International History for Leaders

The global crisis that started in 2007 has re-opened the never ending dialogue between history and policy in an exciting way. At the same time as the crisis is shattering the political and intellectual landscape both South and North, it also leads to new focuses – or to new questions about older ones: on security policy, regulation, markets, peace, inequality, demography, growth and prosperity.

We contend that among the resources that will be needed by tomorrow’s macro and micro-leaders is the need for vast, rigorous, fact-based and social science-constructed (and deconstructed) historical expertise – a specialisation of the Graduate Institute ever since one of its parent institutions was created in the interwar era, in a place – Geneva – an international centre for independent, multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary thinking.

The unifying theme of all research and teaching in our department is the history of policy-making: global, local, national, international or transnational. Our research papers and published output look at diverse policies in a historical perspective: development, humanitarian aid, changes in financial regulation, cultural policies, diplomacy, and so on. Our courses and seminars encourage students to develop a critical approach to the past. Looking for instructive precedents is useful: We focus on the lessons learned and attempt at pointing the way forward. We also contend that thinking by analogies, because it is creative, provides powerful ways to understand the world we are living in.

Consistently, we encourage our master and PhD students to undertake research in the papers of policy-makers and advisers, of government agencies, as well as in the archives of multinationals, banks, private foundations, international organisations and NGOs. We emphasise the need to match work on primary sources on policy-making with a keen understanding of the environment with which policy-makers interact or interfere, such as market structures. Geneva is an ideal place where to lead this kind of innovative research: the archives of many international organisations (from the ICRC to the WHO, the UN and the League of Nations, from the WTO to the International Telecommunication Union and the UNHCR) are located literally a few meters away from the International History Department, providing students with accessible and inspiring starters that will hopefully lead them to ambitious and successful inquiries across a changing world.