1 April 2025, 5 PM
ÖAW PSK-Building, 3rd floor, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna
and online via Zoom
Meeting-ID: 680 4832 2829
Kenncode: M7MmnB
Participants:
Raluca Grosescu | SNSPA, Bucharest
Ned Richardson-Little | Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam
Eva-Maria Muschik | University of Vienna
Patryk Labuda | Central European University
Jakub Szumski | Institute of Advanced Studies, Budapest
State socialist regimes and experts have had a tremendous impact on the drafting of international law even though this role has mostly been ignored by current scholarship. The roundtable will discuss socialist agency in the advancement, negotiation and opposition against various international conventions and within different international organizations. It will explore how socialist intellectuals and governments from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia interacted with their counterparts from across the world in the construction of and struggle over the global order in the context of Cold War and decolonization.
The event will also be an opportunity to discuss the volume Socialism and International Law: The Cold War and Its Legacies, edited by Raluca Grosescu and Ned Richardson-Little and published by Oxford University Press in 2024. The collection presents the socialist world as an ambiguous and fragile construct, with one foot in Eurocentric traditions and the pursuit of peaceful co-existence with the West via the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc and the radical Third World challenges to the status quo, primarily from postcolonial Afro-Asian states. Far from a monolith, the socialist world was an intricate and dynamic space that, however, shared common understandings of global affairs and the meaning of the law within them. With the volume as starting point, we will discuss about intellectuals, revolution, law, inter-national organizations, and global dynamics across the North-South divide.
Participants: Raluca Grosescu (SNSPA, Bucharest), Ned Richardson-Little (Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam), Eva-Maria Muschik (University of Vienna), Patryk Labuda (Central European University), Jakub Szumski (Institute of Advanced Studies, Budapest)
The roundtable takes place in the context of the research project “Foreign policy thinking in communist Albania and Romania” funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The event is organized in collaboration with the Research Group New Cold War Studies at University of Vienna.
