa. Most stay settled within their national borders. But does transnational movement threaten the stability of authority, the cohesion of national communities or the reality of state borders? The history of Africa suggests that the relationship between “rooted” stability and “rootless” movement is by no means a oneway street.

Across the precolonial millennia, new states and political systems rose and fell with the movement of people.

The African continent supported a rela­ tively thin population and there was always another place to go. Outcasts, refugees, pioneers and adventurers set out to seek a new home on the frontier. Sometimes they found others to take them in, develop a new way of life with their support, imagination and labour. Complex political ties were developed to manage power relationships between first-comers and later migrants. Many communities today 6

find their “roots” in this history of integration.

Still, the oral traditions of many of Africa’s great kingdoms, cultures and empires recall heroic rulers who came out of the wilderness and pioneering settlers who brought life to barren lands. New communities and complex state authorities were built out of movement. But even the most powerful kingdoms could exercise only limit­ed control over their people. If they imposed themselves too much, or provided too little, their subjects could simply leave, move on and start the cycle of mobility again.

displacement. Even the forced mobility of the international slave trade could be the foundation of fixed authority and settled community.

Of course, every question of state, community and mobility was shaped by the experience of colonial rule.

During their own great migration across the world, European powers attempted to establish themselves in Africa, partly by controlling African mobility. Borders were drawn to define fixed territories and claim authority over those within them. The violence of conquest and control pushed many to move away.

But while colonial authorities needed

“Transnational migration and national settlement are passing actions, not identities.”

There has been no more graphic illustration of the ambiguous link between mobility and power than the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades.

Around the greatest forced migration in history new states built themselves to supply or defend against slavers, while colonies of freed or escaped slaves modelled new patterns of society from

settled people, colonial economies needed mobility. Great effort was devoted to developing migrant labour systems that could “keep Africans in their place” by limiting the mobility of women and children while encouraging the seasonal mobility of working men towards mines, pastures and plantations. State power was defined by

NORTHERN NIGER, Agadez: West African migrants returning from Libya sit with their belongings.

30 May 2015.

AFP/Issouf SANOGO

territory, but settling populations also meant fuelling mobility.

The end of empire was, in turn, a transnational project. Anti-colonial movements linked up across the continent, smuggling ideas and people between them. Mobility became truly transnational, as state, community and territory were combined in the language of the nation. It was often the most mobile of African subjects, those who had been able to study in Europe, America or elsewhere, who gave expression to this revolution.

Transnationalism drove the imagination of the nation.

However, civil war soon showed that some new nations would not

provide a home for all within them. In the eyes of the postcolonial world, the refugee emerged as the archetypal transnational actor, transgressing boundaries and caught between nations. The cycle of mobility and settle­ment turns onwards; in recent decades these refugees have taken their place among the most dynamic and effective state-builders on the continent. “Diasporic states” have been built in Rwanda and Eritrea by returning refugees who have brought with them knowledge, experience and resources from across the world. Yet their actions, from Rwanda’s interventions in Congo to Eritrea’s internal systems of control, have sent many more

into exile, reproducing the dynamics of forced mobility around them. Like their legendary forebears, such refugee rulers prove again that mobility does not move in one direction.

Transnational migration and national settlement are passing actions, not identities. People who take such transnational actions continue to transform the nations they transgress, even as they contribute to their political, social and economic development. Africa’s long history shows that settled community, stable authority and great mobility are mutually entwined. One does not threaten the other, but shapes it.

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INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

BIRTH CONTROL IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: TRANSNATIONAL MOVEMENTS AND LOCAL CONTEXTS Nicole Bourbonnais Assistant Professor of International History

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n 1878, Dutch physician Dr Aletta Jacobs opened what is widely recognised as the world’s first birth control clinic. Operating out of a small office in Amsterdam, Jacobs offered fittings of the diaphragm method for free to poor women, along with maternal and infant health services.

By 1930, similar clinics had opened in some 30 countries around the world.

The concept of birth control was not new, of course. Nearly all soci­ eties in history have sought to control

however, made relatively expensive “modern” methods like the diaphragm more widely accessible. They also moved birth control from private homes and community networks into a medical setting, under the control of a new wave of professional doctors, nurses and social workers.

These birth control advocates were self-consciously transnational from the outset, exchanging information, pamphlets and advice from one corner of the globe to the other.

“Understanding the history of birth control in any particular location requires awareness of the international context and the transnational nature of these movements.” reproduction, whether by late marriage practices, prolonged breastfeeding, homemade barrier methods or induced abortions. The new clinics, 8

Copies of international publications like the Birth Control Review, for ex­ample, could be found in clinics from Jamaica to Japan in the 1940s and

1950s. Local organisations also began to create more formal links through groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which by 1961 had some 32 members in four regions.

Some advocates also moved across borders to pursue the cause.

Recent histories have explored the international work of American advocates like Margaret Sanger, who travelled widely, holding public lectures and helping set up local clinics. But activists from the “Global South” also travelled North, and across the South, sharing experience and expertise.

Jamaican doctor J. L. Varma, for example, visited birth control clinics in India and London in the late 1930s, and India’s Lady Rama Rau became wellknown on the international family planning circuit in the 1950s.

The international push of the movement would be transformed in the 1960s, as concerns over rapid population growth in decolonising countries led to an increased push for birth control within state and foreign aid policy. The small, private clinics of earlier decades were dwarfed in many countries by massive state “population control” programmes, supplying new methods such as the pill, IUD, Depo-Provera and Norplant with financial support from donors like the United Nations and USAID.

UNITED STATES, New York City: Margaret Sanger and Lillian Fassett on way to Court to attend the Sanger trial.

30 January 1917.

THE ART ARCHIVE/ Culver Picture

While these efforts spread access to birth control more widely than ever before, controversy soon erupted.

A number of programmes were found to have promoted highly unethical and coercive practices, such as test­ing experimental methods without patients’ knowledge, pushing women to use certain contraceptives despite safety concerns, or making state benefits contingent on birth control use.

Critics argued that the narrow focus on reducing fertility rates (rather than empowering women) was to blame.

Ultimately, it would take another transnational movement – this time, against population control – to shift the international agenda. Transnational non-governmental organisations like the International Women’s Health Coalition and DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), for example, played a critical role in lobbying for change at the

International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in 1994. The conference’s programme of action led to a paradigm shift towards “reproductive rights”, including the right to safe, accessible and affordable methods of family planning, but also the right to have children (through rights to maternal healthcare), and the right to make decisions about reproduction free of coercion and violence.

Today, reproductive rights have become a widely recognised inter­ national norm.

Understanding the history of birth control in any particular location thus requires awareness of the inter­ national context and the transnational nature of these movements.

And yet, this cannot come at the expense of attention to the local context. Indeed, combining research in the archives of international and local organisations suggests that at

times the very same foreign grant or state programme could be used in one town to push experimental IUDs on women and in another to create voluntary sex education centres requested by local parents. Whether any individual campaign was coercive or empowering could thus be determined at several levels, influenced by the agendas and ideologies not only of international donors and state officials, but also of the nurses and social workers who did the day-to-day work of birth control campaigns, and even, at times, by patients themselves. We should thus be cautious about giving too much weight to official paradigm shifts in the international community or the changing language of state programmes. Just as “population control” aid could fund a wide range of practices, the “reproductive rights” agenda will also, ultimately, find its meaning on the ground.

