Past Present/Passé Présent: All history is politics

Academic Platform Switzerland-UN - 2011 Award!

2011-12-02T12:15:00.003+01:00

PhD Candidate Bernhard Blumenau received, on Thursday 1 December, the 2011 Academic Platform Switzerland-UN prize for his paper entitled "Coping with the Scourge of Mankind: The UN and Terrorism in the 1970s." CONGRATULATIONS!

Photo: Lisa Komar

International History Fondue at the Brasserie des Halles de l'Ile, 9.11.2011

2011-11-11T11:49:00.004+01:00

International History Welcome Cocktail, 4.10.2011

2011-10-05T13:00:00.003+02:00

Keynote - David Rapoport

2011-09-29T18:54:00.003+02:00

A crowd gathers for David Rapoport's speech on "The International Context of the Four Waves of Modern Terror."

Blogging the Terrorism and International Politics Conference - Day 1

2011-09-29T11:40:00.014+02:00

On this sunny Thursday, a group of about 30 to 40 scholars, drawn from conference presenters as well as members of the Graduate Institute community, gathered at the Auditorium Jacques Freymond to kick off the annual Fondation Pierre du Bois conference. This years' event, on "Terrorism and International Politics: Past, Present and Future," sought to examine one of the most visible and intractable problems in recent history.

The first panel, on Terrorism before World War II - featured three speakers. Richard Jensen (Louisana Scholars' College) departed from keynote speaker David Rapoport's framework of the four waves of terrorism, and sought to examine international efforts to control first wave terrorism. Florian Grafl (University of Giessen) took an individualized approach to studying terrorism in interwar Barcelona. And Pierre-Etienne Bourneuf (HEID/Georgetown) took a look at allied strageic bombing against Germany in the First World War.

The second panel, on Terrorism in the Cold War, leaned heavy on the Reagan years. The first speaker, Jonathan Gantt (University of South Carolina), was the exception when he talked about Communist and Jim Crow Terrorism in the US in the early cold war. Thomas Riegler (Vienna) focused on state sponsorship of terrorism. Richard Thornton (GWU) continued from Riegler's discussion and raised the terrorist vs. freedom fighter quandry.

Panel 2, from left to right: Chair Jussi Hanhimaki (HEID), Richard Thornton (GWU), Thomas Riegler (Vienna), Jonathan Gantt (Univeristy of South Carolina)

The third panel, on terrorism and international organisations, spanned the last 30 years. Bernhard Blumenau (HEID) talked about West Germany's success in pushing for a convention against terrorism in the arena of the United Nations in the 1970s. Shaloma Gauthier (HEID) gave a nuanced presentation on SWAPO's use and abuse of "human rights" in their struggle for national liberation (or as terrorists, depending on which side you follow). Anita Blagojevic (University of Osijek) talked about the recent role of the EU and the Council of Europe in dealing with human rights after 9/11.

Panel 3, from left to right: Anita Blagojevic (University of Osijek), Chair Davide Rodogno (HEID), Shaloma Gauthier (HEID), and Bernhard Blumenau (HEID)

The final panel of day one focused on regional experiences. First up was Markus Lammert (Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, Munich) on French leftist terrorism during and just after '68. Nathaniel Powell (HEID) presented on the Claustre Affair, a protracted hostage crisis in Chad.

From Panel 4, Nat Powell (HEID)

And finally Tobias Hof (Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, Munich) presented on repentance policies in Italian law as regards terrorism.

All speakers benefitted from numerous comments from participants and observers alike.

Til the keynote this evening!

Conference Report: Looking Back - Looking Forward - The Women's History Network 20th Annual Conference

2011-09-12T11:26:00.002+02:00

With the support of the IHEID Department of International History and the Women's History Network conference committee, I was able to attend the 20th Women's History Network Conference in London from 9-11 September 2011. This conference was eye-opening - it was a very different network than the sorts I am used to - I should explain that I consider myself a historian of international organizations, and it is within this community I have predominantly resided - though my dissertation has a large gender component, I do not primarily identify as a women's historian.

The conference opened on the 9th after lunch. Multiple sessions ran concurrently, but the one that caught my eye at the time was the 'Politics' session. The subjects discussed were an individual (Sheena Evans on Janet Vaughan), a cohesive group (Marta del Moral Vargas on the Feminine Socialist Group of Madrid), and a constructed cohort (Helen McCarthy on women in the British Diplomatic Service). For the interests of my research, I was most interested in Dr. McCarthy's work, particularly the discussion regarding the concept of the "incorporated wife."

For the second session of the day, I stepped away from my own research and learned about something more contemporary in the 'Women's Movements' panel. Margaretta Jolly and her team, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, gave a check-in after two years of their three-year project entitled "Sisterhood and After: The [British] Women's Liberation Oral History Project" have been completed. There was a real effort to make this section pedagogic - the audience was first asked to, with a limited budget, create a hypothetical women's liberation archive - what types of sources and perspectives to include? The discussion, which included participants from the early years of their graduate studies to veterans of Second Wave women's lib, raised a variety of source possibilities (from minutes to websites) and the problems of capturing primary testimony while subjects were still alive. Given my prior professional experience in archives I was particularly taken with this panel. Jolly's project, comprised of 50 interviews representing a variety of viewpoints, will be available for consultation at the British Library (houses the largest oral history collection in the world) and at The Women's Library.

Friday night was capped with Kathryn Gleadle's keynote speech. As the conference was a 20th anniversary event, the main theme was, how far has women's history come since the beginnings of the network?

Day 2 began for me with a 'Marriage' panel, where we heard about desertion in marriage and its effect on women in Scotland (Andrea Thomson); the one instance in which a child protection entity in Ireland acted in support if mothers (Sarah-Anne Buckley); and about the brief period in which there was a marriage bar in the BBC (Kate Murphy). The chair of this session, Maggie Andrews, raised the salient commonality of all of these presentations - the divide between discourse and practice.

After the first panel was a plenary wherein several of the key figures in the field of British Women's History reminisced about how they came to see a need for such a field and went about creating it.

For the second panel of the day I chose a ‘Life Histories’ panel, which presented works based on a variety of sources. Lynn Abrams used oral histories to illuminate the ‘transition generation’ of British women (post-WWII, prior to women’s lib). Elizabeth DeWolfe presented an engaging story about Madeline Pollard, a spurned lover of prominent American Senator, through a variety of sources, including newspapers and diaries. And Charmain Cannon highlighted the role of British women in World War I through the lens of her grandmother’s personal letters. One of the more interesting points to come out of the discussion during this panel was the idea of a generation (eg. ‘transition generation’, Baby Boomers, etc.) as a construct.

Day three marked the highlight of the conference for me – I was fortunate enough to be on a ‘Life Histories’ panel with a brilliant group of young and energetic historians! First, Paul Merchant of the British Library presented his current project, a series of interviews with female scientists in Britain. I was sandwiched in the middle, presenting the prosopgraphical aspect of my doctoral dissertation. The panel rounded out with Anne Devenish, of the University of Oxford, presenting on Indian women in the United Nations. We all benefitted from the lively discussion sparked by our Chair, Anna Davin, one of the founders of the History Workshop Journal.

The main thing that surprised me about the conference was the different approach emphasized. At HEID we debate quite a bit at the moment about the value of the “transnational” as a category – this framework was almost entirely absent from the panels I attended. Additionally, on Saturday at lunch I heard a few people murmuring they were surprised that there was not much of a focus on Empire either. Nevertheless, as a historian of international organizations, I found it quite illuminating to delve into a different strain of history for the weekend.

Towards a New History of the League of Nations

2011-08-31T15:10:00.003+02:00

Last week, graduate students and established scholars from several continents gathered in Geneva to discuss a "New History of the League of Natitons." Some links for posterity:

Graduate Institute press note on the conclusion of the event.

Keith Watenpaugh (UC Davis) debriefs us on his presentation and panel here.

A text for thought...

2011-08-11T06:13:00.000+02:00

or not?

Noam Cohen's recent article (more properly an op-ed!) in the New York Times highlights a failing of Wikipedia: its citation system.

All historians at IHEID, as at most Western institutions, rely on citation of published sources as a way to document and/or prove the validity of the knowledge presented, and to center themselves within a specific tradition. Cohen's piece pokes a hole in the first part of this logic, giving salient examples of undocumented (at least in the footnoted way) knowledge that Wikipedia rejects on citation technicalities. He makes reference in particular to the video project, "People Are Knowledge," which points to oral history as a parallel development to written history, and fully as valid.

How do you cite less traditional sources? Is it viable to have a not-traditionally-cited reference encyclopedia?

IHP BBQ, 24.5.2011

2011-05-31T05:59:00.006+02:00

Last Tuesday the department gathered on the terrace of the restaurant Barton's Parc for an end-of-year BBQ!

2nd Year Master's in IHP Weekend in the Valais

2011-05-10T12:10:00.004+02:00

In April, some second year students in the Master in International History and Politics took a break from writing their Master's theses and went to the Valais! Here's the report from Léa Paccaud:

"En arrivant le vendredi soir, nous inaugurons le weekend HPI avec une fondue amenée directement d'une fromagerie de Fribourg. Un verre de vin blanc et les langues se délient autant en français qu'en anglais. Le chalet de Loyse est chauffé au poêle et nous nous mettons au coin du feu pour discuter la soirée, avant de nous endormir bercés par les bêlements des moutons du voisin.

Le lendemain, après un petit-déjeuner copieux, nous partons à la recherche du Lac Bleu au pied de la limite de la neige. Le temps est magnifique et le picnic au sommet tombe à pic. De retour au chalet, des discussions s'engagent de manière informelle sur nos mémoires et nous sommes vite rassurés. Apéritif à la tessinoise avec des bruschette et un vin frizzante Fragolino du Tessin. Après un dîner goûteux, le jeu Diplomacy commence et en 1904, le Royaume-Uni, suivi de l'empire ottoman puis l'Italie se partagent rapidement l'Europe.

La dimanche, après le nettoyage et rangement du chalet, deux équipes séparées s'en vont aux Bains-de-Lavey et à la Fondation Gianadda à Martigny finir le weekend par une touche culturelle et relaxante."

See their slideshow here.

Conference Report - Leonardo Rodriguez Perez

2011-05-09T13:38:00.002+02:00

This update comes from Leonardo Rodriguez Perez, an IHP PhD Candidate:

"Le Département d’Histoire et Politique Internationales tient à la disposition de ses doctorants un fond destiné au financement des communications au sein des congrès en Suisse et à l’étranger. Avec l’appui de ce fond, Leonardo Rodriguez Perez, doctorant de troisième année, a présenté deux communications lors des congrès internationaux en Suède et en Angleterre.

Au Congres Mondial de Sociologie, organisé par la Association Internationale de Sociologie en juillet 2010 à Göteborg (Suède), il a présenté une communication concernant la Convention 169 de 1989 de l’OIT, «relative aux peuples indigènes et tribaux». Avant la Déclaration des Droits des Peuples Autochtones de l’ONU de 2007, cette Convention était le seul instrument international reconnaissant explicitement les droits des peuples autochtones, notamment le droit à l’autodétermination. Néanmoins, l’inclusion de ce droit dans la Convention était vue par des nombreux Etats comme un défi à leur souveraineté. Les discussions ont donné lieux à une distinction entre une «autodétermination interne», celle à laquelle auraient droit les peuples autochtones à l’intérieur de leurs territoires, et une «autodétermination externe», comprenant le droit à constituer des Etats. Dans la communication a été analysée la manière dont l’Etat colombien a interprété le droit à l’autodétermination interne des peuples autochtones, après ratification en 1991 de la Convention 169 de l’OIT.

Au «Breaking Convention: Multidisciplinary Congress on Psychedelic Counciousness», organisé par le Département d’Anthropologie de l’Université de Kent à Canterbury (Angleterre) en avril 2011, Leonardo Rodriguez a présenté une communication à propos des peuples autochtones en Amazonie colombienne. La construction contemporaine de la figure des peuples autochtones est réalisée à partir des discours transnationaux de différent type (e.g. écologiste, humanitaire). En tenant compte de ce fait, dans la communication a été abordée la réinterprétation des rituels d’origine autochtone à partir du discours religieux transnationale de notre époque, le New Age.

Ces communications sont le résultat des recherches réalisées dans le cadre de la thèse «Construction du mouvement autochtone en Colombie, 1970– 2000» dirigée par Claude Auroi, professeur emeritus de l’IHEID, et Annick Lempérière, professeur à l’université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne."

Visit to the Olympic Museum

2011-05-06T13:19:00.004+02:00

Professor Rodogno and Saunier's course on the Organization, Activities and Politics of NGOs, 1800-2000, visited the Olympic Museum, plus the IOC library and archives, on 4 May 2011.

The class tour of the Olympic Museum was provided by an HEID alum.

The class was then split in two, and visited the archives stacks, the video library, and photo archives.

We may have even done a little sport!

UCSB/GWU/LSE International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War

2011-04-20T16:54:00.007+02:00

Two third year PhD students of the International History and Politics Section, Bernhard Blumenau and Nathaniel Powell, attended the International Graduate Students Conference on the Cold War, which was hosted in Santa Barbara, California and which is organised annually by the London School of Economics, George Washington University and the University of California in Santa Barbara. Bernhard and Nathaniel presented papers on respectively "The Other Battleground of the Cold War: The UN, Germany and International Terrorism in the 1970s" and "Saving Mobutu: An International History of Africa's First Peacekeeping Force". Prominent Cold War historians such as Odd Arne Westad, Hope Harrison, Mary Elise Sarotte and Salim Yaqub provided valuable comments and feedback to the graduate students presenting at the conference.

Visit to the Museum of Swiss Abroad

2011-04-20T11:41:00.002+02:00

Professor Liebich's course on Nationalism visited the Museum of the Swiss Abroad on 18 April 2011. The tour was guided by Anselm Zurfluh, Director of the Institute and Museum of the Swiss Abroad.

Visit to the Palais des Nations

2011-04-19T20:48:00.004+02:00

Professor Liebich's course on the Twenty Years' Crisis went offsite to the Palais des Nations on 19 April 2011.

First we had an introduction to the Archives of the League of Nations.

Then our handy tour guide (a PhD Candidate in our department!) gave us a wonderful overview of the League of Nations - its activities, structures, successes, failures, and so forth.

We even spotted a few of the famous Ariana peacocks!

Save the Date!

