WONAGO Lecture Series

About the WONAGO Lecture Series The decades since the late twentieth century have been marked by both the end of the bipolar world order and the rise of the countries and regions of the Global South. Most explanations of these major changes focus on political and economic power shifts and pay less attention to the ideas of order on which political and economic decisions are based. In particular, not much research has been done on how actors within the Global South understand and influence world order.

World Order Narratives of the Global South (WONAGO) is a project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and collectively led by Universität Hamburg (UHH) and the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). The project explores how and why narratives of world order would be articulated and communicated in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East during the Cold War and then in the years since its end too. Our main interest is in highlighting the agency of actors from the Global South by examining their interactions with each other and comparing their narratives.

As part of this project, the WONAGO lecture series aims to generate an interdisciplinary discussion around various components of these world order narratives and build a community of scholars and policymakers engaged with these issues. We therefore invite guests based in different parts of the world to present their understandings of how key Global South actors have been describing the world order, how they construct, disseminate, and renegotiate their narratives, and how this has affected political, cultural, and social developments more broadly. The lectures take place monthly in virtual or hybrid format, depending on the pandemic situation. Information on our activities is available here, and our project X (Twitter) handle is @WONAGO_HH.

Why Middle East Monarchies Matter: Jordan and Beyond

Tuesday, 5 May 2026 | 1:30–3:00 p.m. (CEST)

Location: GIGA, Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20354 Hamburg, room 550, and online

Once the dominant form of government around the world, ruling monarchies have nearly gone extinct, with most surviving examples in the Middle East. Highlighting the cases of Jordan and other Arab states, this talk by Dr. Sean Yom presents insights from two book projects. He argues that the curious persistence of ruling monarchism is a crucial and misunderstood puzzle for students of dictatorship. First, royal autocracies in the Arab world endure not because they are monarchies, but because they have performatively and institutionally adapted to modern statecraft in ways that make them resemble republics. Historical comparisons with the region’s overthrown monarchies, including dozens of tribal dynasties and provincial thrones, show that nothing intrinsic about monarchism predicts longevity. Second, juxtaposing the Arab monarchies also reveals distinctive spatial effects. Monarchical practices long assumed to bolster institutional stability, such as hereditary succession and sacral legitimacy claims, have diffused across state boundaries in the Middle East and especially shaped regime practices in republican Iraq, Syria, and Libya. These dynamics suggest that however exceptional they seem, Middle East monarchies present remarkable global lessons about authoritarian politics that transcend their category.

Speaker:  Sean Yom is Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University (United States) and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at Democracy in the Arab World Now (DAWN). He is author of Jordan: Politics in an Accidental Crucible (Oxford University Press, 2025) and has published academic articles in outlets including the European Journal of International Relations, Journal of Democracy, Global Policy Journal, and Mediterranean Politics. He serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and editorial committee of Middle East Report. His current book manuscript is entitled Monarchism in the Middle East (under contract, Elements series of Cambridge University Press).

Moderator: Dr. Hakkı Taş (GIGA)

Language: English

Rehearsing the Future: The GenZ 212 Episode as a Tactical Laboratory for New Political Horizons

Thursday, 26 March 2026 | 4:00-6:00 p.m. (CET)

Location: GIGA, Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20354 Hamburg, room 550

This lecture explores how a new generation of digital-native activists are confronting one of the most pressing problems of contemporary contentious politics: how to mobilise under conditions of pervasive surveillance and repression. The case at its centre is the Moroccan GenZ 212 episode, a revealing instance of young people devising ways to organise and resist within a context engineered to preempt both. Rather than treating digital platforms as fixed tools, the analysis traces how young mobilisers made tactical decisions in motion, migrating between platforms, working with and against the particular affordances of each, and improvising communicative practices, not simply to coordinate action but to stay ahead of a security apparatus that was itself adapting in real time, both online and on the ground. The central argument is that this dynamic must be read as co-constitutive: tactics of evasion, misdirection, anonymisation, and platform-switching did not follow a predetermined script but emerged through ongoing, iterative confrontation with the specific repressive mechanisms deployed against them. The lecture then presses beyond the operational to ask what these tactical choices produce beyond their immediate effects. It argues that the experience of collectively navigating the cracks in surveillance architectures, of discovering agency where control appeared total, consequentially affects political imagination. The improvised repertoire of the GenZ 212 episode functions as a rehearsal space: not only for the next round of contention but also for futures that exceed the apparent boundaries of authoritarian constraint. Tactical fluidity, in this reading, cultivates more than capacity: it fosters a generational sensibility, a working conviction that repressive systems are porous and contestable that is likely to shape how this cohort approaches solidarity, aspiration, and collective action well beyond any single mobilisation. The lecture concludes by situating the GenZ 212 case as an early signal of an emerging modality of contention in authoritarian settings, one defined by not only infrastructural creativity and platform fluency, but also the way the practice of manoeuvring itself seeds a forward-looking political horizon.

