Preliminary Programme

The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) grounded in Paris in 1945 was one of the biggest transnational women’s organizations in the 1960s-1989. By the 1970s it had the official status of NGO at the United Nations and included members from more than 100 countries. At the same time it was known as a “Communist organization” and lost its international prestige after the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991. During the 1950s and the 1960s the organization was very active in its attempts of engaging women from newly independent countries of Asia and Africa; in order to do it the WIDF’s publications were widely using the examples of the Soviet emancipation of women, in particular, emancipation of women in Central Asia and other borderlands.

My presentation is dedicated to the analysis of how the universal categories of “human rights” and “women’s emancipation” were used by this transnational organization in order to both attract women from countries outside of Europe and to fulfill the goals of the Soviet foreign policy. The last included distribution of the positive image of the Soviet Union and getting support for Soviet foreign policy including Soviet support for the communist and pro-Soviet organizations and movements in different countries. The presentation is based on the archive materials (Moscow archives) and analysis of WIDF’s official documents and periodical publication – Women of the Whole World. (Show less)

The paper explores how historical and contemporary narratives have been used to account for—and respond to—the societal rupture generated by the 2008 financial crisis in Iceland. The collapse of the Icelandic banking system was the biggest that any country has ever suffered relative to the size of its economy. The aim is to show two things: how the past is being felt in the present, reinterpreted and employed to overcome crisis situations; and how it influences historical representations as well as processes of globalized interventions, societal reckoning, and the politics of justice and reconstruction. This includes backward-looking memory battles over imperfect pasts as was well as forward-looking narratives constructed to provide a “new beginning.” This tension-laden process has led to new identity experiments and various forms of post-crisis institutional assimilation and difference.

Special attention will be devoted to international interpretations of the Icelandic response to the crisis. It will be shown that it was not only elite institutions, such as the IMF, which heaped praised on Iceland’s reconstruction, while, simultaneously, taking credit for its bail-out program. Anti-establishment grassroots movements also viewed the Icelandic political experience as a form of “people power” as manifested in Iceland’s determination to take on powerful countries to prevent further economic calamities, to jail bankers, and to involve the public in writing a new constitution. Such idealized narratives generated flawed interpretations of the crisis and its consequences. Their fluidity and contradictions will be problematized within the context of what amounted to a national rebranding to show how a country, which was, initially, stigmatized as a pariah subsequently became a role model for crisis management on the international stage. (Show less)

This paper investigates how Nordic countries, which are praised as the most advanced democracies in the world, have tackled in the last years the debate on function of, and restrictions on, freedom of expression, an issue to which the Nordic Council of Ministers has recently dedicated a worrying report.
Since the Eighteenth century such a right has been seen as a key building block in democratic process; yet the rise of right-wing populism and of racist and anti-Semitic groups who can take advantage of the boom of social media have raised questions related to protecting minority groups from discrimination whilst also attempting to ensure that the non-discrimination acts do not compromise freedom of expression.
Membership in the EU and acknowledgement of certain international conventions means that European and international law sometimes override national law. This can have positive effects on the right to freedom of expression but restricts the freedom of individual States to decide the extent of their non-discrimination statutes. The nation-states’ room of manœuvre is moreover challenged by non-State actors (such as Amnesty International and Civil Right Defenders) who want to have a voice in decision making affecting freedom of expression.
The main aim of this paper is to analyze the arguments which have been put forward for and against the unrestricted applicability of such a freedom by Nordic human rights organizations and think-tanks, focusing on the dilemma they face: either accommodating their universalistic principles to demands for restrictions on particular opinions or remaining firmly anchored to a neutral conception of democracy, with the risk of paving the way to the enemies of pluralism.
The theoretical framework of this paper is Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its assumption that particular types of speech can be harmful to minorities; consequently, if the state fails to protect a vulnerable minority from hate speech, it is in fact failing to provide proper security to its citizens. Hence the belief that it is both politically desirable and juridically legitimate to pass laws against racist opinions and groups, with an oscillation between universalistic principles and differentiated legal treatment which has led some scholars to blame CRT for ”postmodern censure”.
The paper will highlight the different frames (moral, legal, philosophical, or simply pragmatic) which have been used by Nordic human rights organizations to substantiate opposite positions on freedom of expression, examining as well whether the Nordic debate has been linked to the global discussion on such issue and how this redefinition of one of the fundamental human rights may change the very concept, and the global image, of Nordic democracies.
The sources are media articles, reports and interviews to activists of human rights organizations and think tanks.
This project is funded by the research hub RENEW (Reimagining Norden in an Evolving World) and by the Åke Wiberg Foundation (Stockholm). (Show less)