2011-04-17T20:50:00.002+02:00

The International History and Politics Department is pleased to invite current students and faculty to its annual BBQ!

It will take place at the cafeteria Barton's Parc (just below AJF) from 18h30 on Tuesday, 24 May.

Valuing the humanities

2011-04-05T11:37:00.002+02:00

An interesting few pieces as of late on the value of degrees in humanities:

- Professor André Liebich sends this link from the Harvard Business Review blog - Tony Golsby-Smith on why the humanities produce innovative thinkers.

- Check out the website of the nascent US President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

IHP Fondue, Les Armures, 13.12.2010

2010-12-16T08:49:00.003+01:00

Lettre de la côte Ouest

2010-10-26T15:27:00.006+02:00

Anna Mkhoyan, a fourth year PhD candidate in International History and Politics, sends a letter from her semester as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley:

"Ça va faire bientôt deux mois, que je suis à Berkeley; nouveau monde, «nouvelle vie»… Situé sur la baie orientale de San Francisco, Berkeley est une petite ville avec une population de plus de 100000 habitants. C’est une ville extraordinaire, hors du commun... Avec des quartiers résidentiels essentiellement sur des collines, d’où s’ouvrent des paysages fabuleux. La ville a quelques rares immeubles, généralement des résidences estudiantines ; la majorité des résidences étant des maisons, qui datent souvent plus de cent voire cent cinquante ans. C’est également une ville de contrastes, souvent très différente d’un quartier à un autre...

Ce côté atypique est renforcé par le fameux University of California Berkeley, connu également comme UC Berkeley ou Cal, tout court. De South Hall, son premier bâtiment, construit en 1873, on a, aujourd’hui, un immense campus. Situé tout au centre de la ville, le campus est chargé d’événements, d’étudiants, de sportifs (Cal Golden Bears), de monde… Fondée en 1868, l’Université accueille aujourd’hui plus de 35 milles étudiants et a un corps d’enseignants plus de 2000 professeurs.

Un nombre important afin de contribuer à l’économie de la ville, où le niveau de vie est bien élevé. Les logements ont des prix exorbitants…. et, bien sur, ici non plus, rien n’est gratuit ; même l’impression est payante à l’Université, qui a, probablement, ses avantages aussi. Toutefois, l’Université étant publique, les frais d’inscription pour les étudiants ne sont pas aussi élevés que dans des Universités privées américaines. Comme à l’Institut, ici aussi, les étudiants ont l’opportunité de travailler un peu partout dans l’administration, au bureau des sports ou au bureau des logements afin de financer leurs études.

Concernant ma recherche, c’est un endroit très intéressant, enrichissant et intense. Un corps académique très compétent, beaucoup de séminaires et lectures présentés par des académiques ou des praticiens invités qu’on aurait du mal à suivre tous ; des bibliothèques immenses, et riches… Et, bien sûr, un cadre bien international, comme à l’Institut.

Malgré le quotidien assez intense, l’ambiance au campus me semble généralement détendue. Les étudiants, malgré le fait d’être occupés, ne me semblent pas très stressés, probablement le beau temps fréquent y contribue ; et les images du campus, très animées et vives… Des images, qui deviennent, petit à petit, de l’histoire…

Et comme, on s’intéresse tous à l’histoire, un petit fragment de l’histoire californienne, de l’histoire beaucoup plus lointaine, de Fort Ross, puisque le 16 octobre, la semaine dernière, c’était Fort Ross Harvest Festival. Cet événement réuni les familles russes des Etats-Unis, tous en costumes traditionnels, afin de partager avec les visiteurs l’histoire de Ross et la culture russe. A deux heures et demi de route de Berkeley, Fort Ross ou Ross (qui viendrait du mot Rus’), comme l’appelaient les Russes, est une forteresse située dans le comté de Sonoma, au nord de la Californie. Cette année, à l’agenda de Fort Ross Harvest Festival étaient la visite des pommiers, dont les premiers furent plantés en 1820 ; ensuite des domaines de Fort Ross, où nous attendaient des familles russes, des artisans, qui montraient comment tisser des petits paniers en osier ; ainsi que la danse et le chant folkloriques russes.

Aujourd’hui un National Historic Landmark, Fort Ross a été une colonie russe, « l’Amérique russe », de 1812 à 1841, fondée par la Russian-American Company. Pendant sa courte histoire, Ross comptera entre 200 et 400 habitants, essentiellement des Russes, des Aléoutes et des Indiens de Californie. Ross ne va durer que trente ans; les Russes quittent la Californie en 1842...

Meilleures salutations de Berkeley,

Anna"

Scenes from the IHP autumn cocktail, 19.10.2010

2010-10-25T20:54:00.003+02:00

Above the Fray: Thoughts on V.S. Naipaul

2010-10-01T11:32:00.006+02:00

Matthew Hinds, an IHP Visiting Research Fellow for 2010-2011 from the International History Department at LSE, sends this contribution to Past Present:

"Once again, the Nobel Prize winning author V.S. Naipaul’s latest work has been lambasted by his fellow writers. This time in a most scathing fashion, the novelist Robert Harris, in a recent review for the Sunday Times blurred the lines between personal attack and objective reflection, calling Naipaul’s Masque of Africa, a non-fictional account of the author’s travels to the continent, “repulsive.” Ever since Patrick French’s 2008 fascinating biographical portrait of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, reviewers such as Harris have gravitated towards the shortcomings of Naipaul’s personality, rather than the writer’s contribution to literature. The insufferable egotism of Naipaul was put on full display for everyone to see in French’s biography, but should this really be such a surprise? Most writers, particularly the good ones, are more often than not unabashed egotists.

What critics have neglected in their anger is the importance of contextualizing Naipaul’s background and the correlative relationship it has had with his writing. A Trinidadian of Hindu descent as well as a resident of Britain for over 50 years, Naipaul has always viewed himself as a foreigner, even when he is “home.” Looking beyond the parochialisms of Trinidad and the Caribbean, Naipaul’s view of the world was greater than his surroundings. Publishing his first book in the 1950’s, he fought against all those who tried to pin him into categories on account of his race. Labeling him as a “West Indian writer” was a backhanded way to highlight, yet at the same time, minimize the full contribution of his work. Arguably, the unifying force behind Naipaul’s writing is the happy sense of disconnection to any one community. It has inspired his uncompromising writing style, which has no doubt resulted in him making a legion of enemies of many different stripes. Throughout his career, Naipaul’s own unique brand of iconoclasm has rubbed many people the wrong way. Once asked to comment on the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, he mischievously described it as “an extreme form of literary criticism.”

Therefore, it is no wonder that decades earlier, Naipaul was subverting stereotypes by writing such books as The Middle Passage and An Area of Darkness, both prominent works that were highly critical of the post-colonial eras in the West Indies and India. Naipaul, unlike many of his contemporaries, was skeptical of anti-colonial nationalism in terms of the corruption, poverty and politicization that animated some of these movements. In this view, his sharp critique of the emerging third world countervailed those post-colonial narratives that championed the anti-imperial struggle. This is not to say that Naipaul was a reactionary or an apologist for imperialism, as his detractors claim. In fact, much of that famous “Naipaul rage” manifests from the insipid racism and class ridden bigotry he felt when he arrived at Oxford in 1950.

So why then was Naipaul, at the height of decolonization and the growing trend of cultural relativism, more severe in his criticism of post-colonial states as opposed to the former imperialists? The reason is that given his platform as a writer, Naipaul was adamant that it also meant being above the fray of orthodoxy. When confronting such contentious topics like race, class, and country, Naipaul lives by the maxim “fiat justitia ruat caelum” -Let justice be done, though the heavens fall. In this sense, like all great writers, Naipaul has always possessed an unwavering single-mindedness; to tell the truth as he believed and saw it."

Letter from the New World

2010-09-26T14:44:00.003+02:00

Second year MIS-IHP student Barbara Martin sends a note on her exchange semester at Yale:

"While my fellow graduate students are either discovering an exciting new life in our renowned “Genève Internationale”, or slowly (reluctantly?) settling back into a familiar academic setting, I find myself among the “happy few” who will be abroad this semester.

Tokyo, Singapore, Paris, Seoul, Washington, Boston… Some of us are now half a world away, experimenting life in a new environment, sometimes disorienting at first. This is an experience many of you will now be familiar with, for you come from the most varied horizons. Cultural shock is a notion most of us have personally experienced. So had I. I had lived in Ireland and in Russia, and overcome the rainy Irish winter and the rudeness of Russian bureaucrats. But every new country represents a new challenge, no matter how deceivingly “familiar” its culture can seem.

And so I embarked on a my first trip to the United States of America, this mythical land of wonders most Europeans unavowedly dream of. My destination was not a city, but a simple name, crystal-clear and exhaling a legendary scent: Yale!

And yet the place I came to was no fantasy, no fabulous realm of higher learning but an (almost) ordinary university, positively anchored in reality – albeit with this inimitable fairy-tale tinge that old stones and gothic style can confer to a centuries-old institution.

I soon found out that Yale was New Haven, just as New Haven was Yale – or not quite? Scattered across downtown New Haven, Yale is omnipresent, and the streets of this charming old town are flooded with students sporting Yale colors. But were one to stray just a few blocks away from this vast campus, a completely different picture would reveal itself: that of a de facto segregated town where the African American minority looks up in dismay and envy to the “rich Yale kids”.

Most students choose to ignore this disturbing picture, even though it always reappears at some point in one way or another – be it the Black lady begging at the street corner or the “Black males” whose misdemeanors regularly fill the police campus reports sent to every student.

I did not close my eyes on the ambiguity of New Haven. In fact, I chose – probably in a reckless move – to live on one of the “worst” streets of New Haven. But worst from which point of view? True, it is an all-black neighborhood, apparently home to a few drug dealers. But diversity does not bother me, and the friendly smiles and greetings I get every day on my way to class are something I would never dream of encountering in Geneva.

But what about classes, then? Does Yale really live up to its legend? Well, I have to say it does. Admittedly, the high quality standard of our institute’s teaching staff is only equaled, not significantly surpassed. And the same shortcomings are to be found there as well: overcrowded seminars contrast with empty classes and ineffective class registration systems leave students frustrated… However, the main difference lies in the proportions : instead of our institute’s few small scattered buildings, it is a whole town of residential colleges and campus buildings, with a library that is literally a cathedral devoted to higher learning, encompassing a dozen floors stacked with books on all subjects and in all possible languages… The campus is impressive, and so are the means devoted to the students. Not a day passes without a reception, a free banquet or a party organized by one department or another. Yes, Yale is indeed breathtaking.

And yet nothing in this world comes really for free. Luckily, I do not have to pay the exorbitant tuition fees that other students are subject to. But I do have to fulfill the other part of the contract, and study as hard as I am required to. And living up to increased expectations is not always an easy task, but it is a tremendous challenge I readily accepted.

By December, this little world will definitely have become mine, just as Geneva became, or will soon become yours. A little corner of our life we will never forget, for we gave it our best, and were accordingly rewarded.

Salutations from New Haven!"

PowerPoint - where do you fall?

2010-04-27T08:23:00.002+02:00

Yesterday's New York Times article "We Have Met The Enemy And He Is PowerPoint" takes note of the growing backlash against the Microsoft tool in military circles. The main critiques presented are: that producing a good presentation takes a bit too much time; that it "makes us stupid", reducing complex ideas beyond their essence; bullet points don't permit deeper connections between subjects - everything appears linear; that they convey much less information that a brief (5-page analysis could); and finally, that the graphic nature of tool means that the creator can get away without valid analysis of the issue at hand.

While I use PowerPoint quite frequently for presentations, I would have to agree with many of these critiques, particularly the critique that it is a reductionist tool. I find PowerPoint useful in that it is an easy way to organize "true" visuals - photos, charts, etc. However, in as much as I can, I avoid using it too present the entirety of my presentation - I would hope that my interlocutors could take that away from my presentation proper!

Where do you fall on the PowerPoint debate?

How to present a paper

2010-04-23T14:47:00.002+02:00

I ran across this article written by former American Historical Association President Linda Kerber on how to present a paper - I think there are lots of good tips, including on proper length, the difference between written and spoken work, and just some basic pointers. Have a look!

THE CONCEPT OF MIXED MIGRATION: REFLECTING ON TODAY'S MIGRATORY POLICIES, MOVEMENTS AND PARADIGMS SHIFTS

2010-03-29T12:56:00.002+02:00

From the Programme for the Study of Global Migration:

A conference on THE CONCEPT OF MIXED MIGRATION: REFLECTING ON TODAY'S MIGRATORY POLICIES, MOVEMENTS AND PARADIGMS SHIFTS.

Date: 8-9 April 2010

Place: AJF

Full programme here.

The Life Raft Debate

2010-03-22T20:48:00.001+01:00

A week ago one of my favorite public radio shows aired an interesting story on the Life Raft Debate, which has taken place under the aegis of the University of Montevallo (in Alabama) Philosophy Club for about the past 10 years. The premise of the debate, as explained on the broadcast [FYI you can listen to the broadcast streaming here; the relevant section is about 42 minutes in, but be forewarned, the point of the story is, in part, to chastize pandering in public discourse], is that the audience is on a life raft, and that they can only select one of the faculty members on stage to join their life raft, thus surviving. Each of the faculty members on stage – from departments like English, Art History, Computer Science, Math, History, etc. – have to argue why their discipline would be the most useful to the raft – a parallel with the question of “what is the value of a liberal arts degree”?

One of the history professors who participated in a past debate was quoted as having argued that, in a life raft situation, the value of a historian was to provide instruction on how to be a benevolent dictator to the dictator which would inevitably arise in the chaos of a life raft situation. While this is amusing (and nefarious!), it begs an examination of what value to attribute to the discipline of history. How about this as a springboard for a discussion?

Go for the Gold: Obama, Reagan, and Nuclear Weapons

2010-02-25T08:48:00.004+01:00

Sometime in the next few weeks, Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev will sign a follow-on agreement to the expired Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that eliminated the firepower equivalent to that wielded by the Death Star. Consequent Senate deliberations over a new treaty are sure to feature accusations that the Russians intend to lie, cheat, and steal, rather than uphold their end of the bargain. Senators opposed to the treaty will invoke Ronald Reagan's name with lusty enthusiasm. Already, Senator Jon Kyl, the number two Republican in the chamber, has indicated his willingness to fight along these lines, and on these terms.