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INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE AND SYSTEMS Jussi M. Hanhimäki Professor of International History

President Woodrow Wilson announcing to Congress the entry of the United States into World War I. Illustration in Le Petit Journal, France.

April 1917.

THE ART ARCHIVE/ Private Collection/CCI

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he histor y of international govern­ance and systems is a field littered with examples of how the weight of history influences the shape of the present. On the one hand, this chequered story shows the efforts of nation states and other actors to create something approaching a stable international order. On the other hand, history reminds us that such efforts – and the international “systems” that emerged as a consequence – have rarely lasted

more than a few generations. Indeed, if we learn anything from history it is the simple fact that nothing lasts forever; systems and modes of governance are in constant flux, new actors emerge while old ones fade away.

Just take the now almost cen-­ tury-old effort to create an international organisation that would be able to regulate the actions of nation states in order to minimise the likelihood of violent conflict. The Geneva-based League of Nations – the first such

attempt – emerged in the immediate aftermath of World War I. It was a response to the cataclysmic collapse of the Eurocentric international system that had been in place since the end of the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. Yet, while the League had some early successes in conflict resolution (by settling border disputes in the Balkans and northern Europe) and in humanitarian fields (helping refugees and combatting the slave trade), it ultimately

failed to provide a broadly accepted international governance system. Part of the reason was simple: the League, despite having a sizeable Latin American contingency, remained an organisation dominated by European imperial powers (France and Great Britain) that were wedded to the preservation of their international subsystems (the colonial empires). To be sure, the global economic crisis, the rise of totalitarianism and the absence of the United States from the League further eroded the League’s capabilities.

The creators of the League’s successor organisation, the United Nations (UN), were supposed to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. The very preamble of the UN Charter made this clear, proclaiming that the UN was “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”

While the League had failed to provide what United States President Woodrow Wilson once thought would be “a definite guaranty of peace”, the UN’s member states – by learning past lessons and implementing them into its structure and modus operandi – were “to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours.”

A noble dream that, 70 years later, remains unrealised? That, certainly, is one possible interpretation of the post1945 effort to create a successful international governance system. Until the late 1980s the Cold War placed strict limits on international cooperation. Together with the rapid decolonisation of European empires, the Cold War conspired to create conditions of extreme volatility in many parts of the

world to which the UN was poorly equipped to respond. Nor did the disappearance of the Cold War dramatically transform the organisation’s – judged by many in the twenty-first century to reflect a bygone age – ability to meet its original goals. Lest it is to undergo a process of substantive reform, the UN is, history seems to advise us, ripe for retirement. Perhaps

larger-than-life rhetoric that characterises its Charter – the UN has never been a unitary actor but rather held hostage to both its own institutional imperfections as well as the many diverging goals and interests that its member states embody.

Therein lies, perhaps, the most important reason why studying the history of the idea and practice of

“Nothing lasts forever; systems and modes of governance are in constant flux, new actors emerge while old ones fade away.” the real lesson of attempts to create functioning international governance systems is that no such system is possible?

Historians, however, are reluctant to accept such a simplistic negative judgment. For one, they point to the remarkable if often forgotten successes of the UN. It has not been able to eradicate conflict but has provided the means to alleviate its effects (e.g. by helping refugees) and call attention to some of its causes (from economic inequality to cultural misunderstanding). For another, historians emphasise the inherent complexity of the international system and the fact that – despite the utopian and

international (or global) governance (not just the UN) is particularly relevant in today’s rapidly changing and inherently complex international envir­o nment. For while theorising about what works and what does not is undoubtedly important, while designing “templates” or “models” about the roles of “stakeholders” can provide useful guidelines, there is no substitute for the concrete analysis of empirical evidence. And, ultimately, all such evidence – whether related to security, development or human rights – is historical.

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INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

WORLD HUNGER, AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION Amalia Ribi Forclaz Associate Professor of International History

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n the last twenty years, against the backdrop of a globalised food and environmental crisis, industrialised agriculture and its accompanying technologies have increasingly come under fire for causing ecological damage, negatively affecting human and animal livelihoods and exacerbating rural poverty. There was a time, however, when such engineering technologies, including mechanisation, crop manipulations and the use of fertilisers were seen as the gateway to progress for rural peo-

Part of the answer to these questions lies in the archives of international organisations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome (FAO).

The history of FAO, its policies, experts and programmes, offers a vantage point from which to frame and view agricultural development as a longterm and comparative process. In order to do that, however, we have first to understand the context in which the organisation emerged. Born in 1943, FAO was not an entirely new organi-

“Development was never a one-way process; it was often shaped by local endorsement, and existing knowledge and institutions.” ple and a sure means to solve the problem of poverty and hunger. How can we track and understand changing conceptualisations of rural development and welfare over the second part of the twentieth century? What role have international organisations played in the promotion and implementation of agricultural modernisation schemes?

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sation. Already in 1905, the so-called International Institute of Agriculture had been created in Rome to facilitate international cooperation and scientific knowledge production in the field of agricultural commodities and foodstuffs. The Institute’s operational activities, however, remained somewhat limited and its faith resembled that of

the League of Nations which succombed to the cataclysm of the Second World War. In the early 1940s, against the backdrop of increased government planning and military requirements, food crises, rationing, but also scientific and medical advances, calls for a more interventionist organisation emerged that would promote the world wide growth of agricultural production, regulate the market and achieve international food security. Steeped in the hopes of the Allies, FAO was thus supposed to bring about no less than the worldwide alleviation of hunger, the improvement of nutritional standards as well as social and economic development and higher standards of living.

While FAO’s goals responded undoubtedly to some of the greatest challenges of international governance in the postwar world, the organisation – with its small initial budget of no more than 5 million US Dollars – was in no position to bring about such important changes. Moreover, as the global political climate veered from wartime idealism and hopefulness for international cooperation to Cold War politics, FAO’s attempts at transforming and regulating the market for agricultural commodities were quickly squelched.

Instead, the organisation engaged in a wide-reaching programme for technical assistance that encouraged the circulation of scientific and practical knowledge, expertise and technological

innovations all over the globe with varying success. The analysis of correspondence, diaries and reports of these technical assistance missions highlights the variety of views on agricultural development that existed amongst early development experts and field staff, ranging from an optimistic belief in science and growth to a much more pessimistic assessment of the potential shortfalls of top down development programmes. It shows how at specific times and in specific places, certain types of interventions were favoured over others, ranging from the low modernist teaching of small farmers to improve the use of existing resources, to high modernist schemes of infrastructure building and technological revolutions.

More importantly, historical research also uncovers the complex process of implementation, adaptation, contestation of development measures by local actors, thus highlighting the political agency of governments, communities

and farmers receiving aid. Development was never a one-way process. It often depended on and was shaped by local endorsement and existing knowledge and institutions.

If we look at the global history of the past 75 years it becomes obvious that a growth in agricultural production does not necessarily lead to better rural welfare. Rather, recurring food crises and famines are highlighting the fact that the world has not yet solved the problem of hunger and food distribution.

