By Elizabeth Martin, School of Historical Studies, Birbeck – University of London
Originally published on Connections.
The “Blind Spots and Buzzwords in Internationalism” workshop was the third event in the “Rethinking Internationalism: Histories and Pluralities” project. It was truly international, running online from 10 am to 6 pm GMT to accommodate participants from different time zones and to make the most of international perspectives and networks. Bringing together scholars from diverse fields, the workshop aimed to explore areas of overlap and to break down the silos that often separate disciplines and subdisciplines. The central goal—under the broader question of “what is internationalism?”—was to consider the multiplicities and complexities inherent in the concept, moving beyond the historiographical dominance of Anglo-American liberal internationalism.
The conference was organized around the ideas of “blind spots” and “buzzwords” in the history of internationalism. Blind spots were conceptualized as those areas that have been marginalized in the scholarship, and buzzwords, the terms often shaped by external pressures that can distort how internationalism is discussed, when, and by whom. Rather than a rigid panel structure, the workshop adopted an organic, discussion-based approach. Below is a summary of the discussions that took place over the two days, organized under the headings of the six thematic panels. Many of the overarching themes and discussions extended well beyond the bounds of the individual panels.
ECONOMICS
Chair: Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck). Speakers: Marc Palen (Exeter); Mohamed Saleh (LSE); Ntina Tzouvala (UNSW Sydney); Negar Mansouri (Copenhagen).
The workshop’s opening panel emphasized the need for political and social historians of internationalism to engage more substantively with economic history and political economy. Marc Palen noted that, in his own work, he was struck by the extent to which economic ideas were entirely ignored, or sometimes even deliberately downplayed, in peace studies scholarship—despite the importance of the history of free trade to the American peace and anti-imperialism movements. Palen argued that it is impossible to study the history of empires and of imperialism without engaging with the economic aspect. Similarly, Mohamed Saleh explained that identity formation is entangled with economics, describing how his work, using population censuses, investigates the role of fiscal policies in the construction of ethnoreligious groups in the Middle East and North Africa.
Negar Mansouri, meanwhile, called for more critical scrutiny of dominant economic ideologies, such as monolithic ideas around market competition. Ntina Tzouvala, an international lawyer, approaches international law and political economy from a historical materialist perspective, in particular how international law manages, mitigates, or even makes invisible the unevenness of global capitalist development. Tzouvala noted that where economics does feature in the history of international law, it is generally as a result of discussions around economic theories rather than in response to economic processes. This tension between discourse and practice emerged as a key theme throughout the workshop. Panelists differed in their methodological approaches to the actors they study. Palen’s work focuses on free trade activists and the international peace movement (particularly women’s international peace movements, Christian pacifist organizations and social democratic parties) and ways these groups collaborate.
Saleh emphasizes the state as a collective actor composed of jurists and bureaucrats, as well as the local populations whose reactions to fiscal policies are central to his work; he also foregrounds colonial authorities, whom he describes as “foreign dictators.” Mansouri is interested in both broader non-hegemonic projects of internationalism and, more specifically, the response of central European actors to economic processes. In contrast, Tzouvala explicitly seeks to decenter actors such as lawyers, arguing that scholarship has overemphasized economic thought at the expense of economic process. Her work is more concerned with what laws do, rather than what their makers believe they are doing.
In discussion, Elizabeth Banks suggested that while ideas may receive the most attention, material resources impose the real limits on what can be achieved, often creating a larger gap between discourse and practice than actors themselves intend. Jessica Reinisch added that disparities of resources play a decisive role in determining which internationalist projects become effective. A question from Daniel Laqua opened up a broader line of inquiry that would recur throughout the workshop: how should scholars understand actors who are economically nationalist yet politically internationalist, and what does this reveal about the intersections of nationalism and internationalism?
MIGRATION
Chair: Ria Kapoor (QMUL) Speakers: Kasia Nowak (Vienna); Henry Dee (Northumbria); Alun Thomas (Staffordshire); Kalathmika Natarajan (Exeter); Emma Lundin (Malmo).
The second panel addressed the paradox that migrants, although both traversing and unsettling the international, are often marginal figures in international history. Kasia Nowak examined cases in which migrants turned to non-state actors such as the Vatican when they fell through the gaps of official secular regimes, as well as how resettlement and repatriation became a battlefield in the Cold War. Henry Dee’s work challenges the often nationalist bent of the historiography of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), highlighting the ways in which members organized far beyond the bounds of the state, and emphasizing the importance of international networks.