Senators who invoke Reagan in 2010 would have bitterly opposed him in 1988, after he signed the first treaty ever to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons. His admirers forget that for five months after December 1987, when Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty eliminating four Soviet missiles for NATO's every one, Republican Senators like Jesse Helms and Dan Quayle held up ratification on the grounds that the Soviets could not be trusted. "Believe it or not there are elements who are hinting it would be a bad treaty," President Reagan wrote in his diary after meeting with Republican leaders on the eve of Gorbachev's arrival.

The delay over INF ratification mattered then, because it made finalizing a START agreement impossible before the end of Reagan's presidency. A delay over a new START would matter now, because rehashing the same arguments of Helms and Quayle distracts from the more important question: what role should the United States assign its nuclear arsenal after President Obama has received a Nobel Prize, in part, for announcing in Prague last year his quest to eliminate nuclear weapons?

Proponents of low-yield, “bunker busting” nuclear bombs, argue that such weapons would provide a more credible threat to deter state-sponsored terrorism, and that they might prove indispensible to strike hardened targets in any potential military engagement with Iran or North Korea. Opponents fear that a new generation of less powerful nuclear weapons would lower the threshold by which the United States -- or another nuclear power -- might use them.

Neither position is so hawkish or dovish as the other might contend, and President Obama has shrewdly indicated his preference for zero nuclear weapons without vilifying those who may disagree. He has also managed to sidestep any meaningful debate about just how to get from point A to point B. This is a national discussion worth having; unfortunately, it is also one where complex matters of military strategy, long-term forecasting, and alliance management are likely to be obscured by political demagogy.

Obama can silence the Cheney Family Choir, however, simply by invoking recent history. Perhaps he might declare that his own attitude toward nuclear weapons derives not from Jimmy Carter but Ronald Reagan. Both men spoke of abolishing nuclear weapons, but only Reagan achieved any real success. And in the last year of his presidency, he wanted to eliminate still more nuclear weapons. "We need to go for the gold," Reagan instructed Secretary of State George Shultz in February 1988, when the administration was deliberating over whether to pursue a last-minute START agreement.

Like Reagan, Obama should go for the gold. The elder statesmen already in his corner could not be more distinguished. For the past few years, Shultz (arguably the best secretary of state since Dean Acheson) as well as Henry Kissinger (who would argue) have joined with Democrats William Perry and Sam Nunn in beating the drum for a "world free of nuclear weapons." A new documentary they have produced, Nuclear Tipping Point, illustrates that no matter how prudent their keepers, no matter the safeguards, these weapons continue to imperil our planet.

For the moment, support for nuclear abolition is growing. Unlike climate change, affirming one's support does not entail the everyday guilt that accompanies purchasing bottled water. The real test is coming, however, not just when the Senate takes on a new START but the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty after rejecting it over a decade ago. Critics will raise questions to which there are no perfect answers; the Obama administration should answer truthfully. Yes, whatever emerges to replace START will have its flaws. No, we cannot be one hundred percent sure that the Russians will not cheat. Neither questions nor answers have changed significantly over the past twenty years. But we do know today that Russia is no longer a sprawling empire with an ideological ax to grind. And we know conclusively that arms reductions contributed to ending one cold war, and that there is no compelling reason to begin another.

James Graham Wilson is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Virginia, and a 2009-2010 Gallatin Fellow at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.

Public Lecture invitation

2010-02-17T23:46:00.001+01:00

From the Programme for the Study of Global Migration:

The Politics of Privatised Immigration Detention

Given by Stephen Nathan of the Public Services International Research Unit at the University of Greenwich

Tuesday 2 March 2010, 12:15

Location: Room CV 342 (third floor)
La Voie Creuse, 16 - 1202 Geneva

Call for contributions/contributions

2010-02-07T16:53:00.003+01:00

The IHP section blog is looking for new contributions and contributors!

As noted before, we'd be happy to welcome new regular contributors, as well as one-time pieces.

You could contribute to the ongoing interview series, or the newer archives visit series. Other ideas are:
- current events pieces
- book reviews
- write-ups of conferences
- notes on study-abroad
- or pretty much anything else under the sun! (want to share something about life in Geneva?)

Contributions with photographs are especially welcome.

There is no minimum/maximum length imposed on submissions.

Interested? Contact jaci (dot) eisenberg (at) graduateinstitute (dot) ch

Visiting Archives: The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

2010-01-08T19:19:00.006+01:00

I just had the opportunity to undertake an exploratory trip to the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts), and thought it would be worthwhile to report on it here!

Named for the prominent American Presidential Historian and his wife, the library and archive houses a remarkable collection of personal and organisational papers, searchable under either the general Harvard library catalog, or the more specific archival collections finding aid catalog (which permits in-text searching of key names and terms) [be sure to limit searches on both databases to the Schlesinger library so as not to return Harvard-wide results].

Portrait of Arthur Schlesinger hanging in the hall of the Schlesinger library.

The Schlesinger library is located at the intersection of Brattle and James streets; the main entrance is on the Radcliffe Yard side. Their holdings are consultable Monday through Friday, 9:30am to 5pm, in spacious and bright Carol. K. Pforzheimer Reading Room. Upon arrivial you have to present photo identification and register some personal and affiliation information at the welcome desk.

Researchers are permitted to photograph manuscript collections for note taking, although there are restrictions as to the quantity of photographs permitted from any one collection. Flatbed scanners are not permitted. Also available on-site are microfilm readers which scan directly to PDF - a godsend for researchers who wish to have the originals on hand for later verification.

The library staff was extremely kind and helpful, both in person and via email prior to the visit, which went towards ensuring I was able to make the most of this preliminary visit. The depth of the material available was much greater than anticipated - I would strongly recommend that anyone with topics pertaining to American history or perspectives, or American women, even as a tangential part of their research, consider examining this library's collection, as it is more than likely some collections will have valuable sources for your research.

On a practical note, several good lunch options exist in the vicinity of the Schlesinger library. Directly across Radcliffe Yard, in the basement of the Longfellow building, is a small Harvard cafeteria with a daily entree, a salad bar, several soup options, and a sandwich construction area, not to mention bagels and muffins; for about $7 you can get a complete lunch. Down Brattle Street, towards Harvard Square, there is Market in the Square, a semi-gourmet 24-hour deli with seating on premises. And just a few feet beyond that are the numerous options of Harvard Square.

Visiting Archives: The Jimmy Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta, Georgia

2009-12-01T21:36:00.004+01:00

A recent project took me to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, Georgia, and I thought this might be a good time to launch a second series on the IHP blog: archive visit notes. Hopefully the information in the posts will help researchers to get better acclimated with various archives before they go, or even help them to discover new archives!

I contacted the Jimmy Carter Library in advance of my visit by the form available on their website. The research room director responded with some information about their holdings which became clearer on-site, as well as with a list of local housing options.

From Geneva I checked the National Archives and Records Administration Archival Research Catalog (ARC), limiting all results (possible under “Search Options”) to the Jimmy Carter Library, for relevant records – the order in which they were returned did not make much sense to me at the time. Upon arriving the research room director ran a search for me, one which was classified by series and thus gave a better idea of the hierarchy of files – to those heading to a NARA archive I would recommend sorting your catalog search results by “Hierarchy” – knowing the record group certainly helps in a first sorting of which sources might be useful and which will likely not be so useful.

A source which is not noted on the Jimmy Carter Library website, but which was extremely valuable, was their CREST database (housed on an in-room computer, not accessible remotely). The CREST database mostly houses once-sensitive documents which have been reviewed and either declassified or sanitized (redacted). The advantage – and disadvantage – of all things digitized is that it is key-word searchable. This works well if you are looking for person names or agency names. However, if you have a less concrete subject, you will likely want to run the search several times, with varying key words, in order to best cover all your bases. As in real life, official titles or names were not always used in cabled correspondence, meaning a thorough search of the CREST database takes some good detective work. The CREST database documents each have unique identifying numbers which can be deconstructed, leading you back to potential files of interest – it can serve as another search tool.

Once on site, you also have the possibility to consult extensive finding aids for their series mentioned online, such as the White House Central Files, or the files of the First Lady’s Office. While the row of binders certainly looks daunting, they are actually a bit wanting in information – often the descriptions are vague, the type with official department titles but little indication of the content – that it serves the researcher best to order any box which might look interesting for their research.

In order to access the archive, I had to fill out a contact form and provide identification (a passport suffices). This in turn permitted me to receive a researcher card, valid at the Carter library for one year.

Prior to entering the archive, researchers are given keys to lockers just outside the reading room for all bags, coats, and nonessentials. Upon entering, researchers have to sign in and present any paper they wish to bring in (or when exiting, what they wish to bring out) to the research room supervisor in order to ensure documents are not being added or pilfered. There are no set pull times for files – one fills out a short request form, and usually in less than five minutes they are available for consultation.

The reading room itself is well stocked with reference works for the period of the Carter presidency, as well as the latest volumes concentrating on the Carter presidency. In addition to the document finding aids, there are extensive finding aids for audio and visual material (generally these results are available on the ARC catalog as well).

Researchers are permitted to photograph all documents (without flash, of course), as well as make copies (or print copies if they are in the CREST database). Copies, however, are fee-bearing.

In terms of accessing documents, as the Carter presidency was less than 30 years ago, there are still lots of documents which are classified. Even some that have passed the 30 year limit are still classified, due to too few staff to review such material. Therefore, I would recommend if the Carter archives were to be consulted for a major work (like a dissertation) in the next few years, that a minimum of two visits be planned - a first one to survey and examine what is already available, and a second one at least three or four months later, in case any access reviews or FOIAs need to be ordered.

The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library is part of the Carter Center complex, which in turn was formerly the Augustus Hurt Plantation.

In addition to the offices of the Carter Center and the archives, the property houses an actual library, a public museum, and a gift shop. There is a cafeteria (adorned with photos of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter feasting all around the world) where researchers are entitled to a complete lunch for $4 (open 11am to 3pm). Between the archives and the museum/gift shop/cafeteria entrance is a small rose garden which is nice on a clear day.

Overall, the Carter archive was very welcoming to researchers, from the receptionist to the multitude of research room staff. A plus for those planning to spend multiple days there is that their chairs are superbly ergonomic! I look forward to returning sometime in the near future.

IHP Fondue

2009-11-26T01:05:00.005+01:00

At the Bains de Paquis, Wednseday, 25 November

Photos courtesy of Lisa Komar

Getting to know the IHP Faculty: Davide Rodogno

2009-11-02T13:31:00.005+01:00

New school year, more interviews! We begin with Davide Rodogno, Professeur boursier, who is a co-director of the Doctoral and Faculty Seminar in International History and Politics this year (and who will team-teach a course on the League of Nations and the United Nations: A Parallel History in the spring).

Jaci Eisenberg: I’m curious about how you became interested in your specific areas of research. Could you tell us about what you did your graduate studies on, and how that’s evolved into what you’re working on today.

Davide Rodogno: I was a Ph.D. student here at the Graduate Institute. Our director, Philippe Burrin, was my supervisor and I also was a teaching assistant for Professor Bruno Arcidiacono and Matthew Leitner. I consider the three of them as my mentors. The topic of my dissertation was on Fascist Italy military occupations in Europe during the Second World War.

The topic of my Ph.D. actually began as a seminar paper in late 1994. Bruno Arcidiacono asked me whether I was interested in working on Fascist policy towards the Jews of the occupied territories in Europe. The topic appealed to me a lot, since it contributed to the understanding of the persistence of a myth alive still today in Italy: Italiani brava gente, the Italians were good people and benevolent occupiers. In 1995, I came to the conclusion that if one really wanted to understand Fascist policies towards the Jews in Europe it was necessary to understand the broader context of the military occupation or annexations. The seminar paper became a mémoire and, eventually, a PhD dissertation.

In 2000, while finishing my thesis, I became interested in the topic of my second book, (a history of humanitarian interventions during the nineteenth century, which should be published by the end of 2010). I should mention that the 1990s was a time when at the old HEI there was a lively debate on humanitarian interventions. As a student I had the privilege to attend seminars of international law professors such as George Abi-Saab, Theodor Meron, and Luigi Condorelli. While preparing my thesis defense, I dealt with questions concerning the history of genocide and I came across Vahakn Dadrian’s book on the Armenian genocide. Dadrian mentioned humanitarian interventions during the 19th century, without giving any definition of this international practice. So, I started doing some historiographical research and realized that, with the exception of some international law articles, nothing had been written on the history of humanitarian interventions.

Shortly after my doctoral thesis defense I applied for a bourse chercheur avancé of the Fonds National Suisse. My research project was about armed intervention against massacre in the Ottoman Empire throughout the nineteenth century. In the meantime, I was already working for the World Bank in Lithuania and try to keep as many professional doors open for my future because I wasn’t so sure that I would get the Post-Doc fellowship.

So, this is how things developed in my case. Curious maybe, but that’s the way it is.

Jaci Eisenberg: What were you doing at the World Bank exactly?

Davide Rodogno: The World Bank had to prepare a Country Economic Memorandum, a photograph of Lithuania, one of the post-communist transition countries, as they were called back in the 1990s. I was one of the members of a team of 10 experts, and the only non-economist of the group. I had to prepare a report on the business environment. It was a very formative experience because I could interview the ex-President of Lithuania, the representatives of the patronat, of the workers, of small-and-medium size enterprises, as well as NGOs monitoring corruption in the country.

At the very same time I was applying for the YPP (the Young Professional Programme of the World Bank) the FNS awarded me the post-doctoral fellowship. I decided that I would keep working in academia. I moved to London and to Paris. From there I moved to St. Andrews, where I was appointed Academic Fellow in 2005.

Now, to go back to your first question, while I was working on the history of humanitarian interventions throughout the 19th century, I realized that a number of public opinion movements, such as the Pro-Armenian, Pro-Macedonian, the Congo Reform Association had a truly transnational dimension. I started developing an interest in transnational history, and wanted to combine this new research interest with my previous interest in the history of humanitarianism and humanitarian interventions. In 2007, I submitted a new proposal to the Fonds national, this time for a position of Professeur boursier, on the history of international humanitarian associations.