Speaker:   Ismail El Mouttaki is a PhD Researcher in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS) in Florence, Italy. His research explores the relational dynamics between social movements and authoritarian regimes during intense and ordinary times, with a specific focus on strategies of (de)mobilisation and tactical innovations in authoritarian contexts.

Moderator:  Dr. Khalil Dahbi is a Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA).

Language: English

The Far-Right in the Southern Cone: From the Military Dictatorships to the Recent Right-Wing Turn

Thursday, 4 December 2025 | 4:15–5:45 p.m. (CET)

Location: Phil-Turm, Von-Melle-Park 6, 20146 Hamburg, room C1004 (1st floor) The lecture will focus on the recent shift to the right in the Southern Cone countries, which brought the far-right to power in that region starting with Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (2018) and Javier Milei in Argentina (2023), while Chile's political fate is currently in dispute during the 2025 November/December elections. This scenario represents a notable political realignment in the region, since after the end of the military dictatorships, in the 1980s, these countries underwent democratization processes with a progressive bias that marginalized the far-right.

The lecture aims to explain the recent context by exploring three analytical strategies: first, historically delving into the phenomenon of the resurgence of the far-right, contrasting it with previous experiences, especially the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s, whose legacies continue to mark the current scenario; second, reflecting on this object considering both its transnational connections - since the growth of the far-right is a global phenomenon that encourages local actors - and regional singularities; third, analyzing essential aspects of the far-right in the Southern Cone highlighting common points but also the peculiarities of each case. The intention is to offer a comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, which represents a serious authoritarian threat to a region where the democratic institutions have historically been fragile. Speaker: Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta is Professor of History at the Federal University of Minas Gerais and Level A researcher at the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). His research focuses on the political history of Brazil, also investing in comparisons and connections with the Southern Cone region. He has published, among others, the books On Guard against the Red Menace: anticommunism in Brazil (2020) and A Present Past: the Brazilian military dictatorship and the 1964 Coup (2023), as well as articles in prestigious international journals such as Hispanic American Review, Boletín del Instituto Ravignani, and the NACLA Report on the Americas.

Moderator: Dr. Natália Ayo Schmiedecke (Universität Hamburg)

Language: English

Civilizationism as Epistemic Reconstitution: The Predicament of Islamic Decoloniality in Turkey

Thursday, 25 September 2025 | 4:00–6:00 p.m. (CEST)

Location: GIGA Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20359 Hamburg, and online The notion of civilization has been a central concept not only in Turkey’s founding ideology, Kemalism, but also in the foundational political vision of the ruling AKP, which has governed Turkey for over two decades under an Ottoman-Islamic civilizationist program that fundamentally transformed the Westernizationist secular Kemalist regime. This transformation was largely made possible by the intellectual input coming from the Islamic intellectual field (IIF) in Turkey, which fueled and sustained the AKP’s civilizationist ideology and produced its leading cadres since the 1990s. Çınar’s research focuses on the ways in which the notion of civilization has been employed by leading journals and schools of thought in the IIF since the 1940s, to demonstrate how this civilizationist discourse is produced as an alternative epistemic paradigm, which seeks to restore what are seen as authentically local intellectual traditions and systems of knowledge rooted in Islam. It also claims that the decolonial discourse of the IIF runs into a predicament by uncritically sustaining the Islam-West binary, which ultimately reproduces the same hierarchies and power dynamics that are attributed to colonialism. Speaker:   Prof. Alev Çınar is Professor of Political Science at TED University, Turkey. She is the author of Modernity, Islam and Secularism in Turkey (2005), and her articles have appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History; IJMES; Theory & Society; and Signs. Her research interests include the intellectual foundations of politics; Islamic thought; political Islam; state-building and nationhood; modernity and decoloniality; gender and patriarchal statehood; nation-building, modernity, and Islam in Turkey.