Ria Kapoor noted that categories such as “refugees,” “migrants,” “exiles,” and “nomadic pastoralists” had been central to the panel and asked how do, and how should, scholars both utilize and also circumvent these categories, particularly in the current context of a contemporary media that increasingly casts refugees as “economic migrants.” Alun Thomas and Kalathmika Natarajan underscored how such categories can obscure lived experiences. In Soviet archives, for instance, nomadism appears only through other labels, reflecting the state’s view of it as transient and often being classified as a “racialised deficiency.” Natarajan pointed to caste as a major blind spot in global histories of internationalism. She examined how states constructed “desirable” versus “undesirable” migrants, categories that were often racialized, and often showed continuities between colonial and postcolonial states. Emma Lundin discussed her work on the international context of the anti-apartheid movement, examining questions of gender and solidarity as well as manifestations of global solidarity in local settings. Dee’s work showed how migrant workers variously not only pushed back against state labels but also strategically pushed the idea of themselves as “the good immigrant” to retain free movement rights, while accepting the curtailment of the movement of others. His work shows how people mobilized and organized around these imposed categories rather than simply resisting them. Overall, the panelists emphasized the role of refugees and migrants not simply as objects of state policy, but as active shapers of state approaches toward migration.
Leslie James invited methodological discussion when she asked the panel how we should balance the telling of individual stories with more sociological approaches to broader systems. The panelists agreed that systems and individuals were often interconnected and shaped one another, though Thomas noted the difficulties involved in trying to research the individual in Soviet archives, and how the constraints of the archives could shape methodology. Lundin said that she has come to see the tension between smaller stories and the wider sociological approach as actively productive. Natarajan reflected how bottom-up perspectives focused on uncommon spaces of diplomacy could complicate traditional elite narratives within diplomatic histories. She urged historians to move beyond elite diplomatic forums like Bandung and to examine everyday spaces of international diplomacy, such as migrant hostels, passport offices, and quarantine camps. Dee noted the gendered nature of many archives, and the value therefore of individual voices in challenging dominant narratives.
RIGHT-WING HISTORIES
Chair: David Brydan (Kings) Speakers: Kiran Patel (LMU Munich); Raul Cârstocea (Maynooth); Molly Avery (Sheffield); Martin Hamre (Lund).
The third panel was chaired by David Brydan, who noted that in the project’s recent Newcastle conference on counter-hegemonic internationalism there had been no papers on right-wing internationalism. It was clear, then, that this was one of those “blind spots” that the workshop sought to shed light on. During the panel’s discussion, Kiran Patel, Raul Cârstocea, Molly Avery, and Martin Hamre explored the surprisingly internationalist nature of fascist and anti-communist movements. Despite the association of fascism with ultranationalism, fascists routinely borrowed ideas from abroad and saw themselves as participants in global ideological struggles. Avery and Hamre both noted that as the communist enemy was seen to be transnational in its goals, a transnational opposition was needed. Hamre pointed out that in the 1930s fascists were opposed to not simply the revolutionary left, but also liberal international organizations, such as the League of Nations.
One area of debate centered on the contested meaning of “fascism” itself, with Patel drawing attention to the ways in which he believed it was misapplied in today’s discourse, while Cârstocea emphasized how the meaning of “fascism” had never been fixed. Because every fascist movement is ultranationalist in its beginnings and therefore context-specific, Cârstocea stressed the difficulties of finding a stable definition for global fascism. Despite their differences, however, many fascist movements shared similar conceptions of the future, enabling transnational dialogue through chronopolitics.
A question put to the panel was whether or not the actors they focused on saw themselves as counter-hegemonic. Hamre and Cârstocea argued that fascists often did, resisting what they perceived as Jewish liberal imperialism, whereas Avery’s right-wing internationalists mostly saw themselves as explicitly hegemonic defenders of the status quo. Leslie James remarked on the absence of white supremacy from the conversation thus far, prompting Patel to argue for the recognition of not only white but also non-Western racial supremacies that shaped twentieth-century international politics. The panel concurred on the ideological flexibility of right-wing movements, and the need to integrate them more fully into histories of internationalism.
