Project description
How international bureaucracy took shape
The League of Nations is mostly remembered for failing to keep world peace, but it actually left behind a massive legacy. It essentially invented the modern global bureaucracy. With this in mind, the ERC-funded INNER-LEAGUE project aims to study the 4 000 people who worked in its Secretariat to understand how they lived and worked. Instead of focusing on official treaties, the project will investigate the social lives, office hierarchies, and personal networks of these early international civil servants. Overall, the project expects to reveal how their day-to-day interactions created the blueprint for organisations such as the UN. This should provide insight into how human relationships have shaped the way the world is run today.
Objective
INNER_LEAGUE provides the first, comprehensive social-bureaucratic history of the League of Nations Secretariat. The project will investigate the inner life of the secretariat to a) understand how it shaped the professional lives of the ca. 4000 people that worked there. And b) how this global workplace shaped the lasting bureaucratic infrastructures of multilateralism it serviced.
The project posits that it was the personal, social, and professional relationships in this bureaucracy that created what later has been reinterpreted as an anonymous machinery in the background of grand politics. Today international public administrations are so pervasive that the innovation of its emergence is mostly forgotten.
To deliver on its undertaking, the project implements an approach combining social, institutional, and digital history across three work packages: i) Communities, ii) Hierarchies, and iii) Infrastructures. To operationalize its approach, INNER_LEAGUE has several concrete objectives:
1) To systematically uncover and analyse the emergence, endurance, change and impact of professional, educational, epistemic, social, and emotional communities within the League Secretariat.
2) To examine the often-contested formation of hierarchies within the League Secretariat via state-of-the-art digital approaches.
3) To investigate how processes of community building and hierarchization impacted upon the professional lives of the staff of the League Secretariat.
4) To study and explain how, and under what material circumstances, these hierarchized communities of officials and staff built, maintained, operated, and passed on new infrastructures of multilateralism.
INNER_LEAGUE thus provides a completely new history of why – while the League was first disgraced by its inability to prevent WWII and then slipped into obscurity among diplomats and politicians alike – its bureaucratized multilateralism became a foundational hallmark of 20th and 21st century international politics.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities history and archaeology history
- social sciences political sciences public administration bureaucracy
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
1165 KOBENHAVN
Denmark
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