CFP: Institutions and International Law in Eastern Europe

Original announcement is here.

Place and time: Leibniz-Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Europa (GWZO), Leipzig, 28.09.2017 – 29.09.2017

International law is enjoying increasing popularity among historians of global and international affairs, due to a re-reading of legal norms and rules that questions a state-centered approach. Instead of seeing law as an outcome of state behavior, recent scholarship has examined the transnational character of law and legal communities, and the oftentimes complex negotiation processes that precede the codification and subsequent ratification of international conventions. This perspective aligns with the focus on border-crossing relations and on professional and nonstate actors and institutions that has become essential to global and international history. Moreover, connections forged between the history of international law and discussions of the limits of legal universalism have increased the legal dimension’s relevance for historians of empire and decolonization. Encircling notions of hegemony, imperialism, and civilization, and scrutinizing the role of international law in imperial and civilizing missions, this strand of research has given rise to regional histories of international law.

CFP: From Below and In Between – Narrating and Practicing the Cold War in South East Europe

Organizers: Janis Nalbadidacis (Chair for South East European History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Matthias Thaden (Chair for the History of Western Europe and Transatlantic Relations, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Date: June 1-2, 2017

Deadline for Applications: February 5, 2017

Venue: Berlin

The Cold War as a global geopolitical order after World War II had a profound impact on the comparatively small area of South East Europe. Ideological fault lines divided various countries from one another and resulted in an exceptionally fragmented political landscape: Rumania und Bulgaria joined the Warsaw Pact under Soviet influence, Greece and Turkey became members of the NATO, and Yugoslavia held a leading position in the Non-Aligned movement. Furthermore, Albania broke bonds with the Soviet Union in 1962 and became increasingly isolated. Not only in a Cold War-context, South East Europe is often seen as a periphery to the global centers. The workshop will challenge this perspective. Instead, we will approach the region as a center of ideological fractions during the Cold War, therefore treating it as a “burning glass” of geopolitical orders.

CFP: Practises and Processes of Space-making under the Global Condition

Place and date: Leipzig, 29.10.2017 – 01.10.2017

Deadline: 15.03.2017

This second annual conference of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199: “Processes of Globalization under the Global Condition” analyses the role of actors and their activities in making and changing spaces of action under the global condition in both the past and the present. The conference is part of a larger endeavour of the SFB 1199 at the University of Leipzig to develop a typology of those spatial formats that have emerged under the global condition. Examining different social and historical contexts, the scholars at the SFB first explore the intentions, practices, and imaginations of different groups of actors that lead to the development of spatial formats. Second, they consider how these spatial formats are combined to form complex spatial orders and how this has changed, and continues to change, over time. Third, the scholars investigate the visualization and imagination of already established as well as of alternative spatial formats and orders. The annual conferences will develop the notions of spatial formats and spatial orders as heuristic tools and deploy them for the analysis of concrete historical processes of respatialization.

Read more here

CFP: “Transnational and Global Dimensions of Justice and Memory Processes in Europe and Latin America”

Transnational and Global Dimensions of Justice and Memory Processes in Europe and Latin America

International Conference

Paris, 8-9 June 2017

Justice and memory processes that had accompanied the “third wave of democratisation” have been the subject of a large body of academic literature. These works have commonly taken certain approaches. Some have analysed these processes within national borders or by providing comparative accounts of countries seen as discrete units, disconnected from transnational or global developments. Others, by contrast, have tried to account for the criminalization of dictatorships and conflicts in terms of the emergence of international norms based on an ethics of human rights and a “cosmopolitan memory” – often driven by a decontextualized remembrance of the Holocaust. This scholarship has however tended to overgeneralize global trends without always grasping the complexity of local attempts at dealing with the past. In the last ten years, a third approach, focusing on specific transnational entanglements, has gained ground. This emerging literature has started to analyze empirically transnational activism, exchanges of knowledge and expertise at bilateral, regional or international levels, the impact of legal and mnemonic narratives outside their countries of origin, and the role of international organizations and NGOs in dealing with mass violence.