Throughout the discussion, participants questioned whether nationalism and internationalism were really as incompatible as is usually presumed. Ayça Çubukçu suggested that scholars may be perceiving paradoxes where none exist, while Laqua asked whether definitions of internationalism risk becoming too broad to be useful. Avery observed that although nationalism and internationalism are not inherently incompatible, the right-wing actors she studies consistently present them as such. Cârstocea argued that there is no contradiction at all, noting that nationalism itself has been one of the most globally successful ideological exports.
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
Chair: Daniel Laqua (Northumbria) Speakers: Leslie James (QMUL); Ayça Çubukçu (LSE); David Temin (Michigan); Giuseppe Grieco (City St George’s).
The intellectual history panel, chaired by Daniel Laqua, explored how this group of scholars came to study international ideas within intellectual history, and how the field’s terminology shapes their research. Leslie James explained that her move to intellectual history was driven by dissatisfaction with the assumption that key ideas flowed outward from Harlem or London; she seeks to complicate directionality and “circumvent the metropole.” Ayça Çubukçu traced her own interdisciplinary pathway into the field, driven by interest in Marxist and anarchist visions of internationalism. Giuseppe Grieco discussed how intellectual history can reveal alternative models of global thinking, extending beyond liberal internationalism. David Temin, trained in political theory and international relations, explained that his work on settler colonialism and environmental justice led him to question how discussions of the “international” can inadvertently reinforce the nation-state.
Laqua noted a shared dissatisfaction among the speakers with existing labels, prompting further debate on how intellectual history can better accommodate non-elite actors, marginalized ideas, and non-European perspectives. Grieco’s strategy for finding non-canonical thinkers is to start not from the thinker but from a small source, like a leaflet, and to trace outward. James suggested using spirituality and religious movements as a way of tracing intellectual history without focusing exclusively on elites literate in Western languages.
In response to a question from Cârstocea, panelists reflected on the slippages between internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and empire, with Çubukçu arguing that scholars must clearly acknowledge the conceptual messiness of these terms. James described how her work now focuses on relational modes beyond nationalism and internationalism, especially anti-colonialism, and moments of convergence found across ideological spectrums. Grieco explained how his research often moves away from the bigger category of colonialism to see how non-colonial, semi-colonial, or quasi-colonial states should be studied through the lens of imperialism.
THE UNITED NATIONS
Chair: Margot Tudor (City) Speakers: Alvina Hoffmann (SOAS); William Carruthers (Essex); Maria Ketzmerick-Calandrin (Leibniz ZMO).
Chaired by Margot Tudor, the panel on the United Nations (UN) brought together Alvina Hoffmann, William Carruthers, and Maria Ketzmerick-Calandrin to explore how international organizations function in practice. Alvina Hoffmann noted the inherent contradiction of the early UN human rights experts being national diplomats purporting to act as “independent” authorities, a practice that later became institutionally unthinkable. Ketzmerick-Calandrin examined the “internationalised history” of Cameroon, where local self-perceptions were mediated by international trusteeships.
Tudor asked the panel to reflect on the extent to which the actors they study considered themselves to be explicitly “international.” Ketzmerick-Calandrin found that the Cameroonian figures she studies did not necessarily regard themselves as international actors, as their primary goal was national sovereignty. Hoffmann observed that self-described “independent experts” often preferred to identify with “independence” rather than using the term “international.” Carruthers noted that in different situations and at different scales, the language of “internationalism” was something that could be “turned on” when it suited the strategy.
Adding to the overarching conversation about actors, Tudor emphasized that scholars must stop thinking about the UN as a monolith and start thinking about actors and individuals employed within the UN, as well as the recipients of international interventions. Hoffmann agreed, explaining how her work focused on actors, their trajectories, and their life stories, noting that successful UN experts often had to have had very successful national careers before taking up their international careers. Carruthers noted that while organizations like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are not monolithic, actors internally sometimes speak of them as a coherent whole due to reputational interest.
The discussion expanded to methodological challenges: the enormous scale of UN archives as opposed to more manageable archives like that of the League of Nations, and the impact this could be having on the amount of research done on each organization; issues of confidentiality; and the problem of extracting coherent narratives from vast or uneven documentation. Tudor emphasized the importance of considering the informal and personal spaces of UN internationalism, where decisions were often actually made, but which are hard to find in archives.