I started this 4 years’ project when I came in Geneva, in 2008. It is an entirely new experience for me. For the first time a lead a small research group and collaborate with two IHP Ph.D. students: Shaloma Gauthier and Francesca Piana. The first thing that we did was to narrow down the topic. We have decided to focus on humanitarian relief operations in the aftermath of conflicts, whether internal or international during the 1920s and 1930s. Our units of analysis are European and Northern-American non-state humanitarian actors, such as the ICRC, the League of Red Cross Societies, Save The Children, l’Union Internationale de Secours aux Enfants or the American Relief Administration. The project is about a given number of situations, post-war situations, and a given number of configurations. Geographically, the project covers an area that goes from Poland, down to Eastern and Central Europe, the Balkans, and then Turkey and Caucasus, including the relief for Armenians, from Anatolia to Asia Minor. We try to understand who were the actors doing what, and how humanitarian cooperation took place.

As you see, my interest in the history of Ottoman Armenians is still alive today. The reason why today I keep working on the international relief on behalf of Armenian populations, especially women and children in the 1920s, is because for me this is in a way the third chapter of a story that begins with the Armenian massacres of the 1890s, when no humanitarian intervention ever took place, and tragically continued during the War with genocide.

Jaci Eisenberg: Have you started any other projects? In previous conversations you’ve mentioned the League of Nations Century Project.

Davide Rodogno: This is a very long-term project that involves the colleagues of this academic unit, and possibly of other academic units, who have an interest in the history of international organizations. On the one hand, we wish to cooperate with the United Nations in the process of digitization of the documents. Currently, we are exploring the possibility of focusing on the Fonds Nansen, which is a corpus of documents that stands alone. Moreover, some of these documents have already been microfilmed, so the digitization process should be smooth and easy. On the other hand, we are developing a scientific project that will go along with the digitization. The history of Nansen is inextricably linked to the history of refugees, and, as you know, HEID hosts a refugee center, directed by Jussi Hanhimäki.

Jaci Eisenberg: You’ve already mentioned quite a lot of future projects, but do you have any others that you’d like to talk about?

Davide Rodogno: I would like to teach a seminar on the history of NGOs (maybe co-teaching it with Professor Pierre-Yves Saunier of Lyon). Pierre-Yves and I have already been discussing a number of things that we’d like to deal with in our seminar. We would like to encourage students to work in the archives of NGOs, to study the history and politics of NGOs as well as the history of NGOs governance a very topical question. As you know, a number of NGOs have their headquarters in Geneva or in Switzerland, and I wish our students to exploit this gold mine of unexplored archives in the future.

Bernhard Struck (University of St Andrews), Jakob Vogel (University of Cologne) and myself organized a two-round conference on the history of transnational networks of experts and organizations during the long nineteenth century. We are currently preparing a synopsis, and hoping to find an editor willing to publish this volume.

Finally, let me mention the Groupe d’Histoire des Organisations Internationales (History of International Organization Network). Last year, together with Sandrine Kott, from the University of Geneva, and Daniel Palmieri, from the ICRC, we funded this group. Our initial aim was to provide advanced students, independent scholars, university professors, as well as archivists with a forum and a locus where they could meet and exchange their views on the history of international organizations. We began by organizing a number of meetings with the archivists of the ICRC, the United Nations, the ILO. This year we’ve got an award from UNO Academia to organize a seminar on the history of international organizations. On October 27, we had a brilliant Oxford historian, Patricia Clavin, come to Geneva and present a fascinating paper on the League of Nations during the Second World War. By the beginning of 2010, we plan “to go virtual” and to have a website allowing scholars and students from all over the world to join the network. So, students and scholars coming to Geneva – where many archives of international organizations are located – will get to know the community of students and scholars sharing their same interests.

Jaci Eisenberg: Do you have any advice for the students of the History and Politics section?

Davide Rodogno: Just follow your passion. Especially for Ph.D. students, this is extremely important, because they have to live with their topic for 4 years. They should not follow any ephemeral fashions or short-term interests and take all the time necessary to understand what really their passionate about.

Professor Davide Rodogno, Office Hours on Wednesdays from 16h to 18h, Voie Creuse 334.

How accurate are your sources?

2009-10-20T11:47:00.004+02:00

The Columbia Journalism Review recently profiled the "Tilburg Checkers", a group of Dutch Journalism students whose fact-checking skills are being honed through an intensive course of re-fact checking mainstream press articles - an astonishing amount of which are incorrect in some way or another.

This article certainly applies to history as well. In researching my Master's thesis, I found mistakes which ran the gamut from:

CONFUSION - for example, Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels' ("Transnationalism and the League of Nations: Understanding the Work of its Economic and Financial Organisation." Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (2005), 490) indictment of sloppy research on behalf of economic historians:

They often write of ‘Geneva-based ILO-LON economists’, although many of the League reports originated from committees comprising government representatives, such as the Delegation on Economic Depressions. League officials, League economists, members of the International Labour Organisation, League committees and delegations comprising national representatives are frequently, and confusingly, lumped together See Andres M. Endres and Grant A. Fleming, International Organisations and the Analysis of Economic Policy, 1919–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

To MISAPPROPRIATED ERRORS - such as assuming the title of a person, as seemingly presented in official sources, was indeed their title - without further checking.

In my professional experience i've even copyedited works who employed primary sources in their own way, mixing and re-ordering the quotation until it bore little resemblance to the original!

How frequently do you find mistakes in your sources? How do you address them in your research? Let us know!

Digitized archives

2009-10-14T09:29:00.004+02:00

A recent article in the New York Times talks about some recent grants by the Levy Foundation to private organisations or institutions to digitize their archives. It emphasizes the positive, that such digitization is unearthing works which were previously uncataloged.

If you are a researcher that had worked with both paper and digital archives, what are your thoughts? Is it possible to conduct comprehensive research from digital archives alone, or must one imperatively see the paper in person?

Public Lecture: Global migration and the crisis: Do we still need immigrants now?

2009-10-13T10:34:00.002+02:00

From the Programme for the Study of Global Migration:

Global migration and the crisis: Do we still need immigrants now?

Philippe Legrain, Journalist, Writer and Visiting Fellow at the European Institute (LSE)

Monday 26 October 2009, 12:15

Location: Room CV 342 (third floor)
La Voie Creuse, 16 - 1202 Geneva

An event organized with the Editions Markus Haller, publisher of the French version of Mr. Legrain’s book Immigrants - Your Country Needs Them/Immigrants - un bien nécessaire.

The library: making your research easier

2009-10-13T09:55:00.003+02:00

The HEID library recently updated its landing page, as well as added some new tools for research, the most interesting of which is a downloadable toolbar with quick links to the Geneva library catalog, the UNIGE A to Z journal database, database listings, etc. I've been using it for a few days now, and I can attest that it really saves time!

What inspires your research?

2009-09-29T15:01:00.005+02:00

It's not exactly international history and politics, but interesting nevertheless:

September's National Geographic had a fascinating story about a non-historian who created the Mannahatta Project - an effort to re-envision Manhattan as it was before its discovery by Henry Hudson in 1609 - after seeing an historical map in a coffee table book.

This begs the question: what sources inspire you? Have you found a great research topic in an unusual place? Let us know!

Welcome back!

2009-09-03T22:46:00.002+02:00

After a three month summer vacation, welcome back returning IHP students, and welcome to all new students!

I will take this opportunity to shill for contributors to the blog - anyone from the IHP section - students, professors, etc. - can contribute content - thoughts on the news, information about side projects, questions about methodology, reports (like Fiona Ziegler's excellent contribution from January), other topics - there aren't really too many restrictions on what can appear here! And there is no set schedule - if you have a one-off piece, we'd be happy to have it. Or if you would like to start a column, that is great as well! Contact me at jaci.eisenberg(a)graduateinstitute.ch and I will arrange for blog posting access.

One more thing: I came across an interesting article in Harper's magazine the other day by Mark Slouka ("Dehumanized: when math and science rule the school", September 2009) on the overemphasis on math and science in American higher education, to the detriment of the humanities. While the debate could go on for ages as to whether history is more social science or included within the humanities, his take on the ramification of favoring fields of study whose output is easier to turn into a professional field (say a math major becoming an accountant) than those where it is more difficult (like literature, history, or political science) is worth a read. You can access the link here, although to read the complete article you will need a login. If anyone is interested I would be more than happy to lend them my copy.

See you in class!

Memoire advice for 1st years

2009-06-02T08:36:00.000+02:00

The 2nd year IHP class, in the thick of writing their mémoires, would like to offer this advice to the 1st years:

NOW:
- Look for a professor to advise you NOW because they are (as well as several of you) are gone during the summer. A letter will arrive shortly by mail notifying you that you will need to provide the name of your professor and your topic at the very beginning of September.
- Pick a topic you like because to work one year on a single topic is difficult otherwise.

SOON:
- Create a comprehensive bibliography early on and ensure the books are available in the RERO network. If not you might need to order them through Inter-Library Loan or request that the library purchase the book, both of which take a while and can make you lose time.

LATER:
- Take at least one class or have a part-time internship or job in your spring semester so you have something to keep you on schedule – otherwise the mémoire can devour your days.
- Plan on submitting a first full final version in May or June of your 2nd year so you are able to correct it afterwards.

ALWAYS:
- Be organized!

More to follow....

Getting to know the IHP Faculty: André Liebich

2009-05-17T16:46:00.004+02:00

Our interview project continues with André Liebich, Professor of International History and Politics. This semester he teaches a course on Nationalism, as well as one entitled Reading the Yugoslav Wars.

Jaci Eisenberg: How did you become interested in your specific areas of research? Could you walk us through first what exactly you research, and then perhaps process that has led/leads you to chose these areas.

André Liebich: I’ve been working the last few years on issues of nationalism and minorities, and that’s a stage in a long process. I’ve always been interested in the relation between ideas and politics, in an historical perspective. I began as a political scientist, my first degree was in political science, and economics. I then did a degree in Soviet studies, and then a Ph.D. in Political Science. My initial interest was in political theory, and because I had this interest in what was then Soviet-dominated or Communist Europe, I was interested in Marxism and Marxist regimes. My first book was in political theory, on an aspect of Hegelian thought. My second and third books were, respectively, on Russian Socialist émigrés, and on minorities in Eastern Europe. I have very eclectic interests, but there is sort-of a fil conducteur which is ideas, even minorities of course is a recent concept, and how they work themselves out in the political sphere. I do contemporary things as well, both in terms of teaching and services, and occasional work. But I think my serious work involves looking backwards to see how this relation between ideas and politics has played itself out at different times.

Jaci Eisenberg: You had just mentioned your teaching. While we’re on that topic, could you talk a little bit about the courses you’re teaching this semester?

André Liebich: Yes, this semester I’m giving a “Nationalism” class, which is a service class that the history and politics section does for the MIA. It’s nationalist theory, so we read authors and look at case studies. My other class this semester is called “Reading the Yugoslav Wars”, and that’s contemporary historiography. There’s an enormous literature already on the Yugoslav wars. We’re looking at schools of thought, biases, debates, even controversies of which there is no lack. The “Nationalism” class is one which I’ve given previously twice. It’s a regular, semi-obligatory class for the MIA. The “Yugoslav” class is my own choice, and that’s also something, that is very valuable and, some extent, specific to this section: we’ve always had a lot of liberty to choose what we want to teach, and we are encouraged to change our teachings. The rationale behind this is that we are a small Institute, students are here at least two years, so they should have some sort of choice in the classes they are offered. In the autumn I gave a class on “Political Ideas”, which is also an obligatory class for the International History and Politics – MIS incoming students, next year it will be semi-obligatory. And I gave a class on “Minorities and Nationalities” in a largely historical perspective. Next year I’m going to give a class in the autumn on Russian Foreign Policy since the fall of the Soviet Union. I’ll try to look at continuities - ideological continuities, ways of thinking, and security concepts - in both present Russia, Soviet Union, and even Tsarist Russia.

Jaci Eisenberg: Where have you studied? How did that path progress into teaching?

André Liebich: I was brought up mostly in Montreal, and I went to McGill, which is a good Canadian university. I studied political science and economics - it was one department at the time, a bit like History and Politics are here, and everybody had to take a Minor in Economics. So, in fact, I took some History courses, but not that many. I went on from there to Harvard, to the Soviet Studies program. Harvard has the oldest Russian Research Center in the US, and, of course, it’s a very dynamic place. That was a two-year program, from which I went on directly into, what is called then and now at Harvard, the Government department. There I wrote my thesis with two people: Adam Ulam, whose title was Professor of both History and Politics, a specialist of the Soviet régime, who had actually begun as a specialist of the British Empire and of British labour; my other thesis director was Judith Shklar, who was a classical Political Theorist, with books on the great political philosophers, such as Rousseau, Hegel, and on normative theory, notably a book entitled "Ordinary Vices.” As I was finishing my studies, I got a fellowship to go to Oxford, St. Antony’s College, which is a very cosmopolitan place; it’s one of the newest of the colleges, a graduate college, and by Oxford standards it is very laid-back. It’s something of a meeting place for people from all over because they have regional centers, a Europe center, a Russian center, a very famous Middle East center, and now a Japan Institute too. From there, I went back to Montreal, where I began teaching, at a newly-founded university the Université du Québec à Montréal, the first state university in Quebec. In my sixteen years of teaching in Montréal I also taught at my alma mater, McGill, and at the Université de Montréal as well. I became Professor of Political Science, Secretary of the Canadian Political Science Association, and so on. It was when I came here, in 1989, that I discovered that I was a Historian. And I was very pleased to learn that, because the way in which Political Science had developed left me completely cold. To my great relief, I no longer had to subscribe to or read the American Political Science Review. My Chair here when I came was called “le monde communiste.” This was autumn 1989. My first class was on the Socialist bloc and every week one of these countries ceased to be Socialist. That was a moment when I was reconfirmed in my belief that history gives us much more of a handle to understand what is happening, even today than formal models or one-size-fits-all political science approaches. It seems to me that the fall of the Soviet Union was the great failure of social science at the time; Historians didn’t anticipate this either, of course, but they weren’t in the business of anticipations and they could take a much longer view. Once it happened, it was much easier for them to find their point de repère, and their way. I remember after 1989, journalists called and were very eager to know about the Sanjak of Novy Bazaar. Well, you had to be a historian to know what this was because it hadn’t been mentioned for the last 80 years. Suddenly, places and matters such as these became contemporary, relevant, and burning issues.

