Toward an Historical Geography of International Conferencing

2015

This introduction to a special issue on historical geographies of internationalism begins by situating the essays that follow in relation to the on-going refugee crisis in Europe and beyond. This crisis has revealed, once again, both the challenges and the potential of internationalism as a form political consciousness and the international as a scale of political action. Recent work has sought to re-conceptualise internationalism as the most urgent scale at which governance, political activity and resistance must operate when confronting the larger environmental, economic, and strategic challenges of the twenty-first century. Although geographers have only made a modest contribution to this work, we argue that they have a significant role to play. The essays in this special issue suggest several ways in which a geographical perspective can contribute to rethinking the international: by examining spaces and sites not previously considered in internationalist histories; by considering the relationship between internationalism in the abstract and the geographical and historical specifics of its creation; and by analysing the interlocking of internationalism with other political projects. We identify, towards the end of this essay, seven ways that internationalism might be reconsidered geographically in future research: through its spatialities and temporalities, the role of newly independent states, science and research, identity politics, and with reference to its performative and visual dimensions.

Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World, 2021

As a recent wave of scholarship has rightly attested, the story of the twentieth century cannot be told without reckoning with the explosion in internationalism in both thought and action. This internationalism was premised on the overcoming of space, transcending the geography of the nation-state in search of the shared interests of humankind. Paradoxically however, it was also dependent on the coming together of people in certain places, and the carving of spaces in which they could make manifest and jointly dream their internationalism. This chapter introduces the contention that the primary space at which this paradox played out was that of the international conference, and that by taking conferences as the primary lens of analysis we can open up a range of new ways in which to think about the spatialities of internationalism which transcend and cut across established categories of thought. It discusses the spatiotemporal framing of the volume from Versailles to Bandung: temporally, connecting interwar and postwar periods, and spatially, encompassing a broader constellation of conferences. And lastly, it looks at the methodological questions posed by this approach: that is, where we might locate the archival trace of international conferences.

Using the WSSD as a specific case, I explore the idea of the international summit as a spatial locale for “enacting the global.” Taking theoretical inspiration from Bourdieu and Durkheim, I consider the role of “representation” in the making concrete of abstract sociations such as the “international community” or “global civil society.” Within this framework I am interested in two types of representation: the performative construction of a “social body” or bodies and the more fraught process of the construction of voice, the “speaking for” a social constituency. The organization of space (and temporal organization of program) within the summit city creates a “stage” (or set of stages) for this performative activity. This staging, with its internal geography of boundaries, titles to space and exclusions, helps to shape and define the performance. From this perspective a summit can be assessed in part as an “end in itself” rather than in terms of measurable policy outcomes. Applied to the WSSD this type of analysis still reveals shortcomings of what was meant to be a pivotal global event.

International Organizations and Global Civil Society

This short commentary results from my enthusiastic reception of the call launched by the editors of Political Geography (PG) for the Virtual Forum 'The Geographies of Political Geography'. I was especially intrigued by their reflection on the need to consider the contexts and positionalities from which scholars write, which matches concerns that are widely assumed in fields such as historical geography and intellectual history. To understand the ways in which knowledge is produced, it is indispensable to reflect on its places, contexts and mobilities. Reflecting on the PG papers that have played a special role in informing one's research is a useful exercise for all of us to rethink our own research trajectories at certain moments in our careers in order to understand scholarship in-making. Indeed, the formal references that we usually make to the works and suggestions of other colleagues, such as citations and final acknowledgements, are not always sufficient to fully account for the multiple ways in which others can inspire our own scholarship.

2011

Reading Carl Schmitt demands an appreciation of context: that in which he wrote; the contexts through which his work has travelled and been translated; and the contexts in which we now read and apply his work. Various authors have contextualised Schmitt in different ways, through his intellectual biography , his ongoing theoretical engagements and the international relations of Germany . This chapter will seek an alternative route into engaging and problematising Schmitt's writings on the nomos. Rather than taking as its focus a person, concept or interpretation related to Schmitt, it will seek insights into his thought through examining his treatment of an institution. The League of Nations recurred as a focus of ire throughout Schmitt's writings, culminating in the Nomos where it signified the decline of European world order, the rise of US economic imperialism and global interventionism, and a reign of 'spatial chaos' (Schmitt, 1950(Schmitt, [2003, 257). As such, the League of Nations has a synecdochical position in Schmitt's writings. It represents for him the granting of small nations parity with the great powers, the stifling of international politics (which had previously allowed friend-enemy relationships to be resolved by bracketed wars), the occlusion of American hegemony beneath the mask of ethicalhumanitarian intervention, and the ossification of European imperialist privilege through the defence of the 1919 status quo.