Most people agree that we cannot learn from history and that it would be dangerous to expect history to answer to contempoary policy problems. Each time and place is unique and there are qualitative differences between ”then” and ”now”. As governmental and non-governmental organisations are calling for a new green revolution for Africa, however, it becomes crucial to understand the intellectual roots, challenges of implementation and long-term impacts

of previous agricultural modernisation schemes. Not least in order to gain awareness of the implications of using certain terminology, language and discourse and to question some of the models and binary oppositions that social scientists have established between ”modern” and ”traditional” forms of labour, life and production, between ”developed” and ”underdeveloped” economies, and between ”agrarian” and “industrialised” communities.

Last but not least, an understanding of past development efforts highlights that not only do the impacts of such interventions evolve over a long period of time, they are often not as linear as they were conceptualised to be, and they can have unintended consequences for local populations and natural resources.

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INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

CITIES, DECOLONISATION AND GLOBALISATION Cyrus Schayegh Professor of International History

LEBANON, Beirut: Dikwaneh refugee camp on the outskirts, 1 January 1970. © UN Photo/DB

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n the 1940s-70s, a handful of cities f unc tioned as “s witches” – switch-cities, we may say – between multiple recently decolonised countries in one region, and global trade, finance, communication, transport and knowledge circuits. For the Arab East (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq) and the Arabian Peninsula, Beirut played this role from the late 1940s.

From the 1950s, Dakar did so for West Africa and Singapore for much of Southeast Asia. Already by the later nineteenth century, these cities had been imperial hubs and remained in demand even when “their” region’s countries became independent.

Fledgling countries needed these cities’ global connections. Several Arab countries relied on knowledge managed for instance at the American University of Beirut and actors from outside the region needed these cities for easy access to recently-decolonised countries.

Whereas after independence many postcolonial elites sought to homogenise their nation, Beirut’s, Dakar’s and Singapore’s elites embraced diversity. This was reflected in the urban tissue of these switch-cities. Singapore adopted a vast public housing policy preserving a racial mix of Chinese, Malay, Indians and others,

including Europeans. Beirut and Dakar had mixed quarters like Hamra and Centre-ville, respectively. After World War II, tens of thousands of non-Lebanese Arabs and thousands of Westerners moved to Beirut, which had attracted people from across the Middle East and beyond from the mid-1800s. Dakar, while mainly Wolof, was home also to a large LebaneseSyrian community, to North Africans, to about 30,000 French nationals and other Westerners, and to many more non-Senegalese Africans.

Building on that diversity, elites of those switch-cities and many a regular denizen depicted their city as a bridge

between civilisations. Singapore developed a policy of multi-culturalism. It did so not only to depoliticise the fact that it was a mainly Chinese island in a mostly-Muslim Malay region. It also showed the world that it continued to be a crucial trade, transport and communications centre for Southeast Asia, and, hence, the bridge between that entire region and the rest of the world.

bridgehead and an observatory of the world,” and that being “bi-lingual (even trilingual, if possible)” is crucial to the ability to keep the world connected. Meanwhile, for Léopold Sédar Senghor, a Francophone writer and Senegal’s president from 1960 to 1980, Senegal was a “hyphen” between “the black world and the Arabo-Berber world” and between “Europe and Africa”. Senegal was not

“Studying switchcities helps us qualify narratives of globalisation that frame the 1940s-70s as a period of slowed globalisation.”

In Beirut, Charles Malek – diplomat, philosopher and Lebanon’s foreign minister from 1957 to 1958 – s tated in a speech in 1970 to the Beirut College for Women that Lebanon’s capital was the “centre of the world” and wide open to it. The city, he boasted, linked up the most diverse intellectual and political currents of thought: “Islam and Christianity, … Arab and Western cultures [and] … Russian communism and Western liberalism.” More than two decades earlier, Michel Chiha, one of Beirut’s leading bankers and a prolific author, argued that “situated at the meeting point of three continents, we” – Lebanese, in particular Beirutis – “are obviously an ideal

simply itself. It linked wider realms, was destined for greater thing. Dakar was the arena for this reality and, not by coincidence, home to the First World Festival of Negro Arts, in 1966.

The endeavour, by people from places as distant and different as Dakar, Beirut and Singapore, to depict their cities as inter-civilisational, inter-continental bridges can be read as an attempt to carve out a niche in a new, post-war world: to triangulate between the two powerful political blocs of the global north and rising post-colonial nation-states – and to claim doing so in a way that larger nearby postcolonial nation-states such as Syria, Indonesia and Mauritania could not. The world

needs interpreters and meeting places, those people argued – and their switch-cities were ideally positioned to fulfil that function. This was the case doubly because they had from the nineteenth century been French, British and Ottoman imperial centers. To bypass or compete with their massive inherited transport, communication, educational and cultural infrastructures was difficult for their neighbours, even for capital cities like Damascus, Djakarta and Nouakchott.

Studying switch-cities like Dakar, Beirut and Singapore side by side helps us to qualify narratives of globalisation that frame the 1940s70s as a period, simply, of slowed globalisation, de-globalization or inter-nation-alisation. It suggests, too, that we can read decolonisation more forcefully into globalisation. From the viewpoint of switch-cities and their self-projection as inter-civilisational bridges, the decline of European empires and the interlinked development of a two-bloc Cold War and of decolonisation rendered the world not necessarily less integrated.

Rather, the globe became integrated in new ways – ways that were as uneven and as much filled with tensions and opportunities as in the long nineteenth century. Last but not least, seen from the viewpoint of these switch-cities’ function as links between global circuits and multiple nation-states, they constituted a specific type of global city. As such, they force us to consider the role of historical contingency in thinking more elastically about such definitional questions. They drive home how much decolonisation formed an intrinsic part of globalisation, a process that cannot be seen as simply originating in, or being steered by, forces in the global North.

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INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

THE WHAT AND THE WHY OF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY Susanna Hecht Professor of International History

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nvironmental history is relatively young as a category in the modern framing of the discipline of history.

While natural history was more about nature and geography and their unfolding, environmental history takes inspiration from this long attention to the natural world to the interesting role of non-human forces in shaping human affairs. As such, environmental history seeks to explore the interactions between environmental events and processes as elements that affect, engage and inform human histories and projects. The field also explores how humans shape nature, the multiple means through which people create knowledges about nature, how people represent nature and how environmentalisms of various kinds are deployed and unfold in political and economic dynamics in the past as well as today.

Environmental history provides us with powerful tools for understanding large and small changes in human strategies and constructions of livelihoods, institutions, economics, symbolic worlds and politics at multiple scales.

While there are many superb local land/ cultural change studies, one can also say that environmental history is increasingly important for understanding biophysical influences at larger regional and global scales of history.

Fernand Braudel whose work on the Mediterranean and Leroy Ladurie’s studies of long-term climate effects in 16

rural France were foundational texts for understanding environmental engagement; they largely and creatively relied on classic archival research.

Today, the field brings powerful new historical tools into play through the use of many new scientific techniques. The explosion of environmental historical writing in the post-World War II period began to move the analytics away from merely using archives to engage what we might call “the natural archive” – climate and other environmental data from multiple historical sources as well as those inscribed in vegetation patterns, ice cores, lake cores, pollen profiles, soil carbon, tree rings, erosion signatures, chemical signatures, fire scars, plant distributions and residues.

These are new forms of documentary evidence about the context that has shaped human events. They help us understand local processes, but they are also increasingly important in global history.