In the course of my career, I spent several years on sabbatical or on research leave. I went back to my second alma mater, Harvard, for two years. I was at the Kennan Institute, which is the Russian Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. I spent a year at Stanford at the Hoover Institute, where they have marvelous archives – that’s where I was working on Russian émigrés. And here, since I came to Geneva, I have spent a year at Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is of course a fabulous place, it’s Einstein’s office, and all that. The Princeton Institute treats its members very well. . But the experience confirmed to me that I was happy to be in a European setting. Since then I’ve been on sabbatical in London for a semester, and I’ll be going on sabbatical next year as well, in the Winter semester, to St Antony's and then to Nuffield College, in Oxford.

Jaci Eisenberg: Could you talk about some of the books, or perhaps research projects you’ve been involved with in the past?

André Liebich: When I was studying Political Science at McGill, a great revelation was Charles Taylor’s class in the history of Political Thought. I became utterly fascinated by Hegel, on whom Taylor was then writing. A visiting French academic at Harvard, Miguel Abensour, suggested that I do my thesis on a figure whose name came up frequently in discussions of the origins of Marxism but who had never been studied in his own right. This was August Cieszkowski, a Young Hegelian, French utopian socialist and Polish Messianist, meaning he tried to offer an interpretation of Polish, indeed universal, history, in terms of suffering and redemption. A very interesting figure, who hadn’t been really treated in depth in historiography, in part because he was so difficult to pin down. He wrote his philosophy in German, his social works in French, and his messianic quasi-religious philosophy in Polish. Obviously, a very particular combination My thesis on Cieszkowski was an intellectual biography, where I tried to set him in a Mannheimian perspective. It’s called “Between Ideology and Utopia,” which refers to the two paradigms that Karl Mannheim offers, and, which as my title suggests, don’t seem to me to be adequate, because some people fall between the two, as did August Cieszkowski. Then I did an edition of Cieszkowski's writings in English, published by Cambridge University Press. It put at the disposition of an English-language reading public, texts which were obscure and in different languages.

By then I had begun teaching, and I came to author a number of articles on contemporary Eastern Europe, which I still continue to do and still enjoy. I tried to explain how different Eastern Europe was from the Soviet Union, as I try to explain today how different it also is from Western Europe, as I think we are finding today. My next big project was Russian Emigration. I was going to do a political and ideological history of the Russian Emigration, and I was going to divide it into schools across the political spectrum – left, center, right. I began with the Left, the Mensheviks, and I never left them. There was so much fascinating and original material there and they were so influential in developing the way Socialists in the West saw the Soviet Union. The Mensheviks criticized the Soviet Union, from a socialist perspective, and never ceded to outright anti-Sovietism. That project took me much longer than expected, it was very much a labour of love. I spent much time in different archives – Stanford, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, London but at the time, the Soviet Union was closed for this sort of research. Since then, I have gone to Russia, to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything. I have been relieved to find that none of my Mensheviks had been a secret Soviet spy I published that book, which was very well received, won a prize, and is being translated., I am still involved in work on the Mensheviks, because the history of the emigration has become very important in post-Soviet Russia, whereas it was banned in the past, treated with utter contempt, and so on. Now it’s a real source of legitimacy, a sort of point d’ancrage, the link with "Another Russia," the authentic Russia, as it were. Indeed, in post-Soviet Russia, there is something of a cult of the emigration, which is a little bit disturbing, because some of these émigrés were pretty scary, but the Mensheviks have had their share of attention, of course, because of that. So I have been putting out Menshevik documents with Russian colleagues. There are now six volumes, and a seventh, final one is coming out. These are archival documents which are published with lengthy introductions, annotations, indices, and biographies, and so on.

Since I came to Geneva, I have turned to minority issues, initially because the Swiss government was very preoccupied with the minority problem. I first did a commissioned report and then as I became more involved in that the subject, I started giving classes, several of my seminars were devoted to this. I directed memoires and theses in this area, some of which have been published. I wrote a book in French on minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, which is something of a popularization, justified by the fact that there is so little in French on minorities, the French are allergic to the idea of ethnic minorities. They believe they don’t have any at home and, if they do, they don’t want to see them. From minorities I went on to nationalism. And the major book that I am preparing, is to be called Must Nations become States? It’s about the developement of the idea of self-determination from the French Revolution to the First World War, with a number of case studies. I have a chapter on the Poles in Paris after 1830, a chapter on Mazzini, another one on the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a final one on Masaryk and the creation of Czechoslovakia. That’s a project which has been generously financed by the Fonds national, one that I should have finished already, but there’s always something more coming up.

I’ve worked also in Roma issues, and I’ve written on that, both scholarly and popular articles. I’m involved now in an EU project, which is about seeking out best practices in Roma policies in Central and Eastern Europe. Applied or policy research is not really my cup of tea, but it’s something that one does, as a service, and as a different way of approaching one's subjects of research. I’m also involved in a project on citizenship, which is particularly interesting because it has all sorts of ramifications. This is a project which originated at the Carnegie Endowment and has become a network nested at European University Institute in Florence. I have contributed to the project's book on the new EU members. A second edition is now coming out. It includes the newcomers, Bulgaria and Romania and we also have Croatia and Turkey, perhaps in a sort of anticipation. Although there is a Professor of Law from Edinburgh co-directing the project it’s really the social-historical-political analysis of citizenship laws and practices, that is so interesting. It’s as if citizenship were too important to be left to the lawyers! There is always something new or surprising to discover as one looks at the implications and the image of the state that comes through in the way that it formulates and implements its nationality policies, especially since citizenship laws are changing all the time, all the more so in the post-Communist countries - being a plural citizen myself, I’m very interested in citizenship.

Jaci Eisenberg: You’ve just mentioned quite a few projects that you’re in the process of completing. Do you have any on tap for the future?

André Liebich: Yes, well, I do have to get some things off my desk, but I do have two projects for the near and further future. Both are of a biographical nature. When I go on sabbatical next year to Oxford, I want to do a biographical study of a British journalist called Henry Wickham Steed. He was editor of the Times during the First World War and just after the First World War, but the way that I come across him is that he was the great promoter of Central European independence. He had a very colorful life, of course, as a Foreign Correspondent in different places. Very contradictory person, with a complicated personal life. I found his unpublished memoirs in addition to his published memoirs and I got permission from his executors to use them. There’s another further biographical project which I want to do somewhere down the road, which is about another also very complex and very contradictory personage known under different names, Michal Czajkowsk, but also Sadyk Pasha. He was a Polish exile of the 1830s who wrote popular romantic novels in French with a a Ukrainian theme, then went to the Ottoman Empire, converted to Islam, and became a high-ranking Ottoman official who created a Polish legion under Ottoman command. At the end of his life, he retracted everything, begged the Tsar for forgiveness, and went back to die in Russia. Very strange sort of person, who shocked his environment several times, an author, as well as a political figure, whose very name, “Sadyk” meaning faithful, was ironic, because he was seen by his contemporaries as faithless, as an apostate, as he had given up his Catholic Christian faith for Islam, then gave up Islam for Russian Orthodoxy. These are biographical subjects, which are going to be fun, but I think we all find that we don’t really define what we are going to do. You sit down to do one thing, and then you get a phone call, or someone writes you and says, we really need an article on this, and you say, oh, that’s a good idea. Or there’s a Conference and you say, ah! I think I could perhaps contribute something to this, or someone says, I really need you for one thing or another.

Jaci Eisenberg: Do you have any other pieces of advice for the students in the IHP section?

André Liebich: I think this is a great place. There’s a combination of academic cultures, both at the level of the faculty, and at the level of the students, it’s really remarkable. There are many places which are quite international in terms of the student bodies these days. I was in England a few days ago, and at both the LSE and Oxford you hear French, German, East European languages, you see the people who are obviously from Asia, and so on. But the faculty tends to be much more homogenous. They tend to come out of the same, in this case, English, mold, or in the United States you have the American mold. Here you have people who have studied in all sorts of places, very often not places from which they originate. And that, I think, gives a sort of originality to the Institute.

2009 Europaeum Lecture: Margaret MacMillan discusses “90 Years On – Lessons for Peacemakers from 1919?”

2009-05-12T21:39:00.003+02:00

The 2009 Europaeum Lecture was held this evening, in the Auditorium Jacques-Freymond, at 18h30. IHP Professor Jussi Hanhimäki delivered opening remarks, among which was the exciting news that Professor Davide Rodogno (also IHP) is launching the League of Nations Century Project with Margaret MacMillan as co-chair. While official details were not released, one can assume this will follow in the steps paved by the United Nations Intellectual History Project and the ILO Century Project.

This years’ Europaeum speaker, Margaret Macmillan, is a world-renowned international historian. Currently Professor at and Warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, Dr. MacMillan has written several works familiar to us: “Paris 1919,” “Nixon in China,” and most recently, “The Uses and Abuses in History.” Dr. MacMillian began her remarks by noting this was her first visit to Geneva (which she was quite enjoying), but it would not be her last. Our location even prompted her to let us in on the fact that Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George (who also happens to be her great-grandfather!) originally wished to hold the peace conference in Geneva, believing tempers to be too high in Paris, but in the end, Paris it was.

The topic of the lecture was “90 Years On – Lesson for Peacemakers from 1919?”, and Dr. MacMillan did not disappoint in offering possible answers. However, before delving in, she warned against believing history has “lessons” to be “learned.” For her, such “lessons” necessitate skepticism if they are employed in a definite way (“History teaches us…”); such beliefs can force decision-makers into taking erroneous decisions. On the other hand, historical “lessons” are useful in the sense that they provide policymakers with a range of possible options to act with. In sum, she synthesized her most recent work: history can be a dangerous tool, but it is the only one we have.

Are there lessons to be pulled from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919?

First, Dr. MacMillan pointed out, the context is quite different. In 1919, leaders of the Great Powers came together for 6 months to come up with a settlement. Today, such a meeting would be impossible and impractical. Meetings such as the G7 or G8 tend to only last two days! In a related vein, Dr. MacMillan observed it is no longer the “fashion” to have large international conferences to deal with several issues at once; nowadays we tend towards issue-specific conferences (ex. the Dayton Conference to deal with Bosnia).

Dr. MacMillan pointed out that the prevailing view of the “six months that changed the world” in 1919 is that the settlement was a complete disaster, directly causing World War II 20 years later. She would beg to differ: not all of it was a failure, nor did it lead directly to World War II. The politicians meeting in Paris did the best they could in very difficult circumstances, an observation often ignored with our benefit of hindsight. As she went on to explain, in 1919, conditions were not favorable for peace. The world, postwar, was in turmoil, suffering from a huge loss of life: to paraphrase, society went through enormous tremors. The prevailing belief was that World War I was to be followed by a revolution (in the vein of the Bolshevik Revolution) which would turn European society on its head. But in the end, this was not the case.

Slightly off topic, but interesting nevertheless, Dr. MacMillan addressed the misconception that the Treaty of Versailles “created” Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia out of nothing. As she sees it, empires were disintegrating and the people which had been part of it were demanding states, homelands of their own. Therefore, it is more accurate to say the constituent groups of (soon-to-be) countries like Czechoslovakia dreamed them up, with the Treaty of Versailles merely solidifying the borders.

Returning to the central question of what lessons can be learned, Dr. MacMillan suggested that the means to enforce the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles were lacking, inherently suggesting that modern-day peacemakers should not try to devise settlements they cannot uphold.

Another “lesson” would be that leaders should be realistic in explaining to their publics what they can and cannot expect from a peace settlement. Politicians who pander to the ballot box will end up disappointing. For example, David Lloyd George ran his Winter 1918 election on the platform of seeking revenge on Germany, and this was fulfilled by the enormous German reparations bill. However the actual wording of the reparations bill split the payments into three, whereby the first part would have to be paid before the bill for the second part was issued – leaving Germany with no incentive to pay the first part (who wants to get further bills?). In reality, the amount of reparations paid by Germany was likely less than that paid by France after the Franco-Prussian War. But given the rhetoric surrounding the reparations payments, the German people had the impression they had paid too much.

Another caveat for modern peacemakers would be the need to consult those affected by potential divisions. At the Paris Peace Conference, the British delegation created Iraq – essentially they threw portions of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire together, believing their advanced technology, combined with a complacent local ruler, would suffice to give them power. However this did not turn out as planned.

Dr. MacMillan also noted that human mistakes are made, even in situations like these. A prime example was Woodrow Wilson’s stubbornness to compromise on terms of accession to the League of Nations. The bill approving membership in the League was subjected to joinders, small concessions, as it passed through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. While it is clear that David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau would have accepted American membership with some concessions – they were quite keen to have the US on board – Wilson was so stubborn about the alterations that he even convinced his own party to vote against the bill.

Dr. MacMillan offered some general instructions to us historians: we should cut some slack to the politicians present at the negotiations in 1919 – there was no way they could predict the Great Depression, nor could they predict the rise of Germany under Adolf Hitler. In more general terms, in history, never dismiss the defeated, and never assume anything in history is permanent.

In closing, events like the Paris Peace Conference show that unintended consequences were much greater than the intended ones.

Getting to know the IHP Faculty: Jussi Hanhimäki

2009-05-03T16:46:00.003+02:00

We continue our interview series on History at HEID with Jussi Hanhimäki, Professor of International History and Politics, who is also currently head of the IHP unit. This semester he is teaching three courses: Transatlantic Relations since 1945, the United States and the Cold War World, and the IHP Doctoral Seminar (with Davide Rodogno and Brigitte Leucht). Professor Hanhimäki is also the Director of the Programme for the Study of Global Migration.

Jaci Eisenberg: What has your academic path up to now been?

Jussi Hanhimäki: I studied first in Finland – Tampere University – where I did my Bachelor’s Degree. Then I went to the United States – I was at Boston University – where I did my Master’s and my Ph.D. Afterwards I taught in Canada for one year, at Bishop’s University, which is in the province of Québec. Then I had a couple of years of post-docs. I spent a year at Harvard, at the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History, and then I spent a year at the Contemporary History Institute at Ohio University, after which - 1995 - I moved to London, and was at the LSE for five years as a Lecturer in International History. And then in 2000 I came to the Institute.

Jaci Eisenberg: How did you become interested in your specific areas of research? Were you influenced by certain professors?

