Is globalization a threat to democracy? In this podcast interview, PR Officer Kim König is joined by Julia Angster, professor of modern history at the University of Mannheim, to discuss the research behind her GHIL Lecture on globalization, democracy and the nation state in Germany after 1990. They explore the impact of globalization and neoliberalism on the nation state and national identity, the current state of liberal democracy and future directions for historiography beyond the national frame.

Is ‘globalization’ a threat to democracy? From the 1990s to the late 2010s, social scientists, economists, and historians in Western countries thought so. They worried about a loss of national sovereignty and agency, about national identity, and most of all about liberal democracy, which was based upon the national framing of state and society. This discourse was most prominent in post-unification Germany. The lecture will look at perceptions of ‘globalization’ and analyse the underlying assumptions about democracy and statehood. It argues that instead of a crisis of democracy, this was a crisis of national patterns of political thought dating back to the nineteenth century.

Some years ago, historians reacted to the elite bias of much historical writing by advocating a ‘bottom-up’ approach focusing on peasants, workers, the urban and rural poor, racial minorities, women, and others of subordinate status in their social contexts. To do so is not only to bring out the violence, exploitation, and suffering to which people at the bottom of a social order were subjected, but to look beyond the categories of knowledge through which dominant elements in society operate and to explore alternative conceptual schemes. The resulting scholarship has enriched different fields of history, not least my own field of African history and colonial and postcolonial studies more generally. Of course, some people are on the bottom because others are at the top, so bottom-up and top-down histories need each other. In this talk I will approach the study of power from a different angle, inspired by categories developed by the Senegalese politician, poet, and political thinker Léopold Sédar Senghor.

It is a widespread belief that the Reformation introduced the possibility of choosing between different variants of the Christian faith. In contrast, this lecture argues that the early German Reformation created a field of experimentation in which it was disputed who was able, and who was permitted, to decide on which faith options, and how. The Reformation gave rise to new questions of individual and collective religious decision-making, encompassing many different dimensions, such as faith options, the semantic and practical framing of situations in which choices were made, and the actors and procedures involved.

During the Reformation people had to choose between the Protestant and Catholic faith - or so the popular narrative goes. But is it really that simple? GHIL Deputy Director Michael Schaich and podcast host Kim König are joined by Matthias Pohlig, Professor of Early Modern European History at Humboldt University of Berlin, to discuss the research behind his GHIL Lecture on ‘Religious Decision-Making in the Early German Reformation’.

In this GHIL Podcast episode host Kim König is joined by GHIL Senior Fellow and Head of the India Research Programme Indra Sengupta to talk to Radhika Singha about her recent GHIL lecture and her research on criminology and 'scientific' penology in India, 1894-1955. Their conversation touches on criminal and labour histories, and seeks to answer the question of how the history of colonial India can be written into broader global histories.

The Indian Jail Committee report of 1919–20 is often cast as the turning point in colonial penal policy, when reform and rehabilitation were added to deterrence. But it is also acknowledged that very little changed on the ground. Why after all did a cash-strapped, politically-besieged regime sponsor a globe-trotting tour of jails and reformatories? Why did the committee return to enthuse about ‘flexible or indeterminate sentencing’, a principle embraced in the USA but faltering in Britain? To deflect criticism about the harsh treatment of ‘seditionist’ prisoners, the Jail Committee recast spaces of confinement as sites for agendas of post-war economic, institutional, and civic reconstruction. It presented a combined vision of confinement and social engineering that was taken up by colonial successor regimes.

Today, the state of emergency seems to be as permanent as it is omnipresent. The term became ubiquitous in the early twentieth century and continues to guide the self-description of contemporary societies. Yet, referring to ‘emergencies’ implies a large range of meanings, from actual states of war to moments of humanitarian crisis, from abstract realms of the law to concrete territories under siege. The lecture argues for a history of emergency experiences in the long twentieth century that reaches beyond ‘classical theories’ and focuses on the social dimensions of administrative agency instead. It treats the ‘state of emergency’ as an imaginary that informs technocratic practices and legal theory at the same time, and argues that historicizing it can help us to understand the critical role of the state apparatus in moments of transformation.

From living through wars to experiencing humanitarian crises, in this podcast episode, GHIL Research Fellow Clemens Villinger and PR officer Kim Koenig talk to Stephanie Middendorf about the research behind her GHIL Lecture on states of emergency and exception. What did they mean for societies in the 20th century and what can we take away for our own current moment?

Listen to Stefanie Middendorf's lecture on ‘Societies under Siege: Experiencing States of Emergency in the Long Twentieth Century’.

Can federations be stable? Should political orders last forever and constitutions be permanent?

75 years ago, the German Basic Law came into force.

In this GHIL podcast interview, Research Fellow for Modern History Pascale Siegrist and PR Officer Kim König talk to Eva Marlene Hausteiner, Chair in Political Theory and History of Political Thought at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, about her research on historical debates surrounding the introduction of the German Basic Law and the durability of federal constitutions.