Environmental history has brought non-human organisms and biophysical actors into focus not as determinants but as elements of the co-produced worlds we inhabit. It is useful for understanding a planet that is not simply a substrate – a kind of ecological theatre – on which the “real” play of human destiny unfolds, but one that evolves in its own right, both of its own accord and in response to human actions. This attitude of environmental history has a

different cast and tone than many other forms of historical inquiry. Environmental history is a profoundly interdisciplinary project, and one that has helped rethink events, and reorganise the multiple ways we think about forms of historical causalities and influences.

Many historians and scholars of allied disciplines of environmental history like geographers and historical ecologists are exploring environmental change and major historical processes and events, as climate scientists start to ”run the models back through time” to assess how humans have dealt with cataclysms in the past, and what this might mean for the future. Dramas of daily life and livelihoods are composed of many dimensions, and simple causal explanations of today’s political events cannot really be reduced to one trigger.

However, historians, climate scientists, development practitioners, refugee specialists and disaster analysts point to the reality of social disruption that often attends environmental catastrophes as amplifiers of existing instabilities.

Colonial studies pointed to how changes stimulated by imperial regimes undermined the institutions and practices that evolved as mechanisms to address periodic crises. Mike Davis chronicled the impact of the 1887 El Niño, and how these precipitated famines, marginalisation and the rise of indentured servitude in the hardest hit areas of India China and Brazil. What

we begin to see here is also the beginning of a unifying theme of “global history” – that strong planetary phenomena unfold in different ways across the planet, and the changes they produce are profound and frequent. Their results can be mitigated or made much worse by the social institutions in place. Clearly there were different colonial dynamics at work, but strong persistent drought interacted with colonial policy to create higher risk and vulnerability.

As the US dust bowl of the 1930s shows, large traumatic events can also stimulate new forms and applications of science, (recuperation ecology) new institutions (New Deal, Soil Conservation Service, US Agricultural Extension Services), new technology applications (integrated basin development with dams, contour plowing, low till agriculture), new cultural forms (novels, music and art) and new ways of thinking about the underpinnings of human meaning

“Environmental history is a profoundly interdisciplinary project that helps reorganise the multiple ways we think about forms of historical causalities and influences.” and resistance to “socio-planetary shocks.” The dust bowl also facilitated the spread of southern evangelism as people migrated from the southern plains to southern California and began to use mass media.

Environmental history is a rapidly evolving field, and one that has many implications for the present day. As we enter the “age of consequences” as the planetary environmental bills become

due, it is an area of research and practice that provides lenses on the conditions of possibility and the range of environmentalisms we might deploy as we confront a planet which no longer has what the poet Elizabeth Bishop called “the forgiving air”. Environmental history illuminates what can happen in an unfriendly Anthropocene, and is a powerful means for thinking about alternatives before we use our history up.

CAMEROON: aerial view of one of the tributaries of the Niger River.

1 January 1982. © Shaw McCUTCHEON/ UN Photo

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INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

CONNECTING HISTORIES Gopalan Balachandran Professor of International History and Politics

PAKISTAN, Chinari, Jhelum Valley: houses destroyed by the earthquake.

2 November 2005. © Fred CLARKE/ ICRC

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ver since the “global turn” in historical scholarship, the question of what the “global” means from the perspective of individual places or regions has never been far from the surface. Though this is a general question that may be posed to any spatial frame or label, “global”, “world” and “transnational” histories risk appearing more portentous for claiming to encompass, mediate or displace an array of other possible spaces. They are hence invitations to reflect on locations and perspectives

for attempting histories beyond the conventional framework of the nation.

Attempts at “history-writing on a world scale” are not new. Already in the sixteenth century, works answering to the definition were being produced in the Mughal and Ottoman empires, Mexico, Western Europe and Poland. They were also extensively circulated. World histories circulated but were not emulated in China, Japan and Persia, suggesting that even for the sixteenth century the

absence of locally produced “worldscale” histories does not offer a reliable guide to spatial consciousness.

Nor was there a single kind of “world history”: world history, like the world itself, could appear and be written differently from different locations.

Even in more recent times, colonial writings in a historical mode were often less self-consciously “global” than metropolitan histories, a disposition relatable perhaps to a consciousness of absorbing rather than projecting power.

Since the late twentieth century most disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences have experienced a “global” turn. History is in this sense not unique. Such turns, and the resulting debates and directions, have also been quite different across the disciplines. In reflecting on history’s “global” turn historians can usefully look sideways at other disciplines for perspectives on the rescaling of scholarship in their own discipline. History’s turn towards the “global” was heralded with pomp, but without much actual reflection on methods and limits, or about place, people, sources, voices and such like. To its strongest advocates, global history was the history of “globalisation”, to others it recalled “universal histories”, reprised imperial histories, or narrated the past from utopian locations improvised as historiographical terra nullius.

Even sympathisers puzzle over possibilities for rendering the world’s pasts through experiences and perspectives from marginal and “outside” locations; and whether even in the absence of gatekeeping proclivities narrowing the “global” to metropolitan locations and perspectives, this mode of historical engagement allows for an open-ended and conceptual, rather than pre-formed, sense of the “global”. In my own research on monetary and macroeconomic history, labour and now on commerce and cultures in the Indian Ocean, I find perspectives from the margins indispensable to addressing the intrinsically constitutive, rather than axiomatic, nature of the “global” and its claims, categories and boundaries.

They can also help us think beyond conceptions of “global” glossed by

“Perspectives from the margins are indispensable to addressing the intrinsically-constitutive nature of the ‘global’ and its claims, categories and boundaries.” notions such as “entanglement” that may often temporise the knots in our own minds and materials, or generated by accumulative and aggregative research procedures including, of late, those motivated by “big data”.

A cursory survey of leading journals (including journals with quite explicit national or regional foci) suffices to reveal the ongoing rescaling of historical scholarship since at least the last five decades. Much of it may not appear “global” in the contemporary sense: political categories such as capitalism, class, race and gender encoded scale attributes, yet commanded attention to how they travelled across political boundaries.

By comparison, spatial referents of the global in historical scholarship may evoke categories (such as capital and commodities) whose mobility might seem less troubled; or categories of governmentality (like “migrants”) less troubling to liberal governance than race, class or gender. At the same time, spaces such as the Indian Ocean whose historiographical legacies of early modern cultural interactions and adaptive agency antedate the “global turn”, have come more strongly to the

fore. Besides, as places are rescaled from the bottom-up, as it were, through connections and networks, nominally local stories resonate more widely and allow actors consigned earlier to the historical margins to step into the light.

Perhaps this is the moral of my story. While not being social theorists, historians read, absorb and reflect social theories in their work. Not unnaturally, in the light of their emergence as arenas of political and theoretical contestation, historical research has been informed in recent years by a multiplicity of spatial horizons, connections and relationships.

The “global” turn in history has no doubt had a role to play in this.

However, the continuing rescaling of historical frames in the last several decades would suggest that it may no longer be meaningful or appropriate, if ever it was, to define or encompass these frames under the sign of a single “global” or “world” history. It would seem once again that there are many worlds connecting and many connecting histories.

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INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

CHINA AND THE FLAWED INTERNATIONAL “LIBERAL” (WESTERN) ORDER Lanxin Xiang Professor of International History and Politics

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lmost any form of order may seem attractive to people engulfed by anarchy, whether it stems from warfare, crimes or moral disorientation. The Chinese are no exception. However, the Chinese vision of order always requires moral commitments of its members. Most current discussions in the West about the “Rise of China” are nonsensical, for they tend to focus on how much China would be willing to “accommodate” to existing international order. The underlining assumption is that the undemocratic Chinese regime lacks legitimacy, and the international liberal order can help change the nature of the regime and save its repressed people.

