Preliminary Programme

In 1935, the International Labor Conference adopted a recommendation to address the problem of unemployment among young people. Most notably, it advocated the resort to school structures in order to canalize and absorb the specific group of “unemployed youths”. This paper focuses on the transnational networks that helped construct this new social category during the economic crisis of the 1930’s. First, we will identify the networks and groups involved in the struggle against unemployment, highlighting how they reorganized around the international organizations newly created after WW1, and especially the International Labor Organization. Finally, we will discuss the range of solutions elaborated on the international level to tackle this sensitive issue by tightening the links between educational and labor policies. (Show less)

This paper explores the foundation and development of various universities in the Middle East roughly between 1850 and 1950. Examples will include among others the American universities in Beirut and Cairo, the French Université St Joseph in Beirut and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The paper particularly aims to highlight the role of international or transnational actors of various kinds in the creation and maintenance of these institutions. In fact all of the universities were targeted by more than one such transnational network – colonial governments, religious missionary organizations, American philanthropic foundations, or the Zionist movement, to name but a few. The entanglement between these different institutions as well as the connection between global interests and local implementations will form the central theme of the paper. (Show less)

“The Christianity and the civilization of a people may both be measured by their treatment of childhood”, wrote Benjamin Waugh in 1886, chairman of the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Of the eight Millennium Development Goals that the United Nations has set for 2015, half are directly or indirectly related to children. Between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, child welfare became not only an objective that featured prominently in the range of state (and supra-state) missions worldwide, but also a yardstick of civilisation – the criterion by which one could measure a country’s development. In that sense, child welfare is a fundamental element of our modernity.
However, this kind of general presentation is liable to conceal several important facts. Firstly, Europeans and Americans played a crucial role in theorising and implementing child welfare. The Frenchman Joseph Raulin in De la conservation des enfants (1768), the Britons Florence Davenport Hill in Children of the State (1868) and John Eldon Gorst in Children of the Nation (1907), the Swede Ellen Key in Le Siècle de l’enfant (1902); and the American Grace Abbott in The Child and the State (1938): in their own way, they all defined the community’s responsibilities with regard to children. This leads us to highlight the role of cultural, social and political factors in the encounter between children and social welfare: the “feeling of childhood”, to use Philippe Ariès’ term, but also the construction of the nation, the development of the state of law and the welfare state, as well as the rise of the middle classes moulded by individualism and Christian values.
There is a very rich historiography of the different aspects of child welfare (reducing infant mortality, banning child labour, protecting orphans, educating delinquent children, fighting child abuse, etc.). On the other hand, the way in which it was universalised has not been studied to the same extent, given that the history of childhood is often structured around a national framework. However, it is vital to understand the way in which states, philanthropic organisations, scholars and jurists helped to bring about a common conception of children and child welfare in Europe and the United States, while establishing themselves within a particular national context, with its own legislative framework, social set-up and political agenda.
My paper will try to analyse, based on the European and North American experience, both the globalisation of child protection, understood as the spread of practices and standards worldwide, and its internationalisation, which combines the exchange of knowledge with the sharing of experiences and cross-border trends of method and imitation – with both aspects closely linked. (Show less)

The evolution of the IBE between 1925 and 1946 is a significant manifestation of the challenges and paradoxes lying in the endeavors to construct an international European approach to education that is above the conflicts between States and that, nonetheless, depends on their approval in order to survive and to accomplish its mission.
Indeed, the IBE was founded as a result of the personal initiatives of the first builders of the Institut Rousseau - Bovet, Claparède and Ferrière. Nevertheless, the main work of its foundation is conducted under the executive direction of general secretary of IBE, Mary Butts, a leading figure from the feminine European networks. IBE came into being in 1925, thanks to subsidies from the Rockefeller Foundation and supported by the Society of Nations and the International Labor Organization. ILO is an important model for the development of the IBE, even if both organizations do not have the same state legitimacy. The IBE declared itself neutral, free of any binding to governments, based on a strictly scientific spirit, aiming, thanks to education, for an intellectual cooperation, international solidarity and pacifist ideals. It wanted to become the main instrument for rallying all institutions in the world working for the same cause.
The ambition, obviously, was excessive: in the short time of four years it had exhausted the resources of its ardent internationalists. In 1929, in order to survive, the IBE separated from the Institut Rousseau, and it became an intergovernmental institution, directed by Piaget and Rosselló, Mary Butts still doing a huge amount of work of legitimization on the international level. The new IBE progressively strengthened its partnership with the national educational authorities and the international organizations. There was still a hard lobbying done during the last years of the Second World War in order to maintain the work of former IBE and the influence of European countries, very present during the period of the inter-war years. After the Second World War, the IBE became part of UNESCO, akin of an intergovernmental product.
On the basis of voluminous archives, we will describe the history of the IBE and of its main protagonists in focusing on the following tensions: how had the ideas of internationality, put forward by the founders of the IBE, become internationalism and how were these ideals redefined each time the IBE was restructured? How did the institution position itself during war or after it among the nations in crises, and did it succeed or not in avoiding political and military conflicts in order to contribute, through education, to a better world, as its inaugural emblem proclaimed? More particularly, we will set out to understand the role of researchers in education in this international institution. We are, indeed, interested in describing how they themselves, as researchers, manage the tensions that can appear between the ideal of internationalism and intergovernmentalism. At the very moment when expertise has progressed, where do the scientists position themselves in view of the risk of - notably political - instrumentalization of science? (Show less)