29514 - Global History: Public Sphere and Mass Media (1) (LM)

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, students will be able to use the acquired conceptual and theoretical tools to build adequate analytical frames and approach specific historical subjects. Particularly, students will master theories and methodological approaches concerning the shape and changes of public spheres in contemporary history. Thanks to the knowledge of the national and international historiography, students will be able to manage on their own further historical research on a specific topic. At the end of the two modules of the course, they will be aware of the methodological orientations prevailing in the global history, particularly with regard to economic matters, material cultures, environmental changes and changes in the public sphere. This will allow them to be critical towards the information, the texts and data and their historiographic relevance.

Course contents

Peace, political cultures and pacifist cultures from a global historical perspective 

The first module of the integrated course will focus on the themes of peace and pacifism in a global perspective. It will address the processes and modalities through which the issue of peace has become a thematic axis of central importance in the formation of collective movements between the 19th and 20th centuries and then during the XX and until the dawn of the XXI century. Particular attention will be devoted to processes of circulation of ideas within communication systems increasingly dominated by mass media; the construction of transnational communication and action networks. Moreover, it will shed light on the reciprocal influences between social actors operating in different political contexts; the transformation of the agency of pacifism and antimilitarism into communication domains dominated by the mass media. The global perspective will intertwine with the class dimension, especially for the period between the end of the 19th century and the advent of World War I, and with a gender perspective in addressing the links between feminism, pacifism and anti-militarism from the early decades of the 20th century up to much larger and more articulated networks in recent times (eg WILPF). 

The classes will be organized along 5 thematic blocs, one for each week, as follows:

I. Conceptual clarifications and introduction to global history: Peace, perpetual peace, mediation of conflicts, absence of war, just wars, nonviolent practices. There will be analized the different declinations of the concept of peace and the first forms of international pacifism during the nineteenth century.

II. "Bourgeois" pacifism and proletarian pacifism, anarchist anti-militarism, and the mobilization against war carried out by the Second International.

III. Women for Peace: Sisterhood, Antimilitarism and International Agency in the wake of World War I.

IV. The atomic threat in the international public opinion. The role of the media, science and intellectuals in the formation of movements against nuclear weapons and pacifism; the decline of nonviolence in the context of wars of decolonization and the war in Vietnam.

V. Links and divergences between feminism, anti-militarism and nonviolence in the pacifist movements of the 1980s. From the development of a European network of movements against nuclear weapons to the institutionalization of anti-militarist instances for world security (Palme Commission).

Readings/Bibliography

The books listed below are references for topics tackled in class. They can serve as starting readings for the preparation of the final paper.

On issues concernig methodological approaches and concepts:

Marek Tamm, Peter Burke (eds.), Debating new approaches to history, London, Bloomsbury 2019;

Sebastian Conrad, Storia globale : un'introduzione, Roma: Carocci, 2015;

Stefan-L. Hoffmann, Civil Society 1750-1914, Palgrave New York 2006;

J. Habermas, Storia e critica dell'opinione pubblica, 3. ed
Roma-Bari, Laterza 2008;

Craig Calhoun (ed), Habermas and the public sphere, The Mit Press, Cambridge 1992;

Marica Tolomelli, Sfera pubblica e comunicazioni di massa, Bologna, Archetipo 2006;

Stefan Berger, Holger Nehring (eds.), The history of social movements in global perspective. A survey, London, Palgrave 2017.

On peace, pacifism, antimilitarism, collective action:

David Cortright, Peace. A history of movements and ideas, Cambridge 2008;

S. E. Cooper, Patriotic pacifism. Waging war on war in Europe 1815-1914, New York-Oxford 1991.

Georges Haupt, La II. Internazionale, Firenze 1973 e Id., Il fallimento della II. Internazionale, Roma 1970;

Ruggero Giacomini, Antimilitarismo e pacifismo nel primo Novecento: Ezio Bartalini e "La Pace" 1903-1915, Milano 1991;

Gianni Oliva, Esercito, paese e movimento operaio. L'antimilitarismo dal 1861 all'età giolittiana, Milano 1986;

Masao Nishikawa, Socialists and international actions for peace 1914-1923, Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2010;

Pier Cesare Bori, Gianni Sofri, Gandhi e Tolstoj: un carteggio e dintorni, Bologna: Il mulino, 1985;

Colleen E. Kelley and Anna L. Eblen (eds.), Women who speak for peace, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002;

Amoreno Martellini, Fiori nei cannoni: nonviolenza e antimilitarismo nell'Italia del Novecento; prefazione di Goffredo Fofi, Roma: Donzelli, 2006;

Cecelia M. Lynch, Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018;

Elda Guerra, Il dilemma della pace: femministe e pacifiste sulla scena internazionale, 1914-1939, Roma: Viella, 2014;

Alison S. Fell, Ingrid Sharp (eds.), The womens movement in wartime: international perspectives, 1914-1918, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007;

Antonella Marrone, Piero Sansonetti, Né un uomo né un soldo: una cronaca del pacifismo italiano del Novecento, Milano: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2003;

Joseph Rotblat, Daisaku Ikeda, Dialoghi sulla pace, Milano 2006;

Francisco Fernandez Buey, Albert Einstein filosofo della pace, Roma-Reggio Calabria 1989;