SURVIVING ACADEMIA: ADVICE ON PUBLISHING AND GRANTS IN A “BUZZWORD” ERA
Chair: Margot Tudor (City). Speakers: Patricia Clavin (Oxford); Daniel Laqua (Northumbria), Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck); Agnieszka Sobocinska (Kings).
The final panel turned inward to the conditions of academic work in the UK. Participants noted how institutional pressures, linguistic limitations, funding shortages, and disciplinary boundaries shape what scholars can research and write. The discussion included advice on navigating academia, grants, and publication. Panelists specifically noted the tension between timely research and sustained scholarship, stressing the need for scholars to use “buzzwords” as a new prism rather than remaking their entire scholarly identity to fit current trends.
Alun Thomas noted that it was difficult to have conversations about methodology without addressing the structural limitations of UK academia. Academic jobs often do not allow workers the time needed to study necessary languages for international history. For this reason, he finds interdisciplinary reading to be incredibly helpful, with work in areas such as geography often being just as important if not more important to his work than historical scholarship. Maria Ketzmerick-Calandrin also highlighted the specific career difficulties faced by interdisciplinary scholars. Once again, these discussions underscored the broader theme that the study of internationalism, with its blind spots and buzzwords, is often shaped by external constraints that dictate which narratives can be told and by whom.
CONCLUSIONS
The “Rethinking Internationalism” workshop examined the complex interplay between nationalism and internationalism, as well as the dynamic relationships between international actors, discourse, and practice. The workshop also emphasized the importance of revisiting the gaps in the historiography of internationalism, particularly those ideas, methodologies, and actors marginalized by the dominance of Anglo-American liberal internationalism in the field. Discussions throughout the panel sessions called for greater engagement with historians of economics, intellectual history, and migration, as well as scholars from disciplines beyond history, such as international relations and geography. There was consensus on the need for scholars to critically examine the structures of academia that influence which research is funded and published, and how these structures often perpetuate dominant historiographical narratives.
Looking ahead, the project will culminate in a fourth conference in London, scheduled for March 18–20, 2026. It will result in several publications, including a new handbook on the “Histories of Internationalism,” to be published by Bloomsbury, as well as a “History” journal series on counter-hegemonic internationalisms. The “Rethinking Internationalism” project goes beyond a series of events and publications, however—it provides a platform for an international network of scholars at various career stages and working across different disciplines. The workshop’s panel on “Surviving Academia” as well as ongoing peer mentoring and planned buddy-system programs are contributions for fostering vital relationships that will ensure the continued growth of the field. The project’s organizers hope that these connections will extend beyond the formal end of “Rethinking Internationalism,” enlarging both the historiographical framework and the networks of scholarship engaged in the history of internationalism.
Conference overview:
Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck) / Ria Kapoor (QMUL) / Daniel Laqua (Northumbria) / Margot Tudor (City): Welcome and introduction by “Rethinking Internationalism” team
Panel 1 – Economics
Chair: Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck) Speakers: Marc Palen (Exeter); Mohamed Saleh (LSE); Ntina Tzouvala (UNSW Sydney); Negar Mansouri (Copenhagen)
Panel 2 – Migration
Chair: Ria Kapoor (QMUL) Speakers: Kasia Nowak (Vienna); Henry Dee (Northumbria); Alun Thomas (Staffordshire); Kalathmika Natarajan (Exeter); Emma Lundin (Malmo)
Panel 3 – Right-Wing Histories
Chair: David Brydan (Kings) Speakers: Kiran Patel (LMU Munich); Raul Cârstocea (Maynooth); Molly Avery (Sheffield); Martin Hamre (Lund)
Panel 4 – Intellectual History
Chair: Daniel Laqua (Northumbria) Speakers: Leslie James (QMUL); Ayça Çubukçu (LSE); David Temin (Michigan); Giuseppe Grieco (City St George’s).
Panel 5 – United Nations
Chair: Margot Tudor (City) Speakers: Alvina Hoffmann (SOAS); William Carruthers (Essex); Maria Ketzmerick-Calandrin (Leibniz ZMO)
Panel 6 – Surviving Academia
Chair: Margot Tudor (City). Speakers: Patricia Clavin (Oxford); Daniel Laqua (Northumbria), Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck); Agnieszka Sobocinska (Kings).
Elizabeth Martin, Tagungsbericht: Blind Spots and Buzzwords in Internationalism, in: Connections. A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists, 16.02.2026, https://www.connections.clio-online.net/conferencereport/id/fdkn-160548.