Journal of Historical Geography, 2021

This paper argues that more explicitly geographical methodologies are required to study twentieth-century internationalism, which invite different conversations between international historians and historical geographers. We show how the form and location of international archival records is itself evidence of multiple, interlocking modes of internationalism which unevenly intersected with national, imperial, and pan-national pasts. This is explored through three case studies: the archive of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), located in the UNESCO headquarters in Paris; the Maharaja Ganga Singh Archive in the Indian city of Bikaner; and the papers of Lydia Brown in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a translator and interpreter at the Second Pan-African Congress. We argue that bringing the archives of large international organisations into dialogue with a wider overlooked field of international archival evidence offers new perspectives on what internationalism was, where it happened, and to whom it mattered.

This chapter develops and applies a chronotopic method for the analysis of international legal subjectivity and its construction in the context of the Bandung Conference. This approach has a critical purpose. The aim of the chapter is to understand what (in a political sense) lay behind the superficially bland restatement of the principles of the UN Charter articulated in the Bandung Conference’s Final Communiqué. It argues that the postcolonial states represented at Bandung sought, through the construction of a particular narrative strategy, to position themselves, as the global order’s newest subjects, as also and for that reason its ‘truest’.

Bandung: journal of the global south, 2015

In April 1955, a historic conference was held in Bandung, Indonesia. Political leaders from 29 Asian and African countries gathered on the initiative of the leaders from China, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and Myanmar, to address the issues about economic cooperation , self-determination, decolonization and the peace. These ideas contributed to the creation of the non-alignment movement (NAM). However, in Africa, Nkrumah's proposal for political unity was defeated, which led to the creation of the Organization of the African Unity as a compromise. NAM was later penetrated from within by the forces of imperialism, notably dictatorships and authoritarian regimes supported by the United States, the Soviet Union, the former colonial powers and their local cronies, weakening its functionality. General introduction: issues and objectives This is not a historiographical study of the Bandung Conference. This article is essentially a reflection on the Bandung Conference, which is framed within its historical and ideological constructs as defined by its final declaration. It is not an empirically and historically tested and verified factual work. It focuses more on interpretative significance of the conference in relationship to goals of the non-alignment movement (NAM). However, the reflection is intended to project its significance beyond April 1955 within neo-global liberalism. This work is divided into 6 sections: the first part is this general introduction; the second heading is about the concepts of unipolarity, bipolarity and multipolarity; the third section is on the Bandung Conference within a historical context; the fourth section is on the Non-Alignment Foundation of the Conference in a historical context, the fifth section deals with the final declared resolutions of the conference; and the last section is on rethinking the Bandung Conference: where to go from here? Rethinking is both about reconceptualization and re-contextualization of the significance of the Bandung Conference and its policy implications in the 21 st century. It is about questioning its claimed relevancy, identifying its potential in a new regionalist and globalist discourses, and examining its embodied vision of progress. In the rethinking, we should also identify and examine the contradictions as part of analyzing social phenomena.

This is a study of the World March of Women, a newly emergent and innovative transnational feminist network. Through this study, I aim to contribute to scholarship on transnational feminist practices, grounded empirically in an account of the spatial praxis of the World March of Women, and enriched analytically by critical concepts in geography. I begin by problematizing conventional grammars of the local-global and transnational in feminist studies of movements, networks and organizing. I proceed to introduce more complex theorizations of space, place and scale imported from critical geography. I then provide an account of the emergence of the World March of Women, with an eye to analyzing its spatial praxis. I conclude by considering both the political significance of this praxis and theoretical implications for feminist analytical work on the transnational.