Jussi Hanhimäki: In Finland, what got me interested in American History was an American Fulbright Professor who was there, and who was a very good teacher. He recommended that I spend a year in the US in this exchange program, to which then I applied, and was accepted, and I went for a year, and then I never went back, in part because there was another professor at Boston University who then got me interested in more specifically in US foreign policy. Initially I wanted to go to the US to study African-American history, but for some reason that didn’t happen, and then… so I didn’t write about the Black Panthers, but instead I wrote about the United States and Finland during the Cold War. I think those two professors, probably, are the most influential.

Jaci Eisenberg: How have your research interests evolved over time?

Jussi Hanhimäki: They’ve expanded. When I started out with my dissertation it was on, like I said, the United States and Finland after the Second World War. That then became a book, and then I wrote another book that was about the United States and Scandinavia since 1945… so always my main interest has been in American foreign policy, but the scope has expanded. I wrote a book about Kissinger later on, and, so, from the more narrow regional focus, it has become, well, I guess, global in some ways. And more recently then I’ve, I guess at the moment it’s really three things, they’re all related to American foreign policy. One is transatlantic relations, which is a key interest, and I’m writing a book about that. The United Nations, which I just finished last year; and then, more recently, refugees and migration issues. So, looking at historical perspectives of those… evolving interests, I guess.

Jaci Eisenberg: Could you elaborate on some of the projects that you’ve done in the past, either on some of the books you’ve written or on research groups you’ve been involved with?

Jussi Hanhimäki: I think, individual research, the interesting part, the reason I did my dissertation in, is I, aside from intellectual ones, is a very practical one. Since I was studying at an American University, and to write about something that had to do with Finland, and, not very many others had any kind of language skills that would have been useful. So I think that’s something that is sort of very practical and not very scientific, perhaps, but, I got to spend time in Finland doing research, etc. etc. And that was very interesting in its own right, I think, but then working on someone like Kissinger, has its own different kind of appeal in the sense that there’s a huge amount of material; it’s interesting to look at global affairs, but to use one man as a way of gaining some insight into it. And it was fascinating because it was a more recent period, the dissertation had to do with the 1940s and 50s, so most of the actors had died - I couldn’t do any interviews, really, for that, but for the Kissinger book, you got to meet a lot of the people who you read about in books and documents, and that was fascinating, meeting with Henry Kissinger and some others – Brent Scowcroft and people like that – gives a different sense of history. When you actually get to be face-to-face with somebody who was there, and who doesn’t, of course, remember much about the specific documents that you have been studying for months and months, and has forgotten much of the detail that went on. But that was sort of fascinating, fascinating to me to meet those people.

Jaci Eisenberg: Tell me about your more recent project, as part of the Programme for the Study of Global Migration.

Jussi Hanhimäki: The Programme for the Study of Global Migration is a broad program which has several projects within it, and one of the projects I’m most closely associated with is the Refugee project – it’s called “UNHCR and the Cold War.” We are using the UNHCR archives, which are across the street from where we are sitting. And we’re looking into a group of people – the refugees – that were in many ways caught in between the currents of the international politics of the Cold War. Refugees were not, for most people like Henry Kissinger or others, refugees were not important in their own right; they could be used as tools of policy, and so on, but they were unimportant in their own right; so in that sense it’s a very different approach to looking at international relations. And of course the important part there is the role of international organizations like UNHCR who tried to play an important role, but also tried to play a non-political role, which proved to be quite impossible. If you’re going to help refugees in a conflict area, in which the Soviet Union and the United States have some interest, in which you have often several national liberation movements fighting over control of territory, etc., etc., for a humanitarian organization to go in there and try to act non-politically was extremely difficult. So, it’s interesting to see how these neutral, supposedly neutral actors have to also compromise in order to be able to help the people; after all, they’re there in order to be able to save lives. So it’s interesting to see how these compromises are made, and how successful the organization ultimately, ultimately is, and I think in most cases, you see in Angola and in other parts of Africa, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, with the boat people and, so you see that the UNHCR was a very adaptable organization. It could actually deal, relatively successfully with relatively modest means at its disposal, and actually help people. Of course, it didn’t solve the refugee problems, um, as such, but at least it was able to operate and save lives every day, so that’s an interesting, um, interesting way to learn about another side of international history, rather than what I used to do more, almost exclusively which was sort of conference table and diplomacy, and high politics, and so on.

Jaci Eisenberg: Do you have any advice, or anything at all, that you would like to impart to the students of the IHP section?

Jussi Hanhimäki: There is a wide variety of courses available, and there will be also next year… What I would say is try some new things. Don’t think, since you did this as an undergraduate this will be an easy course, so I’m just going to do this and get a good grade. So don’t do that. Try new things, try things that really are something you wouldn’t find elsewhere, I think, at least not in the form that they are taught here. I think the Institute, and Geneva, offers a certain value-added that you won’t find in the sort of, I guess, more traditional History department or University. And a lot of the courses are interdisciplinary… they’re all good, the courses! But I think you should follow one’s instincts and try as many different possibilities of different courses. And certainly every term when it’s the first week you should go and check out a few options before you finally decide what you are going to do. And get involved in, you know, in other ways. We have the seminars that we are organizing, we have a couple of seminars in April and May, conferences and guest speakers coming. The Transatlantic Security Conference in April, 23rd, 24th, and then we have Margaret Macmillan, she’s coming to give a talk on May 12th. And the week after that we have Matthew Connelly, who is a young, historian from Columbia University who has written a book about population control. So there’s a lot of events coming, interesting courses, and all the guest speakers, and Conferences… as much time as you can spend, I think those can be very inspiring. Take advantage, because two years passes fast.

Jaci Eisenberg: If there are potential students that are looking at this page, what would you say is the value of HEI over other schools that a student might choose?

Jussi Hanhimäki: One is where we are. Geneva is the… the fact that it is called the humanitarian capital of the world is in part propaganda, but it is also very true. I think the University experience here, because of that, is something very unique. There is the opportunity to see and interact with global actors, that you will not find in a sort-of, you know, if you go to Oxford or Cambridge, you do not find this sort of international environment. And secondly, I think the faculty and the courses reflect, as well as the student body, they reflect this international nature of the Institute. Most of our students speak three, four languages, many of them carry more than one passport, and same is true of a lot of the faculty. Faculty and the students, they have more than linguistic and national variety, they come from different educational backgrounds, so you will find – sometimes this is confusing, because you go to a course, and you’re used to doing courses exactly in this way, right?, in the United States, for example, you get your list, with specific page to page readings and so on. Here, the Professor may have been trained in a very different kind of system and has a very different approach, this may be confusing, I think first year students are often a little bit confused in the beginning because there is no uniformity to how courses are organized or taught, but you think of that as sort of an asset, an enriching experience, you do get exposed, even if you never venture beyond the HEID campus, you will get exposed to all of these international influences.

And thirdly, all the activities (conferences, guest speakers) and the teaching programs, and together offer a first-rate graduate education that is internationally highly respected, and I think, in comparison to a number of other places, also relatively inexpensive. So it’s extremely good value for money, I think that’s one of the important points that you could add. And, so… it’s a win-win situation.

Getting to know the IHP Faculty: Brigitte Leucht

2009-04-21T16:04:00.004+02:00

Our interview project continues with Brigitte Leucht, a visiting lecturer in the IHP Section for the 2008-2009 academic year. This semester she is teaching a course on European Union external relations, and she also co-directs the Doctoral Seminar with Professors Hanhimaki and Rodogno.

Jaci Eisenberg: How did you choose history as a field?

Brigitte Leucht: I’ve always been interested in history, even at school… but as I found out later, history was my way of understanding the world; history and politics, I would say, in combination. For my undergraduate studies, I did study History and English - you had to combine two subjects. For me, literature was interesting, but it was not what I wanted to make my job. If you look at subjects like lenses, through which you can understand what is happening around you, history was a better track. And I’ve always liked reading, I’ve liked to do things in depth, and I’ve remained curious in a way this is why I kept doing it…

Jaci Eisenberg: Specifically you have focused as of late on European Integration. How did you come to that area of research?

Brigitte Leucht: Actually, by accident, I would say. I started out doing American history, Constitutional history, and also the history of political ideas, that was more tangible at that point. When I was between my Master’s and my Ph.D., I went to the archives, and I wanted to do something that includes the US, but also Europe in some way. I had a look at the papers of George Ball because I was interested at that point in the Rome Treaties, the treaties that established the EEC. And then I found materials that related to an earlier period, the Schumann Plan negotiations, and that is basically how I started working on European integration. I did not have a background in studying European integration when I started my Ph.D. My background really was more in American history, legal history, Constitutional history, and to some degree, international politics in the 20th century. I would say I always knew what interested me in terms of discipline but the actual topic, to some degree was coincidence.

Jaci Eisenberg: What has your academic path been?

Brigitte Leucht: I did my undergraduate work at the University of Vienna, in History and English. I would also like to add that if you are interested in understanding the how and why of these choices, I’ve to some extent always been shaped by teachers. I think you can be as rational as you like; people do have an impact. The person who supervised my Master’s thesis in Vienna, was a well-known Austrian historian, Gerald Stourzh, and the way he did history, I found it fascinating. He spoke different languages, his lectures were, some people found them dry in the sense of too ‘legal’, but I found them really intellectually stimulating. It made me go to the library afterwards and ask more questions. So in a way, I wanted to continue doing that. That’s why I did the Master’s, and my Master’s was actually at New York University under the auspices of the Fulbright program, which was a good label to have. I focused mainly on American Constitutional history - that was the idea, to go to the States, to understand how people there do American history. But then this thing happened with my archival visit, and I ended up doing a transatlantic/European integration topic. After I completed my Masters, I went back to Vienna, I worked for a couple of years for the Austrian Fulbright Commission, because at that point I just wanted to try something else. I liked academia, but I was not entirely certain – I was 27 when I came back – if I should not try something else as well. And I must say I really liked working outside of academia, too. But I missed in-depth research, and I missed the time to really read. I continued work on the weekends, but intellectual progress was not possible, not in the same way as when you do it full time. And then I decided basically to go for a Ph.D. program; I applied for a fellowship - I actually applied for a couple of fellowships, which I did not get - and then the one I got was at the University of Portsmouth in England, so that’s why I did my Ph.D. there.

Jaci Eisenberg: From England, how did you end up at HEID?

Brigitte Leucht: Again, coincidence. Of course, you have to be qualified. But basically I was contacted and asked if I would like to teach here for a year. And that was about a year ago, I had just written the last word of my thesis after many, many years, so that was a very welcome invitation. And I came here for an interview and was offered a one-year visiting lectureship.

Jaci Eisenberg: Could you tell us about specific pieces of research you’ve completed in the past?

Brigitte Leucht: My Master’s thesis in Vienna was on the equal protection clause of the American Constitution: the idea of equality before the law, how that came into the Federal Constitution. What I looked at was basically a lot of the State Constitutions, some of them going back to the early 19th century, including provisions that contain the idea of equality before the law, even though they don’t call it that. It was a history of ideas. Later, I also got involved in a project that looked at the impact that new media had on how we tell history. That was actually very, very interesting for me because up to that point, I was very positivist: the sources tell you what happened and as a historian, you construct your story from the sources. The media project was also with a different bunch of people, more ‘alternative’ people, different from diplomatic historians, less conventional perhaps, and we presented our findings as a website where we compared how history is presented in different media. And just by thinking through how you present history on film, on CD-ROM, on a website, you reflect on what you do when you actually write a book or write a paper. I learned a lot through that. And then the Ph.D. was basically on how European integration really started, and what I did is that I looked at the formal and informal cooperation between American and European actors at the Schumann Plan negotiations, trying at the same time to become more interdisciplinary and learn from politics -not just to do it, but because you get more interesting and better results in the end, I think. I utilized the network concept, and tried to really understand what happened at the negotiations.

Jaci Eisenberg: Could you talk about some of the publications you’ve worked on?

Brigitte Leucht: I still have to publish my monograph. But I have published articles and book chapters that draw on the Ph.D. I also had a very active supervisor at Portsmouth University, Wolfram Kaiser, who encouraged his Ph.D. students to go to conferences, publish etc. If you worked hard, and you were committed, you didn’t have to have the Ph.D. completed; you could work as an academic. It helped me learn the different skills that are part of academic life, publishing, editing, and I became involved in two edited volumes. Both of them, very, very time consuming; I would have never thought how much time goes into editing a book. And in both cases we organized a conference, with a very clear framework, with invited speakers, who all had to address certain research questions. The idea was to produce an edited volume, but coherent nevertheless. This procedure also highlights what is one of the problems in European Integration History namely that there are so many national and private archives you could go to. There are so many research questions that need to be answered by more than just one person. The whole research area invites cooperation, hence the idea to do edited volumes and draw on the expertise of a group of researchers that each have done in-depth archival research. One of the books dealt with the use of social science concepts for European Integration History. The other one is more specifically on networks in the history of European Integration from its beginnings in post-war Europe up to the present tense.

Jaci Eisenberg: What sort of projects do you currently have on tap?

Brigitte Leucht: I’m still utilizing material from the Ph.D. Intellectually I would like to move on. The nice thing is that to write the monograph, after my year at the IHEID, I have a Post-Doc in Oxford to turn what was the more interesting story of my Ph.D. into a book. For my Ph.D. the problem was that the actual research question applied to just a very brief time period, so to turn it into a book with a major publisher wasn’t very likely. As it is so much work, I didn’t want to just publish it with any publisher, but wanted to use this to make a statement. What I can do in the next two years is to basically take my research a little bit further in time – from 1952 to the early 1960s - and tell the history of how the beginnings of European Competition Policy were influenced by transnational networks. Apart from that, I would like to do many other things. At some point, I would like to apply the research framework of the PhD to explain how the internal market program started in the 1970s. I’ve done a lot about the 1940s and 50s and would really like to move on in time. And, as a result of teaching, my interests are starting to become somewhat more global, especially as a result of what I’m teaching this semester, the EU external relations, where you get a completely different perspective on European integration history.

Jaci Eisenberg: Could you speak about the course you are currently teaching?

Brigitte Leucht: The idea is to understand the emergence of the European Union as an international actor. There are competing theories and conceptualizations of the EU as an actor: a trade actor, an economic actor, and/or, a normative actor, a humanitarian actor, less so a military actor. In the seminar, we have taken these theoretical questions as a starting point to explore the history of the EU’s external relations. What was European foreign policy like before there was an official foreign policy in the narrow sense, which only started in the 1970s? The EEC started in 1958, and it did have an external dimension: there was trade policy, development policy, so looking at the broad spectrum of foreign relations, not just foreign policy. And I find at the moment that I am really interested in that.

