Communicating the International Organisations in the 19th and 20th Centuries –conference

Two EUI researchers Jonas Brendebach and Martin Herzer together with Heidi Tworek, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, organized a conference “Communicating International Organisations in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries” at the European University Institute from 10^th to 12^th March. The conference was made possible by the support of the Global Governance Programme of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, the Alcide De Gasperi Research Centre and the Department of History and Civilization.

The three-day event focused on the relationship between international organisations and the media throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The conference explored how international organisations were communicated to the public by the media. The aim of the conference was to combine two growing, yet largely unconnected lines of research: the history of international organisations and the history of media.

Participants attended seven panels with short presentations on topics related to the theme of the conference. Moreover, there were two keynote speakers. Professor Glenda Sluga from the University of Sydney gave a lecture titled “Hollywood, the UN, and the long History of Communicating Internationalism” and Professor Iris Schröder from the University of Erfurt spoke on “Pictures and the Media Politics of Pity. The Ethiopian Famine, the Civil War and International Organizations’ Aid in the 1980s”

The conference proposed four related fields of investigation: (1) international organisations and the media, (2) the media and international organisations, (3) infrastructures and politics of global media, and (4) imagining a ‘global public sphere’ and transnational publics.

The first field, international organisations and the media, explored how publicity and media visibility played a crucial role for both intergovernmental and nongovernmental international organisations. It discussed questions such as “What role did different international organisations attribute to various types of media” and “How did they work on their public images by influencing journalists and media coverage?”

The second, the media and international organisations, focused on the media’s point of view, examining how international organisations offered new sources of information, new topics and new journalistic environments for the media.

The third field, infrastructures and politics of global media, looked at the kind of technological and journalistic standards international organisations promoted and how journalists, media companies and the national governments positioned themselves towards these standards.  

The fourth field, imagining a ‘global public sphere’ and transnational publics, discussed liberal internationalism and imaginations of a ‘global public sphere’ and a ‘global consciousness’. Questions were raised such as “How did internationalist ideas of the ‘global public sphere’ evolve over time?”

At the end of the conference the three organizers, Tworek, Herzer and Brendebach, concluded that:

“We managed to bring together a group of scholars with exciting research projects covering virtually all the aspects of the relationship between international organisations and media.” A collective book on the conference theme is planned to make the results known to a wider public.