Moderator: Dr. Hakkı Taş (GIGA)

Language: English

Towards a Populist International Order? Patterns, Effects, and Prospects of Global Populism 

Monday, 23 June 2025 | 4:00–6:00 p.m. (CEST)

Location: online This lecture explores whether we are witnessing the emergence of a Populist International Order (PIO) – a potential global shift driven by the growing influence of new political actors, strategies, and normative foundations in international politics. Drawing on a series of collaborative research projects on the patterns of populist foreign policy and the global effects of populism, the lecture offers a structured overview of how contemporary populist leaderships –often studied primarily at the national level— are reshaping foreign policymaking processes, international agendas, and cooperative engagement with multilateral institutions. We will examine how populist governments are operating on the global stage across key domains such as trade, finance, regional integration, and international security, and assess the domestic and international factors that either constrain or catalyze these dynamics in different regional contexts. The lecture concludes by addressing several forward-looking questions: Are we moving toward a new international order shaped by populism? Do recent global developments indicate a transition away from the Liberal International Order toward something fundamentally different? Based on populist visions of world order, what might such an order look like? Is this trend a temporary disruption, or does it mark a more lasting reconfiguration of global politics? And finally, what role can—or should—scholars and practitioners play in interpreting and engaging with this potential transformation? 

Speaker:  Prof. Dr. Daniel F. Wajner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations and the European Forum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on international legitimacy, conflict resolution, regional integration, and populist foreign policy, with an emphasis on their interplay in the realm of European, Latin American, and Middle Eastern politics. He is the co-editor of a 2024 special section in International Affairs on “The Effects of Global Populism”. His recent academic work has appeared in the Journal of European Integration, International Studies Review, International Affairs, Comparative European Politics, Journal of Global Security Studies, and Globalizations. He also co-edited the volume Populist Foreign Policy: Regional Perspectives of Populism in the International Scene (Springer, 2023). 

Moderator: Dr. Hakki Tas is a Research Fellow at the GIGA Institute for Middle East Studies.

Iran-Venezuela Relations: Presidents, Postures, and Pressures

Tuesday, 6 May 2025 | 6:00–8:00 p.m. (CEST)

Location: Universität Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 6, 20146, Phil-Turm Hörsaal C, Hamburg, and online This lecture examines the expanding relations between Iran and Venezuela despite not being natural allies. I argue that the proximity of these relations is predicated on changing presidents, postures, and pressures during different periods. From a policy perspective, these relations are reinforced by the imposition and intensification of US sanctions as the unintended consequence of a coercive wedge strategy. Speaker:   Dr. Eric Lob is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations and Political Science Graduate Program Director at the Florida International University.  

Language: English

Infrastructures of Belonging: An Analysis of Borders and Closure in Morocco’s Eastern Region

Monday, 28 April 2025 | 4:00–6:00 p.m. (CEST)

Location: GIGA, Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, room 243, Hamburg

This lecture explores how border closures in the Maghreb – particularly in Morocco’s eastern regions bordering Algeria – have reshaped regional belonging, identity, and spatial politics. In what ways do narratives of development shape understandings of spatiality in the border region? What are the dynamics between the imagined futures they encapsulate and a collective memory that has shaped notions of belonging in the borderland as a distinct geographical and identity space? Drawing on fieldwork and archival sources, this lecture seeks to unpack these questions by centring the border as both a physical and an affective space.

Speaker: Dr. Yasmine Zarhloule is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center and a Teaching Fellow at SOAS, University of London.

Moderator: Dr. Khalil Dahbi is a Research Fellow at the GIGA Institute for Middle East Studies.

Language: English

From Non-Alignment to Multi-Alignment: Arguments About India's Evolving Foreign Policy

Monday, 7 April 2025 | 6:00–8:00 p.m. (CEST)

Location: Universität Hamburg, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1 (ESA W 221), Hamburg, and online

Following its independence, India adhered to a policy of non-alignment, a policy that gradually eroded in the 1990s, giving way to the pursuit of strategic autonomy. Today, India's foreign policy is best characterised by multi-alignment, a strategy of engaging with multiple powers without formal alliances. This talk will trace India's journey from non-alignment to multi-alignment, exploring the many influences that have shaped this evolution.

