HIS The League of Nations – a social-bureaucratic exploration

The League of Nations (1919-1946) was the first truly global international organization (IOs). Created after the First World War, its aim was to maintain peace, solve transnational problems, and order the world along the lines of the victorious powers. It was a veritable laboratory of global governance, within fields such as health, economy, colonial administration,
disarmament, international law, intellectual collaboration and transport. It was also meant to be the ultimate arbitrer of international disputes. Although it failed to prevent the onset of the Second World War, particularly its international secretariat – servicing all policy fields – became the blueprint for almost all international organizations that have been created since. As such, the League is truly the mother of all IOs.

This course will go inside the engine room of the League of Nations, to uncover the people, practices and platforms that made the whole machinery tick. It will introduce the students to a so-called social-bureaucratic approach, which blends biographical, prosopographical, institutional, social and digital approaches to open the ‘black box’ of IOs. Students will work with digitially available sources, and in particular the personnel files of the staff that worked in the League Secretariat.
These are treasure-troves of information, about assignments, assessments, complaints and career trajectories, which will allow the students to connect the personal and the professional in analysing the League’s multifarious work.

The course will be divided into three main parts:

(1) A general introduction to the interwar period and the League of Nations
(2) A deeper dive into what a “social-bureaucratic approach” entails: methods, (digital) tools and sources
(3) A final part where the students will each write a biographical/collective biographical/prosopographical study on the League Secretariat, connecting people and policy fields, drawing – among other things – on the rich personnel files.

The exam paper will follow the standards of Område 3. That is a written source-based paper, including reflections on
methodology, sources and historiography.
It is the intent to follow this course up, for those that should want, with a voluntary “blog-writing” seminar in the fall of
2027, where students can curate their exams into blogs for the INNER_LEAGUE project (ERC Consolidator, 2025-2030)