Author meets Critic: The Information Strategies of the League of Nations

Book launch.

Emil Eiby Seidenfaden will present his book Informing Interwar Internationalism: The Information Strategies of the League of Nations (Bloomsbury 2024). Professor Louis Clerc, University of Turku will then offer his comments and questions. Finally, the floor will be open for all attendees to discuss the book and the project behind it.

Examining the public information strategies employed by the League of Nations between 1919 and 1940, the book combines international history and the history of communications to tell the story of how officials in Geneva planned for a new kind of public relations to underpin and strengthen the League's internationalist project. Drawing on multi-archival work and shedding light on the role played by journalists in international diplomacy, it follows the footsteps of the people who left promising careers to work for the League's information section and shape “opinion” on a global scale.

All are welcome, and the discussion is followed by a reception.

Bios

Louis Clerc is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Turku, Finland. He specializes in international relations, foreign policy, public diplomacy and propaganda in the Nordic countries, France and Europe

Haakon A. Ikonomou is a Tenure-track Adjunct at the Saxo-Institute at the University of Copenhagen. A historian of international organizations, internationalism, global governance, international bureaucracy and diplomacy, he takes inspiration from digital, global, prosopographical, biographical, institutional, social and oral history approaches.

Emil Eiby Seidenfaden is a postdoctoral researcher at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen. He has previously held research and lecturer posts at the University of Oxford, UK, and Roskilde University and Aarhus University, Denmark.