Call for Papers. “Machineries of Persuasion. European Soft Power and Public Diplomacy during the Cold War”

Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies
Department of History, Aarhus University
Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University

CALL FOR PAPERS

MACHINERIES OF PERSUASION
European Soft Power and Public Diplomacy during the Cold War

Over the last two decades, public diplomacy has become a central area of
research within Cold War studies. Yet, this field has been dominated by
studies of the superpowers’ soft power practices; especially the public
diplomacy programs of the United States have been covered in great
detail. However, the so-called ‘cultural dimension’ of the Cold War was
a much more complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Little attention has
been paid to the efforts European countries to safeguard their
strategic, economic, and political interests by engaging and seducing
foreign publics.

This symposium focuses on the study of the European powers’ use of soft
power techniques, broadly defined, to advance their foreign policies in
the international tumultuous scenario of the Cold War. It welcomes
contributions that deal with the uses of European cultural, educational,
and communication diplomacy aimed at winning the “hearts and minds” of
international public opinion between the 1950s and 1980s.

The symposium will be held on 19-20 January 2017 at the Aarhus Institute
of Advanced Studies (Aarhus University, Denmark). It will consist of
academic paper sessions (oral paper presentations) and a keynote lecture
given by Prof. Dr. Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Department of History, Freie
Universität Berlin, Germany.

Successful presenters will have their accommodation expenses during the
symposium covered.

Key dates:

– Deadline for proposals: proposals of no more than 400 words should be
submitted by 1 October 2016. To submit a proposal, please send an email
to the co-organizers: slarm@cas.au.dk / ogarcia@aias.au.dk
– Notification of acceptance: 15 October 2016
– Deadline for final paper: 6 January 2017
– Symposium: 19-20 January 2017

For more information on this symposium, please visit the website:

http://aias.au.dk/events/ machineries-of-persuasion/

International Conference “State Socialism, Legal Experts and the Genesis of International Criminal and Humanitarian Law after 1945”

International Conference
State Socialism, Legal Experts and the Genesis of International Criminal and Humanitarian Law after 1945
(Humboldt University of Berlin, November 24-26, 2016)
Call for Papers

In the history of international law, the socialist bloc has been generally relegated to the role of roadblock to the fulfillment of the ideals of Western liberalism. Scholars of international criminal law (ICL) and international humanitarian law (IHL) have often dismissed the contributions of socialist legal initiatives as little more than Cold War propaganda and thus irrelevant to understanding the historical evolution of judicial norms and the modern international system. The establishment of different international tribunals since the collapse of the Soviet Union has only reinforced the notion that the socialist world was little more than an impediment to progress. Nevertheless, the American-led global war on terror has done much to call into question Western commitment to the laws of war.

International Conference “Higher Education, Human Capital Formation, and Professional Structures in Eastern and Western Europe since 1945”

International Conference
Higher Education, Human Capital Formation, and Professional Structures
in Eastern and Western Europe since 1945
(Bucharest, 15-18 September, 2016)
Call for Papers

The second half of the 20^thcentury was a period of significant expansion of secondary and tertiary education throughout the world. The number of students grew exponentially, the institutional landscape of higher education diversified, the share of university graduates on the labor market became more pronounced than ever before, and their impact on the overall economic performance of various societies also increased. Europe played a significant part in this global success story. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, there was a strong relationship between the dynamics of economic development and the expansion of higher education. Nevertheless, systemic framework conditions mattered. In socialist command-systems higher education was part of centralized planning and, in principle, it was shaped to fit the requirements of the economy. In the more liberal systems prevailing in Western Europe, the connection between higher education and the requirements of the economy was less one-sided, as the universities had more say in the configuration of professionalization patterns. The aim of the conference is to provide a fresh look on the complex relationship between the contribution of higher education to the human capital formation and the functioning of professional structures in various social systems across Europe since the end of World War II.

The conference is linked to the research project Economic Planning, Higher Education, and the Accumulation of Human Capital in Romania during Communism (1948-1989) financed by the National Research Council (ID_PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0476), in cooperation with the project TURNING GLOBAL. Socialist Experts during the Cold War (1960s-1980s) financed by the National Research Council (ID_PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-0335).