Consequently, two “inevitability” theories are prevailing. At one end of the spectrum is the theory of inevitability of China’s integration into the liberal world order, which assumes that China will eventually be brought into this order through the process of globalisation. Democratisation is considered a global and unstoppable trend, while economically China will develop sufficient stakes in maintaining the liberal order from which it has benefited a great deal. At the other end, stands the theory of inevitability of China posing destructive challenges to the existing international order.

This notion, often articulated by the conservative perspective, assumes that China will behave like all leading destructive powers in history, for it 20

will inevitably attempt at global power grab through attacking the existing international order to enhance its political legitimacy. For the former theory, a most popular expression is “responsible stakeholder”. For the latter, an A.J.P Taylor scenario of a “struggle for mastery” in the world is the favorite, but even more popular is the “Wilhelm German” analogy.

would certainly be prepared to alter some rules of the game according to Chinese tradition, culture and national interest. Ironically, the chance of conflict with the West is higher when China’s traditional outlook is fully “Westernised”. Democracy never prevents expansionism of states (the young American republic is a typical example). A Westernised China with

“What China wants is to return to the original cultural dialogue with European Renaissance humanism, a dialogue that was brutally broken off by the Eurocentric Enlightenment orthodoxy in the 18th century.”

China may not, however, go down either road suggested above. It has no fundamental reasons to destroy the current international order, but

an active territorial agenda would surely come into conflict with the United States just for geopolitical reasons.

CHINA, Chengdu: rice fields.

1 January 1982. © John ISAAC/ UN Photo

The historical policy implication for the West is, therefore, instead of encouraging and forging conditions for China’s Westernisation, the Western world should seek ways to enhance key dimensions of China’s traditional culture and non-expansionist policy.

Starting with the assumption of China being an illegitimate state, the West could not engage China seriously, nor could it encourage China to remain psychologically secure and peaceful down the road of “national restoration” (Xi Jinping). Moreover, it is unrealistic to expect China to stay at the receiving end of West-dominated international order, without making its own contributions.

The first debate about Chinese political legitimacy took place in mid17th century, known as the Chinese Rites Controversy (1645-1742), which was a bitter dispute within the Catholic Church over a fundamental question brought about by the Jesuit missionaries in China: whether or not the Chinese can become Christians and at the same time be allowed to retain Confucian tradition. Since democratic

ideology had not yet become a key rhetorical tool in Europe at that time, whether Chinese state was legitimate or not was never a relevant question.

Indeed, the main interlocutors with China, the Jesuits preferred to see many European monarchs illegitimate and morally corrupt, far cry from the philosopher kings in Chinese history.

The gradual Western dominance of the wider world since the 18th century beyond Europe has created hegemony of Western thought, both explicit and hidden. The history of pre-modern Europe’s rich interactions with China has been deliberately ignored by post-Enlightenment historians. The leading Enlightenment scholars, such as Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay, focused entirely on Europe, no reference given to Confucius and China at all. This reflects the fact that the essence of Enlightenment was Eurocentric, and philosophes scholars never made real efforts to understand China, for they simply used China to support their cultural and political agenda. Distaining the “backward” traditionalisms of non-Western

societies resulted in a new ethnocentric orthodoxy of “progress” and “civilisation”, which justified colonial domination of all those non-Western “peoples without history.”

Yet this orthodoxy obscured the relative position of the West itself during the tumultuous centuries of fighting for a position as a leading “emerging power” on the global stage. During that era, its interactions with the nonWest were characterised by competition rather than domination; accommodation rather than rejection, and negotiation rather than hegemony.

Therefore, what China wants now is to return to the original cultural dialogue with the European Renaissance humanism, a dialogue that was brutally broken off by the Enlightenment orthodoxy in the 18th century. From historical perspective, this is not an unreasonable demand.

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INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

RETHINKING THE HISTORY AND MEANINGS OF TIME-SPACE COMPRESSION Carolyn Biltoft Assistant Professor of International History

GREECE, Athens: the “Supermoon” rises behind the Propylaea above the Ancient Acropolis hill.

14 November 2016.

Aris MESSINIS/AFP

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n The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir revisited the boundaries of an ancient debate; namely the fundamental quandary of the precise relationship between body and spirit, or mind and matter. Rather than trying to resolve the question, de Beauvoir was more interested in pondering why it had remained such a heated and hotly contested issue. The answer rested in the difficulty that human beings had in accepting the “tragic ambiguity of their condition.” As such, she noted the

myriad of ways that people struggled to face the inevitability of death and the uncertainty about what, if anything comes next. Given this universal fact of existence, de Beauvoir claimed that people often preferred an absolute answer, rather than an open question.

In this way, the urge to give primacy to flesh or to spirit, or to find permanent synthesis between the two, simply met different needs for knowing, believing or feeling certain.

Accepting ambiguity – de Beauvoir offered – could liberate humans from the pattern wherein quests for absolute certainty often beget conflict and various forms of real and symbolic violence against the self and against others. Looking at the historical records surrounding the revolutions in communications and transportation technologies provides additional dimensions to de Beauvoir’s insights.

Not only did the birth of the printing press, the telegraph or the telephone

alter practices of buying, selling, and governing, they also altered ways of thinking, feeling and believing.

A range of social scientists and critical theorists have identified the ways in which information technol-

this way, more and more ordinary secular experiences came to require a certain amount of trust in things that could not be touched or seen first hand. Gradually greater numbers of people came to invest in foreign

“With each technological revolution, things that once belonged to the tangible realm of the senses moved into the intangible realm once designated for faith.” ogies have transformed everything from mental health and human relationships, to the architecture of states and international financial markets.

My research into the expansion of information systems in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries argues that the process of so-called ”space-time compression,” mirrored, altered and then remapped the urge to settle “once and for all,” the relationship between the body and the soul, the material and the immaterial. In particular, I set out to trace the contours and consequences of what I call the dematerialisation of material life.

Slowly, and with each new technological revolution (the to and fro of ships, the laying of cables and railways, the sending of telegrams), things that once belonged to the tangible realm of the senses (intimate relationships, financial transactions) moved partially into the intangible realm once designated for faith. In

ventures, wrestle with foreign beliefs and process news from faraway places. As these immaterial information flows penetrated more and more of the fabric of everyday life, it made individuals, communities and even markets more susceptible to something akin to existential crises. Many of the proposed personal, political or economic ”solutions” to or explanations for these crises manifested as correlates of the mind-body debate.

Karl Marx spent a considerable amount of time discerning the ”true” relationship between what he called the base (material and economic life) and the super-structure (ideas, beliefs.) Ferdinand de Saussure tried to discern the relationship between language and the material world, by demonstrating that there was a fundamentality arbitrary relationship between words and the objects they described. We can use these insights to rethink the deeper historical origins

of a wide range of policies, theories and concepts from Gutenberg to the digital age. With this lens, we can identify echoes of the mind-body question in debates as divergent as those between realism or idealism, hard or soft power, nature or nurture, manufacturing or finance or the primacy of local or global. Reflecting on and contextualizing those binaries, rather than adopting them, can lead to alternative perspectives.