Speaker: Dr. Happymon Jacob is an Associate Professor of Diplomacy and Disarmament at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Dr Jacob has held various academic and research positions, including at the University of Jammu, Jamia Millia Islamia University, Centre for Air Power Studies, Delhi Policy Group, and Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.

Language: English

Latin America in the Global Sixties: When Periphery Became the Centre

Monday, 10 July 2023 | 4:15–6:00 p.m. (CEST)

Location: Universität Hamburg, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1 (room 118), 20146 Hamburg, and online

The lecture inquires about the place of Latin America in the global sixties. It will address the trajectories and global influences of certain ideas, as well as political and intellectual projects, that emerged in Latin America. Through the study of the global paths of ideas such as liberation theology, dependency theory, and urban and rural guerrilla warfare, among others, an attempt will be made to show how the global sixties can also be read as an inversion of the centre-periphery scheme in the field of intellectual, cultural and political production.

Speaker: Dr. Aldo Marchesi (Universidad de la República, Uruguay)

Moderator: Dr. Natália Ayo Schmiedecke (Universität Hamburg)

Language: Spanish

Radical Rights in the Global South: Comparisons  Monday, 26 June 2023 | 5:15–7:00 p.m. (CEST)

Location: Universität Hamburg, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1 (room 118), Hamburg, and online Prof. Dr. Fabio Luis Barbosa dos Santos gives a lecture on a paper with findings of a systematic group effort undertaken by scholars from Turkey, Hungary, India, the Philippines and Brazil to compare radical right governments in those countries. Five cases are discussed: Turkey under Erdogan (assumed office in 2003), Hungary under Orbán (assumed office in 2010), India under Modi (assumed office in 2014); the Philippines under Duterte (2016-2022) and Brazil under Bolsonaro (2019-2022). Initial questions driving the comparison include: how did they come to power? What strategies of legitimation did they employ? What resistances did they face? Similarities and common threads are highlighted aiming to shed light on hatred politics as a global phenomenon but seen from the margins of global capital. It is argued that these regimes enact as cultural wars the dynamics of individualism and competition that preside daily social reproduction, while the policies they implement reinforce these same trends - that is to say, they reinforce the dissolution of social bonds that made the politicization of social resentment feasible in the first place. As the social and cultural dynamics that brought hatred politics to the limelight are reinforced, a dynamic comparable to an autoimmune disease unfolds, making it particularly hard to unseat these regimes once they are in power. Speaker: Prof. Dr. Fabio Luis Barbosa dos Santos (Universidade Federal de São Paulo)

Moderator: Dr. Thiago Prates (Universität Hamburg)  Language: English

Counternarratives, Opposition, and the Politics of Global Order

Wednesday, 24 May 2023 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. (CEST) Location: GIGA, Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20354 Hamburg, room 550, and online Based on recent work on the polemical nature of the concept of peace, and the role of subaltern counterpublics in global politics, Professor Jaap de Wilde and Dr. Benjamin Herborth will discuss the limitations of prevalent concepts of global order and explore the potential of rethinking global order in terms of processes of ordering. 

Speakers: Prof. Dr. Jaap de Wilde is Professor in International Relations & Security Studies at the University of Groningen.

Dr. Benjamin Herborth is Assistant Professor in History and Theory of International Relations at the University of Groningen.

Moderator: Dr. Mohammadbagher Forough (GIGA)

Language: English

India and the Indo-Pacific: Between Thucydides and Kindleberger Trap

Friday, 5 May 2023 | 3:00–5:00 p.m. (CEST) Location: GIGA, Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20354 Hamburg, room 531, and online

Ideological divisions (U.S.-led democracies versus China-patronized autocracies) have increasingly grown more prominent, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Debates over Thucydides Trap to Kindleberger Trap are intensifying. The major-power competition—the predominant economic, technological, and political rivalries between the democratic and authoritarian powers - is increasingly sharpening the security and governance landscape in the Indo-Pacific. How is India positioned in this tightly contested environment? What is India’s current and future approaches to Indo-Pacific power politics?