Jaci Eisenberg: Do you have any advice for the IHP Section students, or thoughts about HEID in general?

Brigitte Leucht: An academic career is great if you’re curious. I like the freedom that comes with it as well, I’m not a 9 to 5 person, I probably work more than 40 hours but I mostly work when I like to work. So there are a lot of things to be said for a life in academia. But it’s probably also worth trying something different. Teaching here at the IHEID has been a very, very good experience for me, especially, the student questions you’re not prepared for - they are what takes me further. Also, there’s an intimate relationship between teaching and research, which is encouraged here, but that is not the case in every institution.

Getting to know the IHP Faculty: Claude Auroi

2009-04-03T16:03:00.005+02:00

We continue our interview series on History at HEID with Claude Auroi, Professor of Development Studies, who since the HEI/IUED merger, has been linked to the IHP section as an Associate Faculty member. This semester he is teaching a course on peasantry in globalization, and a seminar on history and development in Latin America.

Jaci Eisenberg : Quelle a été votre parcours académique ?

Claude Auroi : J’ai fait mes études à Genève, aux Hautes Etudes Internationales à l’époque, dans les années soixante. Ensuite, j’ai travaillé un peu dans le journalisme, et puis je suis revenu faire un doctorat, aussi à HEI, sur les questions de développement, et, après je suis devenu chargé de cours à l’Institut Universitaire d’Etudes de Développement, IUED. Ensuite, je suis parti au Pérou travailler dans les projets agricoles. Quand je suis revenu j’ai été nommé Professeur à l’IUED, qui ensuite est devenu IHEID.

Jaci Eisenberg: Comment vous est venu l’intérêt pour votre sujet principal de recherche ?

Claude Auroi : Mon domaine de spécialisation est l’agriculture, le développement rural, depuis ma thèse, que j’ai faite en 1975 sur l’agriculture cubaine. De là, je me suis intéressé à d’autres pays en Amérique Latine. J’ai travaillé un peu sur l’agriculture dans les années 80, dans les projets appliqués de la coopération technique suisse. C’est donc devenu mon domaine de spécialisation. L’aire géographique de spécialisation est principalement liée à l’Amérique Latine, mais aussi un peu à l’Afrique ; dans les années 70-80, j’ai travaillé sur l’Afrique de l’ouest. J’ai fais des missions pour la coopération technique suisse dans d’autres pays, mais disons que mon continent, c’est l’Amérique Latine et surtout l’Amérique du Sud – les Andes en particulier – le Pérou, la Bolivie, le Chili, l’Equateur, l’Argentine.

J’ai surtout fait des recherches de type agraire ; actuellement, je travaille beaucoup plus sur les problèmes de gouvernance : gouvernance politique, gouvernance de politique économique, surtout, mais aussi de politique tout court. Je m’intéresse au phénomène de nouveaux gouvernements plus à gauche actuellement en Amérique Latine. C’est un peu le thème sur lequel je travaille maintenant, j’ai donné depuis 2003 un cours chaque année à l’IMAS sur les problèmes de mondialisation avec un groupe d’étudiants qui font partie du International Master of Advanced Studies de l’IHEID. Je m’intéresse aussi à d’autres problèmes sur lesquels je me suis penché au fil du temps : liés par exemple à la biodiversité, à la protection et à la promotion de la biodiversité, ce sont des thèmes qui sont quelque peu liés à l’agriculture, que j’ai découverts lorsque je travaillais au Pérou dans les années 80. J’ai aussi travaillé depuis dix ans sur les question des commerce équitable, et publié deux livres sur ce sujet. J’ai toujours aimé l’histoire, je replace donc toujours les phénomènes dans un contexte historique.

Jaci Eisenberg : Avez-vous participé aux projets qui ont de forts liens avec l’histoire ou l’étude de l’histoire ?

Claude Auroi : Oui, j’ai écrit un livre sur le Pérou qui s’appelle Histoire violente du Pérou. Je me suis toujours intéressé, quand j’étudiais un pays, au problème de mettre en perspective historique, donc j’ai fait ce livre sur le Pérou. J’ai travaillé sur des pays en essayant d’avoir la vision historique de la situation parce qu’on ne peut pas, je crois, faire du développement sans le mettre en perspective historique. J’ai fait des missions en Albanie et j’ai toujours essayé de voir quelle était l’histoire de l’Albanie, d’où venait l’Albanie et comment la situation actuelle peut s’expliquer par des phénomènes du passé.

Jaci Eisenberg : Quels sont vos projets actuels?

Claude Auroi : Mes projets, c’est surtout continuer à travailler sur l’Amérique Latine, en organisant un colloque l’année prochaine sur les indépendances. C’est le 200e anniversaire des indépendances de l’Amérique Latine, puisque les mouvements de libération ont commencé en 1810. On fait donc un bilan des héritages, et des « mirages » des indépendances. Le colloque aura lieu à l’IHEID. Actuellement c’est surtout sur ça que je travaille, je suis proche de la retraite aussi, donc je ne me vais pas m’encombrer avec des projets épouvantablement grands, j’espère aussi un peu plus de temps pour écrire calmement. J’ai aussi travaillé beaucoup le thème des migrations, et un colloque vient de se tenir à l’IHEID sur ce thème ; j’ai écrit un aticle dans L’Annuaire suisse de politique de développement.

Jaci Eisenberg : Y a-t-il autre chose vous vouliez partager avec les étudiant(e)s de la section HPI ?

Claude Auroi : J’aimerais qu’il y ait plus d’étudiants et de doctorants qui s’intéressent à l’Amérique Latine dans la section HPI pour que l’on puisse vraiment avoir un pôle qui s’intéresse à ce continent un peu négligé, je trouve, par rapport à l’Asie, et aux relations outre-Atlantique. La Fondation Pierre du Bois a heureusement mis deux bourses à disposition d’étudiants de l’Amériqie latine, c’est un grand encouragement.

Getting to know the IHP Faculty: Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff

2009-03-30T17:26:00.005+02:00

This interview marks a new series on History at HEID – interviews with IHP Section Faculty, in order for students to get to know how their Professors came to be where they are today.

We begin our interview series with Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff, Professor of Anthropology in the Development Studies Unit, and Associate Faculty member in IHP. This academic year she is teaching three courses: “Anthropology and Development”, “Droit(s): les paradoxes de la reconnaissance”, and specifically in HPI, “Hybrid Histories: Indigenous Peoples and Nation-Building in North America”.

Jaci Eisenberg: What are your main areas of research, as an academic?

Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff: Naturally, most of my research deals with anthropological issues, some classical, some less so. My main interest is indigenous peoples, especially in North America, and my research in this field focuses on legal anthropology and indigenous rights. I am also interested in multiculturalism, as well as the complex – and difficult – relationship between culture and rights.

Jaci Eisenberg: What are your specific areas of teaching?

Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff: In the Development Studies unit I teach a compulsory course entitled “Anthropology and Development”. Teaching anthropology in an interdisciplinary unit, which Development Studies is, raises particular challenges that you do not necessarily encounter when teaching in a disciplinary department. I address all at once the theory and history of anthropology, policy issues, applied anthropology, as well as a few fundamental issues such as identity or the sociocultural dimension of economics, and, on top of that, the potential contribution of anthropology as a critical discipline to the study of development and international relations. I have also been teaching a seminar addressing specifically the rights of indigenous peoples and the transnationalisation of law – its French title using the term “Droit(s)” to refer to both “law” and “rights”. Starting in 2010, I will teach that seminar in English. The fundamental problematic of the seminar is the dichotomy – if not the paradox – of recognition (of identity rights) and redistribution (of resources). The seminar also addresses a few theoretical concerns: what is “law”? what are “rights” ? – both in a broader framework than the one generally offered by legal positivism.

My seminar in HPI, entitled “Hybrid Histories: Indigenous Peoples and Nation-Building in North America”, is an attempt to look at the history of international relations from a non-Eurocentric viewpoint, and to establish indigenous peoples as international actors. This is why I thought about the seminar in the first place. I wished to create an opportunity for students to envision a larger frame of reference when dealing with the history of international relations. This is most topical, with minorities and indigenous peoples having gained entry into the United Nations, and with indigenous peoples especially having been extremely active over the last 30 years, both in New York and Geneva, within the human rights system and other UN agencies. Moreover, the historical dimension of indigenous claims beyond contemporary politics still need to be better understood : where does the legal-political category of “indigenous peoples” come from? what is the relationship between indigenous peoples and the states in which they now live? how to address what I would call the “founding dilemma” of neo-European states ? I think these are topics most relevant for HPI, where I can make a contribution as an anthropologist – and as an anthropologist interested in history!

Jaci Eisenberg: How did you become interested in your specific areas of research? As a student, when you were at university, how did you find this field?

Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff: By chance. I did my Ph.D. on potlatch theories. The potlatch is a form of ceremonial exchange to be found among the indigenous peoples of the Northwest coast of North America, that is, British Columbia, a portion of Alaska, even Oregon and California. The purpose of the potlatch is to confirm changes of status, or crucial moments of social life (a funeral, the investiture of a chief, a name-giving), via the exchange of so-called prestige goods. The potlatch has implications for anthropological theory and economics. Mainstream thinking has focused on allegedly wasteful spending and the apparent irrationality of ceremonial giftgiving. Yet the potlatch cannot be understood in terms of what is generally regarded as economic rationality, especially rational choice theory. So I started out with an interest in a critical approach to neo-classical economics. At the same time I discovered the situation of indigenous peoples as the somewhat forgotten inhabitants of North America. And it’s been going on from there. At one point, I started to focus more on legal issues because I worked for some years at the United Nations as a consultant for the Special Rapporteur on indigenous treaties.

Jaci Eisenberg: What was your path after working at the United Nations? Did you immediately go into teaching?

Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff: I was always teaching and working as a researcher simultaneously, either under my own steam, after having obtained funding from the Fonds National Suisse or other funding agencies, or as a consultant, because I always thought it would be interesting to do something outside of academia in order to set off my more academic side. I taught in several universities, in Switzerland and France, after obtaining my Ph.D., then I lived for nearly ten years in Canada where I also taught in different universities. I came back to Switzerland in autumn 2003 to take up the position I currently hold.

Jaci Eisenberg: How do your current interests align with the study of history?

Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff: My interest in history is of a methodological or epistemological nature – both because anthropologists have put a lot of effort into methodology and epistemology, and because anthropology as a discipline has a complicated relationship with history (some major classical theories, like evolutionism and diffusionism, are rather “pseudohistory”; conversely, so-called historical anthropology is an attempt to integrate anthropological concerns regarding society and culture into historical analysis). Also, one may look at archival sources as a sort of “field” (in the sense of anthropological fieldwork). It would be advantageous, especially at the level of Ph.D. studies, to expand on issues of methodology with regard to historical topics : how do you construct your object of research? how do you position yourself in epistemological or reflexive terms? As a historian no less than as an anthropologist, one must assume that one’s posture as a researcher affects the result of one’s work. One’s own interests, one’s concerns, one’s presuppositions flow into the work and ought to be objectified, to a certain extent at least.

Jaci Eisenberg: What projects are you currently working on?

Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff: I am finishing a book, which is actually a revised edition of a book I wrote prior to my Ph.D., which was a history of anthropology from a student’s point of view (I say that with hindsight). I’m revisiting the volume, which I’ve been using in my teaching, in order to give it a more precise focus in relation to development studies and international studies. The question is: what can anthropology accomplish in an Institute like ours ? I am also finalising a book on Canada. One of my more classic research foci is the culture concept. Cultural anthropology is one of the main components of North American anthropology – more so than in Europe, really, where anthropologists tend to focus rather on social organisation, to put it in a nutshell. One of my particular interests is the relationship between culture and law, which ties into my seminar on “law/rights” as well as the one I designed for HPI on “hybrid histories”. Canadianists tend to study either ethnicity, immigration and multiculturalism, or the situation of indigenous – or, as you say in Canada, aboriginal – peoples. For my part, I try to combine both these strands which are too often dissociated. So my other book is tentatively entitled Canada: autochtonie et multiculturalisme. It will be in French, like the history of anthropology whose initial title is La vue portée au loin.

Jaci Eisenberg: What are the advantages of IHEID?

Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff: For anybody who is an anthropologist or a sociologist, our Institute with its thematic focus is an interesting place to be at, especially since the merger has forced all of us, from ex-IUED as well as the former HEI, to give multi- or interdisciplinarity more thought. What is interesting in this regard is that student application figures are pretty high for the interdisciplinary programmes, and there seems to be a genuine interest among students. So I suppose we have our work cut out for us. The location is also a plus for anybody interested in international organisations, in certain topics such as refugees and migration, international policies, globalisation, the transnationalisation of law, and the like. In this regard, Geneva is a unique location.

The Film & Music Festival of Küstendorf (Serbia) or: How to get to Utopia

2009-03-18T15:59:00.008+01:00

MIS-IHP 2nd year student Fiona Ziegler has sent in the following story about an unusual experience during her memoire research:

"From January 8 to 14, 2009, the internationally known director Emir Kusturica organized a film and music festival in his own village in the mountains of South-Western Serbia.[1] Only 50 km away from Nobel-Prize winner Ivo Andric’s famous “Bridge over the Drina,”[2] symbol for the encounter of Bosnian Islam with Serbian Orthodoxy, the festival’s location symbolizes the director’s own controversial identity.

Sarajevo-rooted Kusturica built up far away from any big city - 259 km from Belgrade and 136 km from Sarajevo, yet only 5 km away from the Serbian-Bosnian border - his own town:
“I have lost my own city that’s why I am building myself a new one - that’s the one.”[3] Its name: Küstendorf.

Praised as “the architect and creator of a perfect life that is out of the ordinary,”[4] Emir Kusturica’s Küstendorf appears like a cultural island in the middle of nowhere. Surrounded by mountains, it seems to be a revolutionary fortress, referring to the director’s own vision of utopia. Restoring traditional houses of the region, Kusturica wanted to construct an authentic, cultural place - a fortress that resists the influence of the globalized money-driven world. A fortress which Kusturica considers as “a home of a sweet dictator,”[5] who decides who is going to live and stay there and who doesn’t.

