Administrative Culture(s) of International Organizations
ADMINISTORY is an Open Access online journal on the history of state and administration. Volume 7 is dedicated to the topic “Administrative Culture(s) of International Organizations”. International Organizations (IOs) have proliferated in the 19th and 20th centuries and spread across the globe in their various forms from intergovernmental, financial to non‑governmental organizations. They have received considerable attention in recent years as conveyors of internationalism, as a specific model of multilateral conflict resolution, as sites of diplomatic, economic, and military cooperation and contestation and as platforms for the circulation of knowledge, models and practices of governance between nation states.
However, this has overshadowed that IOs themselves constituted the object and product of knowledge transfers and cooperation (as well as conflict) as organizations staffed by actors trained and experienced in different legal systems, administrative decision-making processes, writing and filing routines, and hierarchical structures. IOs, therefore, faced the challenge to establish an administrative apparatus that could integrate or supersede different administrative practices.
IOs can, however, not be understood as composites of national administrative cultures resulting from a unidirectional knowledge transfer from national to international administration. Instead, the administrative internationalisms of IOs provide the opportunity to go beyond such methodological nationalism and investigate the role of subnational administrative bodies, specific branches as well as individual actors. Taking IOs’ role in the circulation of knowledge seriously also means to ask not only how IOs contributed to the dissemination of new administrative models and practices but also whether and when they adopted them for their own administrative bodies.
We invite contributions on
We particularly invite contributions that go beyond the ‘Global North’ and examine the role of actors from or IOs established in the ‘Global South’.
ADMINISTORY sees itself as a platform to publish and discuss cutting-edge research on the history of administration. The journal, which appears once a year with double blind peer-review procedures, is interdisciplinary, transepochal and transnational as well as methodologically open. ADMINISTORY thus establishes itself as an interface between historical-cultural research and the debates on state and administration in the social sciences, law and political sciences. Contributions are published in German or English.
The issue will be edited in collaboration with Madeleine Herren-Oesch. If you would like to propose an article for this volume, please submit an abstract (max. 2,500 characters) including a title and a short CV by 30 September 2021 to thomas.rohringer@lmu.de. The selected authors will be notified in October; the deadline for submission of articles (max. 10,000 words, including footnotes) is 31 January 2022, an online authors’ workshop is planned at the end of February/beginning of March 2022.
Subsequently, the contributions will be reviewed in a double-blind peer-review process which will decide whether the texts are accepted for publication. Publication date for accepted texts is end of 2022.
More information: https://www.lhlt.mpg.de/notice/cfaadministory
