On 20 and 21 March 2025, an international conference in Newcastle upon Tyne will explore “Counter-Hegemonic Internationalisms: Perspectives from the Past”. The event is part of “Rethinking Internationalism: Histories and Pluralities”, a project funded via a Curiosity Grant from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
The conference will be hosted by Northumbria University. In addition to the AHRC’s support, the organizers gratefully acknowledge the backing from History: The Journal of the Historical Association and the Raphael Samuel Centre.
See below for the full programme. For any questions, please contact Daniel Laqua.
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
THURSDAY 20 MARCH 2025
9h30 Registration
10h00 Opening / Introduction
10h30 Parallel Panels A
Panel 1: Internationalism and ‘race’ in the early twentieth century (chair: Liam Liburd)
Lucas Poy (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) – The tension between colour-blind internationalism and “white labourism’ in the debates about migration within the Second International, 1890–1910
Lorenzo Costaguta (University of Bristol) – Building internationalism: race and the global Second International
Cecilia Tossounian (Universidad de San Andrés) – Beauty and internationalism: Miss Universe, Pan-Latinism and race in the 1930s
Benjamin Bland (University of Reading) – Contested soundscapes of internationalism: Black musicians, the popular music industry, and transnational race politics in the mid-twentieth century
Panel 2: Spaces of internationalism (chair: Elisabeth Leake)
Bohan Zhang (Rice University) – The Pan-Pacific China: Trans-Pacific Chinese and the making of interwar Pacific Internationalism, 1910s–1930s
Emma Kluge (University of Exeter) – Oceanic internationalism
Stella Krepp (Universität Bern) – “Economic worldmaking”: Latin America and the struggle for economic emancipation, 1949–1974
Ruth Craggs (King’s College London), Fiona McConnell (University of Oxford) and Jonathan Harris (Dublin City University) – Diplomatic training and spaces of anticolonial worldmaking
12h30 Lunch break
13h30 Parallel Panels B
Panel 3: Religious internationalisms (chair: David Brydan)
Alp Yenen (Universiteit Leiden) – The rise and fall of Muslim internationalism at the end of the First World War
Michael Philipp Brunner (Universität Münster) – Protestant internationalism between missions, late colonialism, and anti-imperialism in Asia, 1920–1940s
Ignatius Rao (University of Bristol) – Catholic Action in Shanghai (1912–1937): religious internationalism and Chinese nationalism
Panel 4: Mexico and internationalism (chair: Hilary Francis)
Francesca Edgerton (UCL) – Political exiles in Mexican post-revolutionary internationalism
Cecilia Burgos Cuevas (Freie Universität Berlin) – Working-class internationalism in post-revolutionary Veracruz
Yixin Tian (University of Oxford) – A revolutionary competitor? China in the imaginary of Mexico’s Third Worldism
15:00 Coffee break
15:30 Parallel Panels C
Panel 5: The global Comintern (chair: Jessica Reinisch)
Andrew Peak (Northumbria University) – Communists, nationalists, and the homesick: two congresses in Baku, 1920
Alexander Jackson (Harvard University) – An insurrection against the forms of the past: left communism in the Comintern’s Eastern Section
Destiny Wiley-Yancy (Vanderbilt University) – Women, we must be in the forefront of the revolutionary struggle’: Black women’s internationalist visions at the Communist International, 1926–1937
Panel 6: Rights-based activism since the 1960s (chair: Ria Kapoor)
Paul van Trigt (Universiteit Leiden) – Countering rights with friendship: the emergence of internationalism of and on behalf of people with cognitive disabilities since the 1960s
Michelle Carmody (KU Leuven) – “Don’t we believe in internationalism?”: Amnesty International’s South Asian sections and the challenge of developing human rights internationalism in the 1970s
Daniel Manulak (University of Toronto) – “You must apply economic sanctions against Canada”: Indigenous rights activism on the global stage, 1983–1988
17:00 Day 1 Closing Session
Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck, University of London) and Daniel Laqua (Northumbria University) – Publication plans
Ria Kapoor (Queen Mary, University of London) and Margot Tudor (City-St George’s, University of London) – Reflections on Day 1
chair: Stephen Legg (University of Nottingham)
17:30 Optional guided walk: “Internationalism and imperialism in Newcastle”
Guides: Edward Anderson and Daniel Laqua
19:30 Conference dinner
Friday 21 March 2025
9:30 Parallel Panels D
Panel 7: Socialism, communism and fascism (chair: Daniel Siemens)
Maurice Casey (Queen’s University Belfast) – The Alpenpost: a child’s eye view of anti-fascist internationalism in the 1930s
Daria Dyakonova (Sapienza – Università di Roma) – Women workers’ internationalism: an alternative to male-dominated Communist and Socialist Internationals during the interwar years?