Sandra Cerrai, I partigiani della pace in Italia. Tra utopia e sogno egemonico, Limena, Libreriauniversitaria, 2011

Ruggero Giacomini, I partigiani della pace. Il movimento pacifista in Italia e nel mondo negli anni della prima guerra fredda, Milano 1984;

Benjamin Ziemann (ed.), Peace movements in Western Europe, Japan and the USA during the Cold War, Essen: Klartext, 2008

Holger Nehring, Politics of Security. British and West German Protest Movements and the early Cold-War, 1945-1970, Oxford 2013

Thomas R. Rochon, Mobilizing for peace: the antinuclear movements in Western Europe, London: Adamantine Press, 1988

Lawrence S. Wittner, Resisting the bomb. A history of the world nuclear disarmament movement, 1954-1970, Stanford 1997

Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society. An Answer to war, Cambridge 2003

Mary Kaldor (ed), Europe from below. An East-West Dialogue, London 1991

Maurizio Zinni, Schermi radioattivi. L'America, Hollywood e l'incubo nucleare da Hiroshima alla crisi di Cuba, Venezia 2013

April Carter, Peace movements. International protest and world politics since 1945, London and New York 1992

Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner, Wilfried Mausbach (eds.), America, the Vietnam war, and the world. Comparative and international perspectives, Cambridge 2003;

Michael Clarke and Marjorie Mowlam (eds), Debate on disarmament, London 1982;

Alice Cook & Gwyn Kirk, Greenham women everywhere: dreams, ideas and actions from the Women's Peace Movement, London: Pluto, 1983;

Cornelius Castoriadis et al., Oltre la pace: saggi di critica al complesso politico-militare, a cura di F. Magni e S. Vaccaro, Milano: F. Angeli, 1987;

Giulio Marcon, Fare pace: Jugoslavia, Iraq, Medio Oriente: culture politiche e pratiche del pacifismo dopo il 1989, Roma: Edizioni dell'asino, 2011

Shin Chiba, Thomas J. Schoenbaum, Peace movements and pacifism after September 11, Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2008;

The Oxford handbook of women, peace and security, edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, New York: Oxford University press, 2019;

Howard Zinn, La guerra giusta; prefazione di Gino Strada, Milano: Charta, 2006;

Marco Bertozzi (a cura di), Schermi di pace, Roma: Ediesse, 2006

 

Teaching methods

For the preparation of class discussions the texts will be uploaded on the "didactic materials" related to teaching.The course includes lectures alternating with debates in which active participation of students is required. Some readings to be discussed in class will be assigned in the first week of lessons to small groups of students. Some of the readings will be:

Georges Haupt, Guerra o Rivoluzione?, L'Internazionale e l'Union Sacrée nell'agosto del 1914, in Id., L'Internazionale socialista dalla Comune a Lenin, Torino 1978, pp. 261-300.

H. Noordegraaf, The Anarcopacifism of Bart de Ligt, in P. Brock and Th. Socknat, Challenge to Mars. Essays on Pacifism 1918-1945, Toronto 1999, pp. 89-100;

Catia Cecilia Confortini, What is Feminist Peace?, in Ead., Intelligent Compassion: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and Feminist Peace, Oxford Scholarship Online: 2012.

Timothy Johnston, ‘Peace or Pacifism? The Soviet “Struggle for Peace in All the World”, 1948–54’, in The Slavonic and East European Review, 86, 2 (2008), 259–82;

Geoffrey Wiseman, The Palme Commission: New thinking about security, in International Commissions and the Power of Ideas, edited by Ramesh Thakur, et al., United Nations University Press, 2005.

For the preparation of class discussions the texts will be uploaded on the "didactic materials" related to course.

 

Assessment methods

Students who attend at least 75% of the lessons are considered to be attending.

Attending students are asked to produce a written paper on a theme pertaining to one of the two modules, to be agreed with the teacher of the respective module. For a 12-credit-essay it is required a length of about 15-18 pages (about 40,000 characters, notes and blank spaces included).

The paper will be evaluated both in terms formal aspects of presentation and articulation of the work, clarity of exposition,  accuracy in the use of historiographic concepts and categories, and in terms of the ability of critical elaboration of the bibliographic material used and its coherence in relation to the subject of the paper. In the evaluation of attending students, systematic and active participation in class will also be taken into account.

In addition to the final exam, non-attending students must take an oral exam on the following book: Sebastian Conrad, Storia Globale. Un'introduzione, Carocci, Roma 2015.

The overall grade of the first module for non-attending students will be the average obtained between the oral exam and the final exam.

With regard to the outlined criteria the evalution will result from following assessment scale:

• Excellent (30 cum laude)
• Very Good (28-30)
• Good (25-27)
• Satisfactory (22-24)
• Sufficient (18-21)

This 6 CFU course can be chosen as a part of the 12 CFU Integrate course "Profili di storia globale (C.I.) (LM)". If the student has the Integrated Course (12 CFU) in his/her study plan, the final grade will result from the arithmetic average of the marks obtained in the two parts (“Global history: Public sphere and mass communication (1) (LM)" and “Global history: Economics, Environment, Society (1) (LM) “).

Teaching tools

The weekly readings will be made available on the "Teaching materials" related to teaching. Knowledge of English is desirable as some of the readings will be in English.

Office hours

See the website of Marica Tolomelli