One such perspective that emerges is that, especially after 1800, the desire for material certainties tends to sharpen with emergence of increasingly virtual and heterogeneous realities. A broad look at the historical records reveals patterns wherein cycles of racist, nationalist or religiously motivated violence intensified in step with greater immaterial flows of knowledge and capital. This insight might prove equally helpful for thinking about contemporary expressions of xenophobia, or the recurrence of anti-immigration sentiment after the sub-prime crisis.

It might also help us make sense of ostensibly more positive re-materialisations, such as the move back from the mp3 to the record player, the farmto-table and slow food movements and ”buy local,” campaigns.

Patterns of dematerialisation and re-materialisation offer a way of pondering some of the deepest fault lines of the modern world. To see the broader geopolitical consequences of these patterns requires thinking seriously about how time-space compressions also rewired existential longings and impulses. Moreover, it requires assessing how those rewiring’s led to the triumph of algorithmic thinking, in other words, the triumph of binary logic itself. Non-binary thinking is at the heart of an ethics of ambiguity, which is one ethical orientation capable of steering and sustaining pluralistic, heterogeneous and democratic societies.

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INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

NIGHT ON EARTH: INTERWAR HUMANITARIAN PROGRAMMES IN THE “FAULTLINES OF WESTERN CIVILISATION” Davide Rodogno Professor of International History

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y next monograph (late 2019) examines cases when, in the aftermath of the First World War, short-term relief programs aimed at providing food, shelter, clothing and basic medical aid – a bed for the night, to use David Rieff’s phrase – to distressed civilian populations turned into ante-litteram development

programmes that went beyond relief.

The tentative title of the book is a clin d’œil to Jim Jarmush’s 1991 eponymous movie since the events I write about took place at the same time in different geographical areas.

The institutions I study defined their humanitarianism as encompassing a continuum between relief and

“Early-twentieth century humanitarian actors saw self-help as an essential ingredient of their social engineering ambitions and as a way to ensure peace and prosperity.” projects or state-building attempts.

My argument is that in the 1920s and 1930s, European and American humanitarian associations undertook 24

rehabilitation and, sometimes, they set up agricultural, educational, public health programmes. Breaking conventional historiographical caesuras,

I argue that “development” programmes undertaken by international agencies existed well before 1945 and the birth of the United Nations. Development revolved around the principle of “selfhelp”, which contested older ideas of charity. Contrary to the idea of self-empowerment, seen today as the opposite of social engineering, early-twentieth century humanitarian actors saw selfhelp as an essential ingredient of their social engineering ambitions and as a way to ensure peace and prosperity in the areas in which they operated.

“Progressive” inter-war international humanitarians “administered relief” in “modern” ways and used discourses similar to post-1945 relief and development agencies. Their programmes were undertaken in areas the protagonists of my story viewed as “under-developed”, “semi-civilised” or “barbarous”. In areas where state sovereignty was conspicuously deficient, these institutions were tempted to “play God” – literally to decide over life and death of civilian populations.

The protagonists of my book imagined the thick line that went from the Baltic Sea and Poland to the Balkans (beyond which Bolshevik territory began) and continued farther east in Turkey, Syria and Palestine as the “ faultlines of Western civilisation”.

MALI, Timbuktu: a man prays at dawn where a mausoleum once stood at the Three Saints Cemetery.

9 December 2013. © Marco DORMINO/ UN Photo

The idea that humanitarian actions performed abroad have domestic or colonial roots is certainly not new.

However, the account of how ideas that germinated in Western Europe or the United States were adapted in Eastern Europe, in South-East Europe and the Near/Middle East has not yet been explored. The protagonists of my book are a group of secular and religious international associations (the predecessors of today’s NGOs) based in Europe and the U.S.: inter-governmental organisations and philanthropic foundations such as the American Relief Administration, the American Red Cross, the Near Eastern Relief, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the American Women’s Hospital, the Polish Grey Samaritans, the Rockefeller Foundation, the League of Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Quakers, Save the Children, the Union Internationale de Secours aux Enfants, YMCA/YWCA and the women and men that worked (as volunteers or in a professional capacity) for all these institutions in various regions of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and in the Near and Middle East, with an emphasis on Poland, Greece, Turkey, the Caucasus, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. They certainly are a heterogeneous group of institutions that nevertheless shared ideas on internationalism (peace and

prosperity), nationalism (nation- and state-building), and international law.

For this reason I work on them as configurations of actors.

Focusing on “humanitarian” programmes allows us to compare actors who did not define themselves as being primarily humanitarian; to engage with different conceptualisations of humanitarianism (and “humanitarian missions”); and to consider the emerging self-understanding of nascent humanitarian organisations. I use a transnational history approach based on a multi-archival research from European or American organisations or Western state archives. The book takes the perspective of the supply-side of humanitarian actions; it is not a history from the margins or a bottom up history.

Still, it critically addresses the many silences of humanitarian organisations’ archives and the defective visions they produce by telling stories of “saved” individuals, ignoring those of the masses of “drowned” civilians.

The work explores the meanings of international humanitarianism – which often blended secular and religious dimensions, imperialist impulses, and eugenic, racist or civilisational assumptions. Rather than merely condemning paternalism and colonial postures of the institutions under scrutiny, the book examines the interweaving of these dimensions with humanitarians’ “good

intentions” in given geographical areas from the late 1910s to the 1930s. I endeavour to find a historical explanation of how self-proclaimed responsibilities, individual or institutional motivations, manifested themselves in a variety of relief and re-constructive actions encompassing social engineering, often delusional, dimensions.

My research has a broader purpose: I wish to avoid the history and politics of humanitarianism to turn into a parochial and self-referential field of study. I wish to connect it with contiguous historiographies and histories: political and diplomatic, social and culture, gender, colonial and imperial. My research is informed by other disciplines such as international law, political science and anthropology. I wish to know more about the 21 grams, i.e., the specific weight of this ever-controversial-ism. I am persuaded that humanitarian-centric accounts are incorrect and fail to adequately contextualise humanitarian actions. The significance of the project lies in its contribution to our understanding of the history and politics of Western humanitarianism, humanitarian and/cum development aid. I hope my research will be relevant for scholars interested in the history of the twentieth century, of non-state actors and of international organisations, of Western humanitarianism and of human rights.

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GLOBALISATION, INEQUALITY AND CITIES Michael Goebel Associate Professor of International History Pierre du Bois Chair Europe and the World

CUBA, La Havana:. colourful, artsy street corner in Old Havana, 23 May 2016. iStock/KASZOJAD

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ver since the term “globalisation” began to circulate widely among social scientists and the media in the 1990s, it has been commonplace to assume that the world’s growing connectedness has also exacerbated socio-economic inequalities. The enormous success of Thomas Piketty’s Capital has lent further credence to the notion that globalisation aggravates inequality. Even as much of the book’s effort was in fact devoted to discussing the ratio between economic growth and the rate of return on capital, its reception among historians has

concentrated on the ostensibly simpler matter of how wealth inequality developed over time.

