Preliminary Programme

The aim of this paper is to examine how decolonization in the Global South impacted current discourses of liberation and development within Europe and especially how it influences the political speech of the Albanian politicians in Kosovo. The discourse on decolonization and historical processes that generated this production of discourse will be analyzed to understand the mobilizing factor of the main political party in power in Kosovo and the anticolonial discourse of its politicians. The critique addresses not only Serbia but also the international protectorate and the public discourse produced aimed towards the Albanians in Kosovo to be positioned as colonized and an othered group. Through the paper, it will be given a more detailed presentation of this discourse involving its origin, process, use, and history. (Show less)

The aim of this abstract is to analyse the role of the League of Nations on twentieth-century decolonization in Albania expanding beyond the heyday of post-war decolonization covering a timeline from 1920-1939. It introduces a wide range of actors who shaped processes of decolonization and the development from representatives of new states and imperial powers, bureaucrats and experts of the League of Nations in Albania. The topic of the League of Nations involvement in decolonization is multifaced. As an organization, the League of Nations faced challenges in engaging nations in international cooperation. It was together with other international organisations a hub for forging anti-colonial and inter-imperial alliances contributing to the simplistic view and arguments that presents international organisations as instruments of neo-colonialism. It served as a public forum for meaning of decolonization more generally and the decolonization of specific places in particular as Albania. The research objective of this paper is to analyse the role of the League of Nations, its employees, and the Albanian immigration societies as historical actors in their own right who sought to respond and shape the process of decolonization in Albania and sometimes in particular cases not following the lead of government representatives. (Show less)

This paper sets the interpretive framework to discuss the panel interventions within a global intellectual history context. This contribution aims to connect the individual topics discussed at the ESSHC panel in Gothenburg with the research areas investigated by the COST-Action CA18119 “Who Cares in Europe?”. It constitutes indeed a first step in a wider collective reflection and dissemination on topics, methodologies, interpretations, actors that will be scrutinised by the COST-subproject Decolonising Empires, 1930s–1970s: (Trans)national Actors and Social Reform in (Post-)Colonial Countries, which is carried out by the Action CA 18119 “Who Cares in Europe?”.
First, this contribution introduces the wider collective subproject whereof the panel is part, that analyses how regional, national, and transnational actors helped or obstructed social reform during the transition from colonially governed to independent countries. Secondly, it reviews the interdisciplinary state-of-art, by locating this topic within the existing literature, and by discussing further research avenues. The paper then uses the Balkan region as a spotlight for the study of the entanglements between local and global fields of action, identifying a set of geopolitical, diachronic, and conceptual issues inherent to the use of analytical categories such as “(post-)colonialism”, “social reform”, “international actors”. By so doing, the paper asks questions such as: the spatial and temporal scope of the concept of “post-colonial transition”; the semantic cleavages and political uses of the notion of “social reform”; the discussion of the role of international actors and transnational social movements in the transfer of ideas, expertise, and policies across a variety of regional variations. (Show less)