Speaker: Dr. Jagannath Panda is the Head of the Stockholm Center for South Asian and Indo-Pacific Affairs (SCSA-IPA) at the Institute for Security and Development Policy (ISDP), Sweden. He is also a Senior Fellow at The Hague Center for Strategic Studies, The Netherlands. As a senior expert on Indo-Pacific & China, Dr. Panda’s research focuses primarily on India’s relations with Indo-Pacific powers (China, Japan, Korea, USA); China-India Relations, India-Japan, and India-Korea relations. Dr. Panda has testified to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission at the US Congress on ‘China and South Asia’. He is the Series Editor for Routledge Studies on Think Asia, a Taylor and Francis publication series.

Moderator: Dr. Mohammadbagher Forough (GIGA)

Language: English

Rebellion at the Agrarian Frontier: Peasant Political Sociability, Globalism and the Colombian State 

Monday, 17 April 2023 | 5:00 p.m. (CEST) Location: GIGA, Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20354 Hamburg, room 550, and online

In this lecture, part of the WONAGO Lecture Series, Professor Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín presents his preliminary reflections on rebel peasant sociability, and its evolution in the last decades. The literature has long established that it was at the permanently expanding agrarian frontier that the Colombian guerrillas, and especially the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia by its acronym in Spanish), made their main inroads and were able to build relatively stable constituencies. But, on the other hand, rebellious peasants at that frontier were intimately linked to very dynamic and essentially deregulated global markets and involved in modest but tangible trajectories of social advancement. Why, how and under which conditions did they associate then to armed revolutionary projects? Prof. Dr. Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín will revisit possible answers to the question linking state, markets and peasant sociabilities.

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín (Universidad Nacional de Colombia)

Moderator: Dr. Alex Waterman (GIGA)

Language: English

Jihad and Revolution in Syria: Political and Scientific Narratives and Counter-narratives

Tuesday, 14 March 2023 | 4:15–6:00 p.m. (CET) Location: Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, ESA W 221, Flügel West, 20146 Hamburg, and online

This presentation is based on an ethnographic study conducted between 2016 and 2017 with the Syrian revolutionaries of the "liberated zones” in Turkey, close to the Syrian borders, and with the populations that lived under the Islamic State government and fled to refugee camps in Iraq. What distinguishes liberated zones, held by revolutionary forces, from the areas that are controlled by the regime and by the Islamic State? This presentation compares the political institutions, both formal and informal, of the principal actors of the conflict in Syria between 2011 and 2017. Building on this comparison, an investigation of the dominant narratives produced about the Syrian revolutions by politicians and scholars is presented, both in Europe and in the MENA regions, highlighting the main narrative positions polarising the political, journalistic, and scientific fields.  A particular focus will be placed on their views of the Arab uprisings, the Syrian revolution, and the case of Europeans who joined the Jihad with various Syrian factions. The presentation will then conclude by analysing the narratives emerging within the Syrian Revolution itself. More specifically, it will highlight the obsolescence of some earlier narratives such as those associated with “anti-imperial struggle”, “political Islam and Secularism”, and “Panarabism”, leading to their overtaking by newer narratives that emerged through the revolutionary process and its dynamics.

Speaker: Dr. Montassir Sakhi (KU Leuven)

Moderator: Dr. Khalil Dahbi (GIGA)

Language: English

Rearranging Cuba’s International Relations after the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Recomposición de las relaciones internacionales de Cuba tras la caída del muro de Berlín (1989-2022))

Wednesday, 21 September 2022 | 4:00–5:30 p.m. (CET)   Location: Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, ESA W 221, Flügel West, 20146 Hamburg, and online

This conference addresses the changes in international and political relations Cuba was forced to undergo at the beginning of the 1990s. The collapse of Socialism in Eastern Europe (1989–1990) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991), along with the strengthening of the economic blockade by the United Stateswith the Torricelli and Helms-Burton Acts, put the Cuban Revolution in the most difficult predicament it had ever faced. The deep and unexpected economic crisis ensuing was driven by the simultaneous loss of markets, prices, and credits, as well as of political and military allies. 

