The 60th ITH Conference explores how labour movements in the Global South and North shaped decolonisation and global modernity through transnational solidarity, political struggle, and worldmaking from the 1950s to the 1990s.
Early bird registration ends on 30 June 2025!
The 60th ITH Conference is organised by the International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH) and kindly supported by the Chamber of Labour of Upper Austria, the Chamber of Labour of Vienna, the Institute for Historical Social Research, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Austrian Society for Political Education, and the City of Linz. The conference is part of the FWF-project
(P34980) A Socialist Workplace in Postcolonial Africa: A Connected History of the Yugoslav Workforce in Zambia (see: https://www.yuworkzambia.net/).
Preparatory Group
Immanuel Harisch (University of Vienna), Shivangi Jaiswal (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam), David Mayer (University of Vienna), Goran Musić (University of Vienna), Saima Nakuti Ashipala (University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa), Therese Garstenauer (ITH, Vienna), Laurin Blecha (ITH, Vienna).
Objectives
The success of decolonisation in the post-World War Two Global South depended greatly on the ability of national(ist) political leaders to rally local labor movements behind their cause. Similarly, solidarity with anticolonial movements, or the lack thereof, showed by the labour organisations and workers’ political parties in the Global North, played an important role in the “battle for the hearts and minds” inside the metropoles. Labor movements in the centre and periphery were not isolated, with rich exchanges taking place via political events, international conferences, delegation visits, and material aid. Parallel to the struggle to assert their geopolitical importance, governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean sought to establish social contracts with their working classes and control trade unions domestically, while using connections with organised labour and political actors in more developed countries to attract development cooperation.
The global turn in the historiographies of decolonisation and the Cold War helped move studies of labour in the Global South beyond their old focus on the formation of national working classes. Recent research on competing labour internationalisms, communist support for decolonisation, transnational developmental entanglements, and South–South solidarities opened new vistas for thinking about the working classes of the emerging Third World as constitutive makers of global modernity. The concept of ‘worldmaking’ has proven particularly fruitful in encompassing the wealth of simultaneous and often competing practices of transnational collaboration in the peripheries during the Cold War. This conference aims to look at the role of workers and workers’ movements situated in the Cold War ‘South’, ‘North’, ‘East’, ‘West’, and ‘in-between’, in these practices of worldmaking triggered by decolonisation between the 1950s and the 1990s.
Registration is available via the following form:
https://forms.gle/x2c3jQURrUnHxGN98
Please note that early bird registration ends on 30 June 2025.
Conference Languages: English – German
Download the full programme from the left column (or below on mobile devices) under “Documents”.
If you encounter any difficulties, please contact conference@ith.or.at