The main topics on which we expect contributions are:

1. Drivers and institutional frameworks for the expansion of higher education
2. Professionalization patterns – national and international contexts
3. Status and dynamics of expert knowledge & interventions in different social systems
4. Labor market, human capital and skills-premium for higher education graduates
5. International student mobility. “East” –“West” – “Third World” countries

Any other topic considered appropriate will be welcomed. Presentations based on a comparative approach are encouraged. We are very much interested in analyses focusing on national and/or local case-studies. We also wish to signal out entanglements between East and West in the field of higher education:  linkages, crossovers, and mutual influences in terms of institutional frameworks, professionalization patterns, expert knowledge, and mobility.

The submission of paper proposal will consist of filling in a proposal form and sending it with a short CV attached (no more than one page) to epherom@gmail.com

Deadline for submission: July 10, 2016.

Colloquium “In from the Cold: Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War”

Colloquium “In from the Cold: Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War”, Bucharest, June 17, 2016.

Organized by:

The Regional Francophone Centre for Advanced Research in Social Sciences (CEREFREA Villa Noël), Bucharest

In partnership with:

National Archives of Romania

Portuguese Embassy in Bucharest

Camões Institute for Cooperation and Language, Portugal

Call for Papers

In 1955, the Afro-Asian Conference held at Bandung, Indonesia, was a historical marker. Representatives of newly independent states came together to discuss the fate of African and Asian nations in face of the superpower’s political ambitions over the “Third World.” The “Bandung spirit” would epitomize the commitment to anti-colonialism and neutralism during the Cold War. In 1961, the Belgrade Summit crystallized this state of affairs as it advocated an eminently independent path for the “Third World”: the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). This shift from neutralism to non-alignment co-existed with important historical events, such as the Sino-Soviet split and the Sino-Indian conflict. In the early 1960s, as the “Second world” of socialist countries was strongly divided and the decolonization process in Africa took off, new ideological and political fronts were opened in the global Cold War.  Africa became an important battleground on which a myriad of political projects were confronted and played out, from anti-colonialism and socialist solidarity to “third worldism”, non-alignment or Pan-africanism. In this context, cultural diplomacy became an important strategy for building cultural ties and fostering forms of political identification among different, sometimes estranged, actors.

[CFP] Africa, Eastern Europe and the Dream of International Socialism

Africa, Eastern Europe and the Dream of International Socialism: New Perspectives on the Global Cold War

European Studies Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford University

28-29 October 2016

Recent years have witnessed renewed interest in international and transnational history across the discipline, as the “global turn” in contemporary history writing has recast the field of international relations from a variety of fresh perspectives.  Yet there are still key areas of inquiry that remain remarkably under-explored. New transnational histories of the Cold War, for example, have concentrated on the relationship between the so-called First and Third Worlds, or focused on countries in the ‘Global South’. 

[CFP] History of the French Communist Party in a Transnational Perspective

UN PARTI GLOBAL. LE PARTI COMMUNISTE FRANÇAIS DANS UNE PERSPECTIVE TRANSNATIONALE (1917-1991)

Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Dijon

25-27 May 2016

Ce colloque international organisé dans le cadre du programme Paprik@2F (Portail Archives Politiques Recherches Indexation Komintern et Fonds français) financé par l’Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) et porté par la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH) avec le soutien du Centre Georges Chevrier et en partenariat avec les Archives nationales, vise à considérer le Parti communiste français comme un objet transnational à part entière, à la lumière d’une historiographie internationalisée en plein renouvellement.

Lancé en avril 2013, le programme Paprik@2F s’est fixé comme objectif d’indexer, d’inventorier, de numériser et de mettre en ligne les « fonds français » du Komintern et les archives de la surveillance d’État muni d’un outil de recherche performant. Ce portail vise également à devenir un centre de ressources virtuel de référence sur l’histoire du Parti communiste français. Le colloque international qui se tiendra les 25, 26 et 27 mai 2016 à Dijon clôturera donc ces trois années de travail.

Read more on the event’s official site.