In less than four decades, Cuba had to reorient its economy and alliances twice at a stroke. First, because of the transformations happening after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, when it was necessary to modify the entire socio-economicstructure of the country and its political and military tiesin response to US hostility. Then, second, at the end of the 1990s – when the environmentin which Cuba had found itself since the 1960s abruptly vanished – the island had, in the middle of an unparalleled economic crisis, to once again drastically alterall its external relations. To a great extent, its economic system had to change as well, with the country facing the acute dilemma of either preserving the social gains achieved by the Revolution or surrendering to the siege of the US, which, taking advantage of the situation, redoubled the blockade. Favouring this new orientation was the extensive collaboration agreements signed first with the People’s Republic of China and later with Russia. However, the most significant of them has been the close collaboration with Venezuela, as well as the foundation of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), a new mechanism of regional integration in which Nicaragua, Bolivia, and other Latin American and Caribbean countries participate. ALBA has been the main base of support of the Cuban Revolution in the twenty-firstcentury. In particular, trade between Cuba and Venezuela would thereafter reach unprecedented levels. 

Speaker: Dr. Sergio Guerra Vilaboy (University of Havana) 

Moderator: Dr. Natália Ayo Schmiedecke (Universität Hamburg) 

Language: Spanish

Hold Your Tongue: Towards a Comparative History of “Small Languages” in Southern Africa and South Asia, 1850s–1930s

Wednesday, 18 January 2023 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. (CET)   Location: Research Centre “Hamburg's (post-)colonial Legacy”, Rothenbaumchausse 34, 20148 Hamburg (mezzanine level entry, on the left side next to Hamburg University Guest House) and online

In postcolonial historiography of both Southern Africa and South Asia, the relationship between colonialism and language has predominantly come to be cast in a manner that privileges such African and Asian languages which command substantive constituencies running into millions. In putting together a comparative story of the often-overlooked “small languages” in these two locations over a period of almost ninety years, this lecture attempts to complicate the easy narrative of vernacularity in the Global South. It explores the political implications of the familial model in the European linguistic imagination, the unequal access to and the uneven imprints of print technology, and the halting histories of standardisation and institutionalisation in colonial frontiers. Attention is given not only to the varying textures of the discursive entwinement of the ethnological and the philological but also to the different ways in which the language question came to be bound up with the promise of representative government in late-colonial climates. Excavating the formation of “small languages” in this style, the lecture contends, allows us to rethink the possibilities of anticolonial histories outside the strictures of methodological nationalism.

Speaker: Dr. Bodhisattva Kar (Department of Historical Studies at UCT University of Cape Town (UCT))

Moderator: Dr. Diana M. Natermann (Universität Hamburg)

Latin American Travels in the 19th Century: Gender, Narratives, and Projections on Europe and the United States

Wednesday, 17 August 2022 | 6:15–7:45 p.m. (CET) Location: Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, ESA W 122, Flügel West, 20146 Hamburg, and online

It has been said that the 19th century is the “golden age” of travel reports. To a large extent, European imperialism contributed to the fulfillment of many trips since knowledge of non-European areas of the globe could add advantages to a cultural, political, and, ultimately, economic power. So much so, that we consider it natural to call “travelers” only those who transited from Europe to Latin America and less likely those who traveled in the opposite direction.

Despite the difference in scale, 19th century Latin America also produced its travelers – men and women. What can we say about the perceptions of these characters on trips to Europe and the United States? Would it be possible to understand their testimonies as a manifestation of what is currently called the Global South? And what about the reports of women? Would they represent a kind of “double counter direction” in a more general picture in which the hegemonic vision was male and European?

The main objectives of this lecture are to analyse, through these narratives, Latin American projections on Europe and the United States in the 19th century and to understand how travel experiences may have collaborated to create and consolidate identities; besides how gender relations contributed to these visions.

Speaker: Dr. Stella Franco (University of São Paulo)

Moderation: Dr. Thiago Prates (Universität Hamburg)

Narratives and Testimonies of Cuban Internationalists in Africa and the Middle East During the Cold War

Thursday, 12 May 2022 | 6:30–8:00 p.m. (CET) Location: Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, ESA W 221, Flügelbau Westen, 20146 Hamburg, and online

Cuba’s internationalism with Africa and the Middle East during the Cold War has gathered a lot of attention by Western scholars in the last two decades. Most well-known missions took place in Portuguese Guinea, Angola, Argelia, and Syria. However, there are no academic historical publications regarding these episodes written by Cuban scholars due to the difficulty of getting records from the different archives in Havana. In contrast, several testimonies of people who fought in these conflicts have been published in the island in the past years. During this presentation different narratives and testimonies of Cuban internationalists in Africa and the Middle East during the Cold War will be presented, contextualized and analyzed in order to find out their main characteristics and reflect on the uses of memory of which they are a part.

