60th Conference of the International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH) (PDF)

Time: 25.-27.09.2025
Venue: Linz
Proposals by – extended: 16.03.2025

The 60th Conference of the ITH will look at labor movements in the Global North and South and analyse exchanges, cooperation and connections between working classes, labour movements and trade unions. The success of decolonization in the post-World War Two Global South depended greatly on the ability of national(ist) political leaders to rally local labor movements behind their cause. Similarly, solidarity with anticolonial movements, or the lack thereof, showed by the labor organizations and workers’ political parties in the Global North, played an important role in the “battle for the hearts and minds” inside the metropoles. Labor movements in the center and periphery were not isolated, with rich exchanges taking place via political events, international conferences, delegation visits, and material aid. Parallel to the struggle to assert their geopolitical importance, governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean sought to establish social contracts with their working classes and control trade unions domestically, while using connections with organized labor and political actors in more developed countries to attract development cooperation.
The global turn in the historiographies of decolonization and the Cold War helped move studies of labor in the Global South beyond their old focus on the formation of national working classes. Recent research on competing labor internationalisms, communist support for decolonization, transnational developmental entanglements, and South-South solidarities opened new vistas for thinking about the working classes of the emerging Third World as constitutive makers of global modernity. Popularized by authors such as Łukasz Stanek (2020) and Adom Getachew (2019), the concept of ‘worldmaking’ has proven particularly fruitful in encompassing the wealth of simultaneous and often competing practices of transnational collaboration in the peripheries during the Cold War. This conference aims to look at the role of workers and workers’ movements situated in the Cold War ‘South’, ‘North’, ‘East’, ‘West’, and ‘in-between’, in these practices of worldmaking triggered by decolonization between the 1950s and the 1990s. Read more … (PDF)

Preparatory group
Goran Musić, Immanuel Harisch, and David Mayer (Univ. of Vienna), Shivangi Jaiswal (Ca‘ Foscari Univ. of Venice), Saima Nakuti Ashipala (Univ. of the Free State, Bloemfontein), Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History), Therese Garstenauer and Laurin Blecha (ITH)