Marion Labeÿ (Università degli studi di Verona) – Anzhelika Balabanova and the struggle for counter-hegemonic internationalism: left-wing socialism and antifascist networks in the interwar period
Panel 8: Navigating sexuality and gender with and through internationalism (chair: Bérénice Guyot-Réchard)
Joanna Simonow (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg) – Indian anti-colonialism, sexual dissidence, and the making of counter-hegemonic internationalist communities
Kate Skinner (University of Bristol) – “All appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women”: internationalist ambitions in postcolonial struggles for gender justice
Siobhán Hearne (University of Manchester) – Grassroots AIDS activism in the collapsing Soviet Union, 1988–91
11:00 Coffee break
11:30 Parallel Panels E
Panel 9: Anarchism (chair: André Keil)
Aileen Lichtenstein (University of Warwick) – “Yes, fellow workers, this is your curse…”: anarchist women’s internationalism at the turn of the century
Danny Evans (Liverpool Hope University) – The Franco-Catalan border in revolution and civil war, 1936–1939
Thomas Jones (University of Buckingham) – Internationalism from practice to theory: Rudolf Rocker, state repression, and Nationalism and Culture
Panel 10: Internationalism in a neoliberal age (chair: Erez Manela)
Agnieszka Sobocinska (King’s College London) – The world vs. the World Bank: alter-internationalism in the movement against global development
Stephen Gaffney (Université libre de Bruxelles) – “Real living suffering examples”: the European Network of the Unemployed, 1989–1998
Jochem Rinsma (European University Institute) – Shop-floor internationalism: the Transnational Information Exchange, European auto workers, and the birth of Brazilian neoliberal democracy
13:00 Lunch break
14:00 Parallel Panels F
Panel 11: Anti-imperial internationalisms (chair: Su Lin Lewis)
Burak Sayım (Universiteit Antwerpen) – Anticolonial internationalism in the interwar Middle East
Josephine Nevill (University of Manchester) – Competing visions of internationalism in colonial radical thinking: two views from West Africa
Mark Reeves (UWE Bristol) – “Hands off Lagos!’: Global labour protest at war’s end
Dena Freeman (Shanghai University) – The anti-imperial Internationalism of Josue de Castro: insights into the mid-twentieth-century World Government movement in Latin America and the Global South
Panel 12: Cold War internationalisms (chair: Sandrine Kott)
Sophie Scott-Brown (Northumbria University / University of St Andrews) – Direct action diplomacy: the San Francisco to Moscow peace march, 1960–1961
Jules Siran (Université de Génève) – Building or challenging state-led internationalism: students and professors at Hungarian technical universities in the global Cold War (1960s-1990s)
Bastiaan Bouwman (Universiteit Utrecht) – Liberation from Cold War liberalism: the World Council of Churches and human rights in the long 1970s
George Bodie (Goldsmiths, University of London) – Dissident solidarities? Socialist internationalism and the end of the GDR
15:30 Roundtable Discussion
David Brydan (King’s College London)
Sandrine Kott (Université de Génève / New York University)
Elisabeth Leake (Tufts University)
Stephen Legg (University of Nottingham)
Su Lin Lewis (University of Bristol)
Erez Manela (Harvard University)
chair: Margot Tudor (City-St-George’s, University of London)
16:30 Closure and Departure*
* Informal dinner option for those who stay for another night