Though focused only on a handful of Western countries, and concerned with the unequal distribution of wealth within, not across, nation-states, Piketty’s general finding of rising inequality in the four decades prior to World War I, followed by a decline during the trente glorieuses of 1945–1975, then succeeded by a renewed rise, were easily mapped onto historians’ standard periodisation of globalisation. The correlation

between globalisation and inequality that appeared to come into sight subtly slipped into the perception of a causation because it made sense: Since from the get-go the term globalisation was associated with the spread of capital and services, unfettered by welfare state regulations, it seemed only obvious to assume that ‘it’ would also promote the concentration of wealth.

The mundane short-hand according to which globalisation boosts inequality masks a reality that deserves more empirical disaggregation than it usually gets. Globalisation has long become

such a catch-all category that it is difficult to ascertain what aspect of “it” redistributes wealth from the bottom to the top. As economists usually know better than historians, there are multiple kinds of inequalities and just as many ways of measuring it. Are we talking about household income inequality, or rather about wealth? Across the globe’s population or as an average of national Gini coefficients? And how do spatial disparities between different regions, or between cities and the countryside, play into all this?

scientists writing on today’s “global cities,” such as Saskia Sassen, have also projected the globalisation-worsens-inequality assumption onto urban space, arguing that global cities suffer from increasing levels of segregation.

Focusing on residence patterns in about a half dozen port cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, my research seeks to put the widespread notion that global connectedness heightens social, and particularly ethnic, polarisation in urban space to an empirical historical test.

“Residential integration did not necessarily stand for socio-economic equality.”

Important as they are for today’s world, historians are often happy to leave such questions to the neighbouring social sciences, but historians should also provide presentist discussions with deeper anchorage.

Looking at port cities between roughly 1870 and 1930, as my research does, is interesting for several reasons.

As nodes in the global movement of goods and people, and in some cases bridgeheads of European imperial expansion, multi-ethnic port cities were the epitomes of an earlier phase of globalisation. Many historians assume that, as such, they must also have been the playgrounds of growing social polarisation. In fact, social

Although ethnic residential patterns concern but one of many kinds of socio-spatial inequality, it is here where global urban historians have intuitively looked for the smoking guns of the globalisation-inequality hypothesis.

Urban historian Carl Nightingale has thus diagnosed a “segregation mania” in cities the world over between 1890 and 1914. In a similar vein, in his magisterial global history of the nineteenth century, Chris Bayly found that “segregation on the grounds of race became more obtrusive” in cities as the century drew to a close.

The vast and fast digitisation of historical sources, including censuses, has made it easier to assess and

unpack such arguments than it was even five years ago. As often happens to empirically inclined historians once they start drilling in, the narrative that comes out looks much more variegated than the initial assumption. For instance, in American cities, on which both theory-building and empirical argument have disproportionately been built, levels of racial segregation – as measured by dissimilarity indices – clearly rose, promoted by deliberately unfair housing, zoning and infrastructure policies, real-estate markets that left to their own devices operated on a racist logic, and other factors. Meanwhile, levels of segregation by nationality or by literacy, a widely used proxy for class, did not rise as uniformly. Looking around the world, the picture becomes much more variegated.

And then, of course, there is the question of what it all means. Cities in which domestic slavery had played a crucial economic role until recently, such as Havana or Rio de Janeiro, often had low levels of racial residential polarisation because slaves had often lived in the households of the slaveholders. Residential integration, in other words, did not necessarily stand for socio-economic equality, especially once we widen our purview beyond cities around the North Atlantic. A global historical comparison of ethnic residence patterns during the age of steam can thus help us to gain a better understanding of the interrelation between globalization and urban inequality. It will also contribute to unshackling urban history from its North Atlantic tilt.

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INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

INTERNATIONAL FINANCE IN HISTORY Rui Esteves Associate Professor of International History

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ow did arms-length financial markets emerge, cross borders and eventually become responsible for regulating the international allocation of capital? Did they contribute to the spread of modern economic growth since the 1800s, or have financial crises had significant costs for the real economy? How did national authorities and international organisations react to the rising trend of economic globalisation?

“The current wave of nationalism and protectionism has distinct echoes in the economic dislocations and political reactions of the 1920s and 1930s.”

“International finance” is a deceptively simple term. “Finance” refers to the management, creation and study of money, banking, credit, investments, assets and liabilities. It follows that the 28

study of finance, particularly throughout history, will have to cover a lot of ground. It will have to cover, among other things, a multitude of different transactions, instruments and institutions. The qualifier “international” would seem at first glance to require less nuance and helpfully restrict the investigation to financial transactions across borders. However, this observation begs the question of whose borders exactly. Starting in 1870, large investments flowed from metropolitan centres to colonial dependencies and was not, therefore, international in the strict sense of the word – although these flows raise many of the same analytical issues as financial transactions between the residents of separate sovereign nations.

Challenges of definition and coverage notwithstanding, a substantial literature has taken a historical perspective on the development of international finance. In particular, a comparative literature contrasts the so-called two eras of financial globalisation, before 1914 and since the 1980s, asking how these two episodes differ and what lessons, if any, earlier history provides for the contemporary world.

Starting with the differences, transportation and communication technologies were less efficient than in today’s interconnected world and biased the patterns of international trade and finance towards trade in commodities and portfolio investment, respectively. Although rising with the spread of major technologies (the

railroad, the steamship and the telegraph), information acquisition was much more of a problem in the 1890s than in the 2000s. The costs of obtaining valid information were not always obvious. In 1889, Carl Fürstenberg, the recently-married director of the Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft (one of the five main German banks), decided to spend his honeymoon in Turkey with the un-romantic purpose of “starting on the spot a study of the conditions” for investment in Turkish railways. Governance in the global market was also more frequently left to the markets themselves, or to informal or temporary agreements between authorities of different countries, rather than to international organisations such as the IMF, the WTO or the BIS. Nevertheless, an ever-expanding and consensual gold standard acted as a reliable monetary yardstick, compared to the lack of an international monetary system since 1973.

While it is important to recognise these differences, the repeated realisation of historical research is that there is more that connects the two periods than what separates them.

As the reach of market forces extended across borders (today and in the nineteenth century), it unleashed powerful trends toward economic integration – through international trade and specialisation, capital markets and migration. No household, firm or government anywhere remains immune to these forces, which call for an explicit study of the interdependence between economic and political

Gold bars in a bank. iStock/TIERO

entities. This plea for an ecological understanding of the past is very much at the forefront of the current drive toward Global History.

Interdependence matters both in terms of economic outcomes (it is hard to grow when all your trade partners slow down) and behaviour, as firms or governments have to come to terms with the fact that the other side of international integration is heightened competition and external pressure. By limiting their possibilities for independent action, globalisation can create difficult political trade-offs. Undesirable consequences in terms of income distribution and the location of production are common drivers for anti-globalization political movements. This is as familiar a story to twenty-first century observers as it was to the generations that lived through the collapse of liberalism in the interwar. The current wave of nationalism and protectionism has distinct echoes in the economic dislocations and political reactions of the 1920s and 1930s.

As Hegel, I doubt that history repeats itself, but economic history

can help us contextualize our current challenges by providing perspective on possible counterfactuals. To take up but one example, countries’ choices of currency regimes are frequently attributed to network effects, namely from trade. Once your major trade partners adopt a particular monetary regime, the costs of being on a different standard create an incentive for monetary convergence. After 1870, the adoption of the gold standard by the core European nations generated the forces that led almost all countries to adopt gold by 1913. However, self-reinforcing network mechanisms can also work in reverse. This pre-war universal monetary agreement was one of the casualties of the processes of disintegration and nationalism unleashed by the Great Depression.