And as it is a fortress for Kusturica himself, it is also a fortress against the entire commercialized world of Hollywood. As Kusturica put it, “Küstendorf wants to create a new vision of the world,”[6] and in order to achieve this, culture is a necessity: “This place wants to bring tradition and the modernity together in the sense in which cinema becomes again a place where you have mostly authors as main mythical characters of cinema and not the events, not stupidity (…)”[7] And: “We choose always great artists to come here, not the stars. Because we hate stars.”[8]

In other words, the Küstendorf Film & Music Festival was envisioned as a platform mainly for young artists and filmmakers - “A place open to young artists from all around the world that have the possibility to meet each other, to see and hear each others work, to listen and speak with great international artists.”[9] And under that motto, the festival’s competition was about short features, shot by students of film academies and young independent filmmakers.[10]

One example of a great international artist who was specially invited to the festival is the American film director Jim Jarmusch. Within the festival’s program Retrospective of Greatness, Jarmusch presented his latest film Broken Flowers (2005). After showing the film, Jarmusch answered in a workshop patiently for more than two hours every single question asked by the audience.

Goran Gocic and Jim Jarmusch

Other special guests at the festival were the controversial Austrian author Peter Handke and Thierry Frémaux. The latter, a key figure within the Cannes Film Festival, gave an excellent workshop and later presented Cannes’ 08 Grand Prix-winner Gomorra (2008), directed by Matteo Garrone. Kusturica himself was presenting his latest production Maradona (2008), a documentary about the most famous football player of all times: the Argentinian Diego Maradona.

Emir Kusturica and Thierry Frémaux

*

As I am writing my Master’s thesis about Emir Kusturica’s film Underground (1995), the international debate/controversy about it and the image of Serbia, I accidentally found out about the festival in Küstendorf on Mokra Gora. Convinced that this festival must be something really special, I made my way up there into the far-away Serbian mountain region. Quite a trip! Olivia Spahni (MIS-IHP 2nd year) and Christophe Cachelin (Licence HEID 2008), the latter who works as a video journalist, came with me. And so the three of us, accompanied by all of Christophe’s film equipment (he was supposed to shoot a brief report on the festival for Swiss internet TV), flew on January 8 from Zurich to Belgrade.[11] There, we took a shuttle that brought us, together with an Ukrainian music band, to Küstendorf.

Approaching Küstendorf by car, on curvy roads and after a car ride of more than four hours from Belgrade, the town appeared like an island on the horizon within an ocean of mountains. What struck us from a distance was a brightly shining moon, lighting up the roofs of the small town. Finally, we arrived. It was bitterly cold. The town is surrounded by a wall; it really appears like a kind of fortress. Through a narrow gate, guarded by two huge, albeit very friendly security men, we could finally enter the town we heard so much about. What we see appears somehow unreal.

Amazingly, the “moon” we saw approaching uphill by car is a giant balloon, illuminating the centre of the village. The village’s narrow streets are named after Kusturica’s idols, such as Fellini, Bergman or Che Guevara and Diego Maradona. Down the main street, there is a little Orthodox church, a restaurant, a café, a souvenir shop, an art gallery, and a reception hall.

We enter the reception. The young woman there welcomes us warmly and gives us our accreditations to the festival. That includes one colourful plastic bag. Curious, we open it - and are taken by surprise as music jumps out of it … wonderfully energetic Balkan music (it was a bit like with those birthday cards which, when opened, play “Happy Birthday”). The bag was packed with the festival’s program and the festival pass and, of course, the music welcomed you, embraced you, made you realize that you had arrived in Kusturica’s wonder-world.

As the music box in the bag indicated, the festival was not only about films but also very much about music. Therefore, every night after the screenings, the projection screen was rolled up and a huge stage appeared behind it. The whole cinema changed within one hour into a vibrant music hall, and after midnight, concerts of selected musicians from all over the world created the ambiance. I have never seen people dancing so ecstatically as there - probably it was a mixture of: the end of a culturally overloaded day, Balkanic passions, consumption of Rakjia and Pivo, all heated up by the rhythms, beats, voices and moves of the musicians on stage.

*

A great asset of the festival was that Emir Kusturica and Jim Jarmusch were always present and reachable, day and night.

Jim Jarmusch talking to Christophe Cachelin

Although Kusturica himself mostly stood or sat in a narrow corner, more overviewing and observing than directing his festival, he and his family were all part of it. On the whole, the festival seemed to me like a platform for young film-makers and film-students, like a stimulating and at the same time easy going, happy workshop that was lasting for one entire week. It was not “Cannes”, “Venice”, “Locarno”, it was a truly unique, even crazy international film festival. And that made up its special charm.

We stayed in a hotel close to the train-station of Mokra Gora, reachable by an old steam engine locomotive.

Every morning around eleven o’clock, one hour before departure, a smell of burned carbon entered our room and finally, it was on the third morning, that we couldn’t stand it anymore and thus decided to take the train instead of being woken up by this uncomfortable smell.

After having had some Burek and yoghurt for breakfast, we got a round-ticket valid for a two-hour ride.

Olivia Spahni and Fiona Ziegler, MIS-IHP 2nd year students

Slowly, the train climbed up the snow-covered mountains, passing by traditional wooden houses, wild valleys, crossed stone bridges built over small rivers. Finally, we arrived at the turning point of our trip and the most beautiful spot to see Küstendorf from above.

At this spot, all passengers went out of the train and took a rest. On the way down, there was an additional stop for kissing the crazy rock - a rock that is supposed to bring everyone who kisses it luck.

Of course, I had to kiss it too. And all of a sudden, I found myself in front of that very house where Kusturica’s film Life is a miracle (2004) was shot.

Inspired by this last image, I went back to Mokra Gora. Next, I climbed up one last time the hill to Küstendorf where Serbian New Year’s eve was celebrated (Serbian Orthodox Christmas falls on January 7 and New Year’s Eve on January 13). On that special night, Emir Kusturica and his “Non Smoking Orchestra” played - and they gave everything!

The concert and all the madly wild dancing ended with warm wishes for a happy Serbian New Year.

And as daylight set in, the festival came to an end.

*

Looking back, participating in the festival of Küstendorf was an enormously intense and enriching experience, and I keep on thinking again and again about that special place in the mountains at the Serbian border to Bosnia, built up by a controversial and very talented film director and visionary - a place which was described on the festival’s own web-site as “the demonstration that, even nowadays, a utopia can exist.”[12] And I wonder: why not?"

-----------

[1] The second International Küstendorf Film & Music Festival was organized by Rasta International and sponsored by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia. See more: http://www.kustendorf-filmandmusicfestival.org/2009/index.php?p=4&&ni=141&nd=1.
[2] See: The novel by Ivo Andric Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge over the Drina), 1945.
[3] Kusturica, Emir: Tendre Barbare, directed by Marie-Christine Malbert, 2004 (ARTE, Une production Illégitime Défense), (00:47:43 – 00:47:48).
[4] See: Küstendorf tourist dossier, p. 1. For more information: http://www.mecavnik.info/.
[5] Kusturica, Emir: Interviewed in Küstendorf on January 10, 2009 by Christophe Cachelin and Fiona Ziegler, (00:03:25 – 00:03:37).
[6] Ibid., (00:00:23 – 00:00:28).
[7] Ibid., (00:01:20 – 00:01:30).
[8] Ibid., (00:03:00 – 00:03:18).
[9] Press and News 2009, Festival-website: www.kustendorf-filmandmusicfestival.org/2009/index.php?p=4, accessed on March 4, 2009.
[10] Film students from 16 countries competed for the Golden, Silver and Bronze Egg awards. Japanese director Kohki Hasei was awarded for the best short features film.
[11] You can access the report on: http://www.blick.ch/people/star-regisseur-wird-zum-dorf-diktator-109977.
[12] Press and News 2009, Festival-website: www.kustendorf-filmandmusicfestival.org/2009/index.php?p=4, accessed on March 4, 2009.

Eighth Conference of the European Historical Economics Society, Geneva, 3-6 September 2009

2009-03-05T16:45:00.003+01:00

Ph.D. candidate Seamus Taggart has sent in the following note about an upcoming conference of great interest to the HPI section:

"From Sept 3rd-6th 2009, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies will host in conjunction with the European Historical Society, the Eighth Conference of the European Historical Economics Society in the Villa Barton. The conference is being organized under the tireless direction of Prof. Marc Flandreau. The key speaker will be Barry Eichengreen of the University of California, Berkeley. The conference is hoping to attaract substantial student attendance. A prize of 1,000 euros named after Gino Luzzatto will be awarded by the European Historical Economics Society to the best Ph.D. Dissertation on any subject relating to economic history written by a young European scholar coming from any university and defended duringthe period August 2007 to June 2009. Also a limited number of subsidies in the form of discount on registration fees will be made available to graduate students."

The Conference main page can be found here. The registration page is here, logistical information is here, and important deadlines to abide by are here (information on the call for papers is here.)

Mark your calendars now, and venez nombreux!

Transatlantic Security Issues (International Conference) on 23-24 April 2009

2009-01-09T17:02:00.002+01:00

Ph.D. Candidate Bernhard Blumenau was kind enough to send me the following information about an upcoming conference at HEID:

"On 4 April 1949, the treaty creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the NATO, was signed. It established a military alliance that was to shape international affairs ever since its foundation. Although its original purpose – to organise the defence of the West against military challenges coming from the East – became obsolete in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, NATO still exists today.

On the occasion of NATO’s 60th anniversary, the Fondation Pierre Du Bois pour l’histoire du temps present and the Graduate Institute’s International History and Politics unit is organizing an international conference on 23-24 April 2009. Entitled “Transatlantic Security Issues from the Cold War to the 21st Century” it will bring together well-known scholars from all over the world to explore NATO’s past, present and future. Among others, emphasis will be put on the transatlantic relationship by focussing on the US and key European states. Moreover, the impact of important international events – such as the Korean War and the end of the Cold War – on the alliance will be addressed as well as the new challenges for NATO in the post-Cold War era.

Six different panels will deal with the following subjects: NATO during the Cold War: Success and Problems (Anne Deighton, François David, Leopoldo Nuti, Sam Wells); Country Perspectives: an Evolution (Jenny Raflik, Georges-Henri Soutou, Benedikt Schönborn, Daniel Möckli); Culture, Identity and Representation in Transatlantic Relations (Tuomas Forsberg, Jérome Gygax, Guillaume de Rougé, Basil Germond); Transatlantic Security and the Middle East (Roland Popp, Jon Alterman, Pascal Venier); Transatlantic Relations and Institutional Issues (Hanna Ojanen, Wolfgang Krieger, Axel Marion); and Transatlantic Security and the Legacy of the Cold War (Jérome Elie, Vladislav Zubok, James Goldgeier, Jussi Hanhimäki).
The conference will launch a series of meetings organised by the Pierre Du Bois Foundation which was officially inaugurated last December by the President of the Swiss Confederation, Pascal Couchepin, and aims at promoting knowledge about contemporary history. The convenors of the conference are Irina Du Bois, Prof Jussi Hanhimäki, Prof Georges-Henri Soutou and Dr Basil Germond. They are assisted by Bernhard Blumenau (PhD candidate, HPI)."

Those interested in the Conference should check here and here for updates to the schedule and practical information.

2009-01-06T18:30:00.001+01:00

Professor Victor-Yves Ghebali has passed; Daniel Warner put up a tribute on the Institute's main page.

Preservation of Sources

2009-01-05T19:56:00.004+01:00

This past weekend's New York Times had an interesting editorial on the challenges historians of the Bush (43) administration are likely to face: missing sources.

True to its mania for secrecy, the Bush administration is leaving behind vast gaps in the most sensitive White House e-mail records, and with lawyers and public interest groups in hot pursuit of information that deserves to be part of the permanent historical record.

As noted, this is not a phenomenon unique to the Bush administraiton - every administration has secrets they would like to keep - but the fact that this administration's dealings, unlike its predecessors, was largely conducted by email - creating correspondence 50 times more voluminous than that of the Clinton administration - means that the gaps might not be evident until the missing information is permanently lost.

The editorial goes on to note the public should thank the historians and archivists suing the Bush administration for access to documents which might track the misdeeds of the administration, and calls upon President-elect Obama to open up records previously shielded by "political interference."

For me, the article raised the question: what role for historians? Do we merely interpret the record, or can we have a role in preserving it as well?

Read the article in its entirety here.

Citing Archival Sources: best practices?

2008-12-11T13:31:00.002+01:00

One thing i’ve always had a love-hate relationship with is the proper way to cite archival sources in footnotes and in the Works Cited list. As most of my personal research is conducted from archives, this is something very near and dear to my heart and something which would be great to have clarified.

The school library’s references sheets are silent on the subject. And one open-source ‘Endnote’-type program I used for a while, Zotero (for use with Firefox only), is insufficient. Here is what the entry box looks like:

Some of the criteria are great – number of pages is generally a good reference to have if all the documents are blending into one, an idea of the thickness of the source is easier for later retrieval. But having only one entry for author, and none for, say in the case of correspondence, the name of the recipient, is not entirely helpful. More important, there are not enough spots to mention both the specifics of one document – for example, a letter – AND the identifying information of the folder in which it is kept.

The Turabian (Chicago Style) Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 7th edition is not entirely helpful. Section 17.6, on the usage of “Unpublished Sources” in the Notes-Bibliography Style, highlights Manuscript Collections (17.6.4):

“If possible, identify the author and date of each item, the title or type of document, the name of the collection, and the name of the depository. In a note, begin with the author’s name; if a document has a title but no author, or the title is more important than the author, list the title first.”

One such example?

“5. George Creel to Colonel House, September 25, 1918, Edward M. House Papers, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT.”

A bit more satisfactory, but still not perfect. For instance, in my undergraduate thesis on the ILO, a specific change of venue was crucial to the story I was trying to tell. Therefore, in citing the letter, I included the place where the letter was sent from, and to:

[1] Letter of M. Viple in Geneva to E.J. Phelan in Montréal, 9 July 1942, Z 1/1/1/11 (J.1).
[it was specified in my Works Cited as to where the archival collection was located]

The date information, though not listed in the Chicago manuals, did make it much easier for the reader to follow the vicissitudes of my narrative. In my current research for my mémoire, certain letters have numbered pages; i’m contemplating even citing the page of the handwritten document – is this excessive, or just helpful?

How do you cite your archival sources? Like me, were there any bits of information that you find/found pertinent to include, but which aren’t necessarily listed in the Chicago guide?