A new SNSF funded project ‘Global Governance, Trust and Democratic Engagement in Past and Present’ brings together researchers who have made major contributions to the study of international cooperation and citizenship in their respective fields. It started in October 2024 and is funded for two years.
MOre About the project
The project ‘Global Governance, Trust and Democratic Engagement in Past and Present’ pursues two major lines of enquiry. First, it examines campaigns that sought to create, reform, transform or abolish international organisations. In doing so, it highlights the democratic potentials and lacunae of international organisations while tracing broader efforts to democratise international relations. Second, the project investigates attempts by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and social movements to enlist the support of international bodies, partly in response to the obstacles they encountered domestically. Such endeavours implied a degree of trust in the ability of international organisations to become tools for positive change. By recovering the past relationship between political participation, democracy and international institutions, the project enables us to better understand how we might reimagine global cooperative mechanisms in the present.
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About the investigators
Carolyn Biltoft is the Principal Investigator of the project. She was trained in the world/global intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Princeton, 2010.) Methodologically, her work fuses the tools of intellectual history, media history and theory, cultural studies and critical theory. She is broadly interested in how the changing material and immaterial infrastructures of globalisation emerged, developed and altered finance, politics and cultural local and globally.
Amalia Ribi Forclaz is Co-Principal Investigator and an Associate Professor in International History and Politics. She holds a DPhil in Modern history from Lincoln College, Oxford (2008), where she was a Berrow Scholar and has held fellowships at the Oxford Modern European History Research Centre, the Excellence Cluster Asia and Europe in Heidelberg and as an SNF Ambizione Fellow at the Graduate Institute. Her areas of expertise include 19th and 20th century internationalism, the history of slavery and abolition, and the global history of agriculture and rural development.