International History Now

The first two episodes of the series cover the “monument crisis” -- a struggle for symbolic recognition of black lives in public spaces which emerged in the context of broader protest movements such as “Black Lives Matter”. Drawing from their research and personal experiences, our guests reflect on the so-called “monument crisis”. They take us on a journey from Eastern Europe, to Africa, Italy, the United States and, of course, the UK. We talk about the parallels between de-communization and decolonisation, the new nostalgia for socialism, commemorative practices in interwar Tanganyika and post-colonial Tanzania, the concept of “vandalism”, Churchill, and more broadly, about questions of public history, memory and heritage in the shadow of the Black lives matter movement. 

Episode 1: Democracy and Violence

Guests: Carlo Invernizzi Accetti (Associate Professor of Political Theory at CUNY, New York); Nausikaa El-Mecky (Professor of Art History at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona).

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Episode 2: Decommunisation and Decolonisation

Guests: Michal Murawski (Lecturer in Critical Area Studies, UCL SSEES, London);
Alma Simba (UG student in International History at LSE, London, and Editor of Lacuna Lit literary magazine).

This episode discusses the fate of monuments from interwar Tanganyika to modern Britain, looks at Black Lives Matter through the lens of African socialism and at Soviet communism as a form of Russian hegemony, analyses why the "Leninopads" in Ukraine preceded "Rhodes must fall" in South Africa and Britain, and raises the question to what extent a new nostalgia for socialism may be emerging.

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July 2020

Episode 3: Hagia Sophia as a Mosque

Guests: Cemil Aydin (Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill); Marc David Baer (Professor of International History at LSE).

In the third episode of "International History Now", we are talking about cultural crises in the pandemic, Hagia Sophia as a mosque, Erdogan waving goodbye to Kemalism, Mehmet II’s place in Kemalist and conservative Turkish imaginaries, and the politics of the Ottoman past. 

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August 2020

Guests: Alexander Etkind (Professor of History at the European University Institute at Florence) and Maria Mälksoo (Senior Lecturer in International Security at the Brussels School of International Studies, University of Kent).

Taking the protests in Belarus which began in August 2020 as a cue, this episode examines some of the pivotal recent scholarship in Eastern European history and international relations through conversations about ways in which the past comes alive in present crises. The episode aims to contextualise the past of Belarus and the region of Kresy in the light of an open future, centring around issues of the cultural and economic histories of borderlands, memory and security, forgotten and obliterated groups. We also discuss how interdisciplinary groups using new media could foster new insights into the history and memory of this region. 

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October 2020

Guests: Jeanne Morefield (Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Birmingham), Samuel Moyn (Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University) and Charles Smith (Distinguished Professor of Playwriting at Ohio University).

The American election has created a closely watched spectacle across the world. The interests of those watching are as widely divergent as those of the American electorate itself. For the past four years, the words and gestures coming from America’s now departing president have made for a horrible show of dehumanisation, farce, and contempt. And yet the election is also a passing moment in a much more protracted crisis revolving around the state of American democracy as well as its status worldwide.

Can American democracy be reformed? What can legal and political theorists and historians do? Should playwrights expose weaknesses of canonical figures of past struggles for equality?

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November 2020

Guests: Zaur Gasimov (Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History of University of Bonn) and Ronald G. Suny (William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan).

Against the backdrop of a new war in Nagorno-Karabakh, in this episode we explore the region’s history through the lenses of political conflict as well as cultural interactions. Since 1994, Nagorno-Karabakh brokered an existence as an autonomous region, and the fortunes of its population were supposedly entrusted to international intermediaries, the so-called Minsk group. While the UN Security Council had ruled to restore the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, de facto throughout this period Nagorno-Karabakh was controlled by Armenia. In the autumn of 2020, Azerbaijan carried out a military operation, which resulted in the transfer of a large part of Nagorno-Karabakh, previously controlled by Armenia, to Azerbaijan. Now Armenian refugees have fled from here to Armenia or to Russia, while the Azerbaijani population expelled from Karabakh in the early 1990s is preparing to return. Among the ruins of towns and villages are both Armenian and Azerbaijani cultural monuments, some of which document a kind of coexistence that now seems unimaginable. Our guests speak about the region in relation to the Russian Civil War, Soviet culture of the 1960s, the role of the diasporas, and the impact of Soviet collapse on the Caucasus as a whole. The episode features music by composers and performers from the region.

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January 2021

Guests: Mark Mazower (Ira D. Wallach Professor of History, Columbia University and Founding Director of the new Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination), Katherine E. Fleming (Provost of New York University and Alexander S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Culture and Civilization, Faculty of Arts and Sciences at NYU) and Effi Gazi (Professor of History, University of the Peloponnese and member of the editorial board of the journal Historein).

25 March 1821 is celebrated annually in Greece as Greek independence day; a day marking the birth of what some have seen as the first nation-state in Europe after post-revolutionary France. A series of localised revolts against Ottoman rule gave rise to a broad revolutionary wave that swept parts of the country. By the end of the 1820s, interventions by different European powers and the rise of philhellenic sentiment secured the state's autonomous existence from the Ottomans. This came at the price of greater dependence upon the so-called Great Powers: Britain, France, and Russia.

As Greece prepared to celebrate the bicentennial of the events of 1821, we examined the dimensions of Greek dependence and independence from different angles. Was the war of independence a standalone event or part of a transnational process of revolutionary activity? How did the heterogeneous populations (Jews, Muslims) within what became the Greek nation-state experience the revolution and its aftermath? What kinds of sovereignty did Greece gain and how did its palace in the world change over time? Finally, how is the revolution remembered in Greece today?

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March 2021