Speaker: Dr. Fernando Camacho Padilla is a researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Moderation: Dr. Natália Ayo Schmiedecke is a researcher at the Universität Hamburg.

Clandestine Transcripts of Revolutionary Globalization: The Shining Paths of Late Cultural Revolution Maoism

Wednesday, 13 April 2022 | 6:00–7:30 p.m. (CET) Location: Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, ESA W221, Flügelbau Westen, 20146 Hamburg, and online

In the growing literature on Global Maoism and its influence during the long and global 1960s, scholars have come to recognize the centrality of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) to Maoism’s spread. However, the focus in both sinological Cultural Revolution scholarship and in studies of Maoism’s influence during the 1960s has been on what could be called the ‘Right to Rebel’ years when Red Guards held massive demonstrations, warred with each other, and tore down the existing structure of Communist Party authority. While the broad influence of this destructive phase of the Cultural Revolution on the imagination of students and revolutionaries around the world is undeniable, the constructive phase of the Cultural Revolution which followed the early, chaotic years has been largely missed.

The efforts of the radical Maoists Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and their collaborators to articulate a new political economy of socialism which broke with past Chinese and Soviet practice were silenced with the October 1976 coup. Zhang, Yao and others were arrested and their theoretical work, the product of a collective endeavor with members of the economics department of Fudan University, was seized from the presses where it had just been published (and has remained unavailable outside very restricted party circles ever since). Despite the official silencing and repudiation of this Maoist political economy in China, the unprecedented public and collective effort that went into articulating this theory during the years before the capitalist restoration that followed Mao’s death led to the globalization of these ideas. The partial articulation of this theory in public campaigns, propaganda materials, and in conversations and meetings that foreign communists (such as the Shining Path’s Antonio Díaz Martínez and Catalina Adrianzén, among many others) visiting or working in China held with members of the radical Maoist minority of the Chinese Communist Party led to these ideas forming an anchor which grounded post-Mao global Maoism after the repudiation of Maoism in China itself. In sites as diverse as Peru, the Philippines, Nepal, and India, large Maoist communist parties drew on this late Cultural Revolution Maoist political economy as a way of answering existential questions about the communist project (and even to grow and thrive) in the context of the reversal in China and then the global defeat of Soviet-aligned countries. This lecture will discuss the articulation of these ideas in late Cultural Revolution China and the process of their globalization, while also touching on the existing literature and issues related to further research on this topic.

Speaker: Dr. Matthew Rothwell (Independent Scholar) Moderation: Dr. Thiago Prates (Universität Hamburg)

Exploring Elites’ Use of Friendship Narratives through the Erdoğan–Obama Relationship

Thursday, 17 March 2022 | 2:00 p.m. (CET)

Barack Obama’s 2009 visit to Turkey resulted in an Obama-mania in the Turkish media, followed by a friendship between Obama and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, which was widely reported in the media and emphasised in their rhetoric. In this lecture, the panellists explain the Erdoğan–Obama friendship narrative by interpreting the relationship through the five key components of political friendship: affect; grand project; altruistic reciprocity; moral obligations; and equality. Our guests argue that histories, leadership styles, and political goals diverged to such an extent that an actual political friendship never existed.

Through sentimental utility theory (SUT), the researchers illuminate the function of friendship narratives and offer insights into how collective emotions produce in-group identities and generate stability for a state’s population. SUT reveals how Erdoğan utilised the Obama-mania in Turkey to create the idea of a personal bond between Obama and himself, and a link between Obama’s progressive politics and Erdoğan’s own policies. This example can be used to show how future research might deploy SUT to make sense of other narratives of friendship and special relationships between states and between state leaders.

Speakers: Dr. Ryan O’Connor is a Senior Lecturer in Security Studies at the Birmingham City University. Dr. Yuri van Hoef is a Lecturer in the School of History, Culture and Communication at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Moderation: Dr. Alex Waterman is a Research Fellow at the GIGA.