Event overview
'Reading letters to the League of Nations on minorities and Macedonia' with Jane K. Cowan, University of Sussex and Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
Part of spring term seminar series.
The 1919 Paris peace conference finalised the dismantling of four European empires. As the nation-state became the normative political form, over a quarter of the populations affected found themselves nationally ‘out of place’. In this seminar, I introduce my book-in-progress, Minority or Nation? Competing Justice Projects at the League of Nations. Using claims for Macedonia and Macedonians as my case study, I argue that the League’s minorities regime became a site for confrontations between competing justice projects. Architects of the ‘New Europe’—statesmen and diplomats, assisted by League bureaucrats—both supervised and collaborated with ‘minority states’ that had been compelled to sign treaties protecting their ‘minorities’. ‘Minority’ was forged as a legal-political category of person: protected, rights-bearing yet domesticated. Yet civic and revolutionary organisations, supported by concerned world citizens, used the minority petition process in multiple ways, including to resist the project of minoritisation and to continue an unfinished struggle for nationhood. I trace this process through examining petitions for Macedonia and Macedonians and the encounters, conversations and debates they generated, contributing to a ‘history of the present'
Photo by William Martin 1930, League of Nations commission investigating a border incident between Greece and Bulgaria
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 6 Mar 2019 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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