Book Talk | "Organiser le monde. Une autre histoire de la guerre froide/Organize the world. Another Cold War Story"

Sandrine Kott, University of Geneva

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https://princeton.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIldOygqTMpHdVv4-hYovNqGkmiDZV1x9dK

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About Organize the world

Diving into the archives of international organizations – the UN and its agencies, in particular, but also non-governmental organizations and large private foundations – Sandrine Kott reveals another story of the Cold War. These organizations, where actors from worlds in conflict meet and oppose each other, turn out to be places for the joint development of knowledge and projects. They make possible and encourage internationalisms structured around causes that both unite and divide: human and women's rights, peace, ecology... They promote the idea that it is possible to organize the world by regulating its imbalances and contradictions. Finally and above all, they give voice to a multitude of actors neglected in the great narratives, in particular those of the “Third World” whose demands for justice powerfully marked the international agenda of the period. The Cold War was followed by the era of globalism marked by the generalization of the logic of competition. Their triumph endangers the space for international debate as well as the projects for regulating and organizing the world, which human societies and their natural environments would need, however, more than ever.

Sandrine Kott is professor of Modern  European history since 2004. She studied in Paris, Bielefeld (Germany) and Columbia (New York) and holds an habilitation from the Sorbonne University. She was a member of the Institut Universitaire de France between 1997 and 2001. She is a member of the academia europeae http://www.acadeuro.org/. Since 2018 she is a visiting professor at NYU (New York University) where she teaches during the fall semester.

She has been invited professor at Humboldt Universität (Berlin), UNiversity of Santa Barbara (California) and at’Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris)

Her principal fields of expertise are the history of labor and social welfare in France and Germany since the end of the nineteenth century and labor relations in those countries of real socialism, in particular in the German Democratic Republic. In Geneva she has developed the transnational and global dimensions of each of her fields of expertise by taking advantage of the archives and resources of international organizations and particularly of the International Labor Organization. She has initiated in 2009 the History of International Organizations Network, a collaborative online research platform and seminar series http://www.hion.ch/

She has published over 120 articles in French, German and American journals and collective volumes, edited 20 volumes and special issues (in French, Polish, German and English) and published eight monographs.

She has supervised 20 PhDs (15 have already been successfully defended)