Once Britain had left the gold standard in 1931 (and then the US in 1933) the value of remaining on gold correspondingly decreased and nations all over the world dropped gold and started pegging their currencies directly to sterling, dollars or the currency of their major trade partners.

Fast forward to 1992. Network effects were clearly at stake in the path toward the European Monetary Union. The current composition of the Euro zone is a reflection of the many strong economic ties that bind its member nations (further strengthened by the previous creation of the Common Market). Yet, the balkanisation of European capital markets since 2009 and the political reaction against migration threaten the strength of these ties and have, understandably, raised questions in some countries about their continuation in the Euro.

The future will tell whether the European Union will avoid a similar fate to the unravelling of the gold standard in the 1930s, but even if economic history cannot predict the outcome, it is key to appreciate what will be at stake.

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INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE, GENEVA

WHY STUDY INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AT THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE? ADITYA KIRAN KAKATI (India) PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant in International History

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nternational History is a field that was entirely new for me when I joined the Graduate Institute four years ago as an MA student. I have continued to study here as I have continually found the space to explore novel openings and have received great direction and support.

Now in the second year of my PhD, I have been able to pursue a minor in anthropology and sociology of development that has greatly expanded the intellectual landscape I am exposed to. This is a unique opportunity that the Institute 30

provides and I decided to continue to study here in order to avail myself of this opportunity. This interdisciplinary exposure has allowed me to reflect more strongly on my own work as well as on the discipline of history. My professors have been greatly supportive of my pursuit of multidisciplinary themes during my PhD in order to allow my perspectives to grow and curiosities to be sparked further. Additionally, the right guidance has been provided to channel this exposure productively.

I have also been involved in the department as a teaching assistant; this experience has significantly nurtured my intellectual and pedagogical

capacity. We perhaps combine the right balance between pedagogical instruction and pursuing our own research. The faculty members, apart from being highly distinguished in their own fields, also possess diverse and interesting personality traits. Our engagement with them is also personal and having greater access to them provides us with an environment that extends beyond just academic guidance.

Our small and closely knit community, the highly international landscape of students and our relationships provide an ideal milieu in which to broaden our spectrum of thought, history and everything else in between.

JONATHAN MATTHEW MATTHEW SCHMITT SCHMITT (United (United States States of of America) America) JONATHAN PhD Candidate Candidate in in International International History History PhD

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an American American historian historian working working ss an on aa critical critical history history of of the the United United on States, itit may may at at first first seem seem States, strange that that II chose chose to to do do strange my PhD at the Graduate my PhD at the Graduate Institute in in Geneva.

Geneva. My My Institute work, however, focuses on work, however, focuses on US history history embedded embedded in in US an international international context context an that isis only only legible legible with with refrefthat erence to to the the larger larger world world erence of which which itit was was and and isis aa of part.

The Department of part. The International International History at the Graduate History Department of the Graduate Institute is the placetotopursue pursue Institute theideal idealtoplace project like like this. this. aa project

The department department provides provides students students The with the the opportunity opportunity and and the the tools tools to to with approach their their studies studies in in more more comcomapproach plex and and innovative innovative ways ways than than do do many many plex other graduate history programmes other graduate history programmes around the the world. world. At At the the Institute, Institute, around students are immediately encouraged students are immediately encouraged to engage engage particular particular historical historical quesquesto tions, as as always always part part of of aa larger larger field field tions, of questions, questions, and and never never to to isolate isolate the the of history of of aa single single culture, culture, society society or or history nation from from the the broader, broader, global global historhistornation ical current. current. ical The department’s faculty faculty isis unparunparThe department’s alleled and the intellectual environalleled and the intellectual environment they they foster foster isis both both challenging challenging ment

and collegial collegial (a (a combination combination one one rarely rarely and finds). The The students students here here take take scholscholfinds). arship very very seriously seriously and and those those that that II arship have had had the the pleasure pleasure to to get get to to know know have are not not only only working working on on fascinating fascinating are and relevant topics, they are also also and relevant topics, they are genuinely committed to the historical genuinely committed to the historical discipline. In In my my experience, experience, the the discipline.

Department of of International International History History Department at the the Graduate Graduate Institute Institute isis among among the the at vanguard of of contemporary contemporary historical historical vanguard studies and and II count count myself myself very very fortufortustudies nate to be a part of it. nate to be a part of it.

ago, II was was living living in in Tel Tel Aviv, Aviv, graduating graduating ago, cum laude, laude, holding holding aa research research assistant assistant cum position, and and was was well well on on my my way way to to aa position, PhD. Still, I felt limited.

I was in need PhD. Still, I felt limited. I was in need of aa major major challenge, challenge, aa completely completely new new of perspective in order to deconstruct perspective in order to deconstruct narratives that that were were confining confining me me as as narratives historian and and as as aa person. person. Due Due to to its its aa historian diversity, the the Institute Institute isis not not confined confined diversity, to any any narrative narrative and and aa critical critical reflection reflection to almost built built directly directly into into this this instiinstiisis almost tution.

For me, this is priceless. tution. For me, this is priceless.

At the the Graduate Graduate Institute Institute II found found At faculty members who know you by faculty members who know you by name and and encourage encourage you you to to follow follow your your name passion. The The International International History History propropassion. gramme isis rigorous rigorous and and the the professors professors gramme are demanding, demanding, but but they they are are also also very very are generous with with their their time time and and advice. advice. generous

Today, II am am inspired inspired and and energised energised and and Today, feel that that II have have found found aa home home from from feel which II can can pursue pursue my my academic academic goals. goals. which II am am again again on on my my way way to to aa PhD, PhD, but but the the one I always wanted to write, not the one I always wanted to write, not the one II thought thought II should should write. write. one Finally, the the Institute’s Institute’s location location in in Finally, the heart heart of of international international Geneva Geneva isis the ideal. Not Not only only does does this this promote promote diverdiverideal. sity, but but the the abundance abundance of of international international sity, organisationsand andarchives archiveswithin withinreach reach organisations are imperative for a well-grounded, are imperative for a well-grounded, globally conscious conscious historian. historian. globally

EFRAT GILAD GILAD (Israel) (Israel) EFRAT

Master Candidate Candidate in in International International History History Master

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hat II value value most most about about the the hat Graduate Institute Institute isis the the diverdiverGraduate sity of of students students and and faculty faculty members. members. sity There is no better way to challenge your There is no better way to challenge your own premises than in a seminar or own premises than in a seminar –– or a brainstorming session a brainstorming session over coffee coffee –– with with aa group group over of open-minded open-minded peers peers who who of come from from different different councouncome tries and and speak speak different different tries languages.This Thisstimulating stimulating languages. environment is is exactly exactly environment what I desired when what I desired when II applied to to the the Institute.

Institute. applied While II cherish cherish the the While years II spent spent at at Tel Tel Aviv Aviv years University, the the past past year year at at the the University, Graduate Institute Institute has has challenged challenged me me Graduate more than than ever ever before. before. Just Just one one year year more

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Demonstrators gather at Puerta del Sol during the “March for Change” planned by left-wing party “Podemos” that emerged out of the “Indignants” movement, in Madrid.

31 January 2015. AFP/Pedro ARMESTRE

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