In our department we use the concept ‘transnational’ as one among an array of analytical tools intended to help scholars and students make sense of the past. While not denying the importance of relations between states, transnational history concerns movements and forces that cut across national boundaries including goods, people, ideas, words, capital and institutions (like international organisations, governmental or non-governmental). Transnational historians examine how individuals, societies or institutions introduce and test ideas and/or practices to new contexts, carrying along former experiences in their luggage, thus producing a complex set of echoes, interactions and circulations at each of the places where they operate. To enhance its effectiveness as an analytical tool, ‘transnational’ enjoys the companionship of ‘connected’, ‘entangled’ and ‘comparative’ history. ‘Transnational’ rejects a scalar conception of space from local to global, while fostering the idea of simultaneity between these spaces as being a more fruitful and useful concept.
Historians in our department pay particular attention to the history of international organisations (governmental, non-governmental) – whose archives are often located metres away from our department – philanthropic foundations, transnational advocacy groups, and social movements. These are recent, under-theorised and methodologically challenging fields of research, which are examined in a critical and non-complaisant way. We privilege a thematic approach, stressing relations and connections – including rivalry – between international organisations, transnational networks or social movements. We look into the mechanisms and structures allowing international organisations and transnational networks to function (or dysfunction) as well as the trajectories of individuals who set up and shaped the organisations and their connections within and beyond the organisation. We examine various aspects of the autonomy of these actors’ politics and policies without turning them into pivotal elements of a given international system or into the puppets of powerful governments.
The way transnational history is taught in our department is empirical and multi-archival, and it is carried out in permanent dialogue with other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, political sciences, and international law. We like to think about the ‘transnational’ approach to history as a means for understanding the historical evolution of connections and disconnections beyond, above and beneath the state.
