Monthly Archives: March 2015

Reluctant Internationalists

The Reluctant Internationalists project inspects the history of international collaboration and ambitions of medical professionals, politicians, generals, diplomats and policy-makers in twentieth century Europe. This four-year project, funded by Jessica Reinisch’s Wellcome Trust Investigator Award, examines the origins of such policies, consequences and lasting legacies.

Throughout the century, concerns about public health crises (real or imagined) were primary catalysts for international solutions, structures and mechanisms, which spurred or forced policy-makers at local and national levels into international action, often reluctantly.

Visit the web site: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/reluctantinternationalists/research/

The Parallel History project

The Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security (PHP, the former Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact), provides new scholarly perspectives on contemporary international history by collecting, publishing, and interpreting formerly secret governmental documents.

In response to the declassification of NATO records and the growing availability of documents from archives in Eastern and Central Europe, PHP as a cooperative undertaking of more than twenty partner institutes brings together leading Cold War historians, archivists, and government officials. The findings are presented to the specialist academic community at conferences and published both in print and on the PHP website.Since its establishment in 1999, the project has collected thousands of pages of material on security-related issues of the Cold War, published a large number of online documentaries and publications on central issues such as mutual threat perceptions and alliance management, and organized several major international conferences on war planning, intelligence, and intra-bloc tensions.The thrust of PHP research interest is in the recent historical origins and development of current security issues and institutions on the basis of newly available documentary evidence.

The main issues of research interest in the coming years are:

The European Security Model
NATO Enlargement and Its Out-of-Area Problem
Regional Security in Asia, Latin America, and Africa
Threat Perceptions, Strategic Doctrines, Military Plans
Peacekeeping and Nongovernmental Organizations as New Security Factors during and after the Cold War

The PHP website has become a leading online clearing-house for scholars, policymakers, students, and the wider public. The worldwide use of the PHP website is steadily increasing. More than 2,000 subscribers receive the monthly “PHP News” as an electronic mailing.

Join the PHP as a partner or an associate! For further information please contact Project Coordinator Vojtech Mastny.

New International Economic Order

The new issue of the journal Humanity is on “Toward a History of the New International Economic Order” – there is a range of interesting articles.

Here’s the link: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/humanity/toc/hum.6.1.html

Moses Kotane’s remains are being repatriated from Russia, back to South Africa

Anti-apartheid hero Moses Kotane’s remains are to be repatriated from Russia, back to South Africa. Kotane was buried at the prestigious Novodevichy cemetery in the capital of what was then the Soviet Union. In the following decades, the apartheid regime collapsed and a new millennium dawned but one woman never forgot Kotane or gave up on bringing him home. Rebecca Kotane, now 103, is about to see her last wish come true when her husband’s remains are returned to African soil. read more in the Guardian’s recent article:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/23/anti-apartheid-hero-moses-kotanes-remains-repatriated-russia?CMP=share_btn_tw