Feierliche Verleihung des Walter-Markov-Preises 2017

Abstract

We warmly invite you to a roundtable discussion presenting two innovative studies in the fields of international management of natural disasters and global labour history:

Lukas Schemper: “Humanity Unprepared: International Organization and the Management of Natural Disaster (1921-1991)”

Johanna Wolf: ““Assurances of Friendship”. Metallgewerkschafter während der Globalisierungsprozesse der langen 1970er-Jahre am Beispiel der Schiffbauindustrie“

Lukas Schemper (Manchester) analysed attempts to create international institutions to manage natural disasters between the early 1920s and the late 1980s. The focus is on the International Relief Union of the inter-war period, on UNESCO’s activities in the field of disaster prevention, the UN Disaster Relief Office, and the project to name the 1990s International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. Schemper shows that the internationalisation and institutionalisation was slow and irregular but he also reveals a remarkable interplay of different contexts and scales of action. Following the individual biographies of international civil servants, humanitarians, and scientists, who were involved in the creation and day-to-day business of these institutions, leads into national, international and transnational, as well as occasionally colonial or postcolonial settings. The respective logics and the dynamics resulting from the encounter help to see the complexities in the coordination of the field.

Johanna Wolf (Leipzig) studied the responses of trade unions in the shipbuilding industry sector that is particularly vulnerable in regard to developments on the world market. With the Oil-crisis in 1973 the demand for tanks sank and the production was relocated, unemployment rose and tightened the competition between shipbuilding industries in different countries. Wolf has made a multi-level analysis, combining the reactions of a German shipbuilding company, the Bremer Vulcan Werft, the meetings of the German trade union IG Metall, and the conferences of the International Metalworkers’ Federation. This enables her to reconstruct how the global shifts in the sector were perceived, constructed and dealt with in different contexts. She also shows how arguments and positions moved between the local, national and international, and how in this process a transnational sphere of references emerged.

The two works have been awarded the Walter-Markov-Prize for Historical Sciences 2017 by the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH).

They will be presented in a roundtable with the authors and chaired by Matthias Middell (SFB 1199) and Katja Naumann (GWZO).

We hope you join us in meeting the authors and exploring their books, and we are glad that we can invite you to a small reception afterwards hosted by ENIUGH.