This is the introduction to the ‘Rethinking Internationalisms’ featured series, which explores how marginalised stories of internationalism can be recovered. The series brings together histories of internationalism that foreground the roles of postcolonial, grassroots, marginalised, and otherwise unconventional actors, organisations and places. This series is a collaboration with the Rethinking Internationalism: Histories and Pluralities (2024-2026) project, which is funded via an AHRC Curiosity Grant (AH/Z50662X/1).
A worldwide lurch to the right, wars, genocide, energy shocks, cuts in foreign aid funding, immigration panics and, for many parts of the globe, economic stagnation. These are the first things that come to mind when we think of the ‘international’ in 2026: it seems to be a story of unravelling international agreements, defunded international organisations, and a retreat to the beggar-thy-neighbour world of the 1930s. Yet there are other forms of cooperation at work, operating beyond the state-state diplomatic sphere and often rooted in particular visions of solidarity or shared causes. For instance, think of the cosmopolitan organising behind the Freedom Flotillas attempting to break the blockade of Gaza, or the international delegation of social movements and human rights defenders in Honduras protesting alongside the Garífuna people, who are mobilising for their rights to ancestral land. There are also ongoing and growing forums for right-wing and far-right international collaboration on display.
History tells us that non-state forms of international activism can be vectors of global change, that internationalism can belong to individuals and communities as much as it does to sovereign states. A focus primarily on the latter obscures other agents of internationalism(s), whether students, scientists, smallholders or artists. In our broader network-based project on ‘Rethinking Internationalism’, we show that it is more accurate to talk of internationalisms – overlapping, collaborating, often competing projects – than assuming a uniformity of practice and ideology across banner terms like ‘Liberal’, ‘Communist’ or even ‘Anti-Imperialist’. This series explores how we can recover marginalised stories of internationalism that demonstrate the ways in which appeals to some international authority or the impetus for international change can come from unexpected sources beyond traditional seats of state power.
It aims to showcase a key goal in our ‘Rethinking Internationalism’ project: to take stock of the fullest possible range of international actors and principles, far exceeding the traditional post-1945 Anglo-American liberal consensus or the binaries of Cold War power blocs. The aim is to write back in geographies, actors and settings that have fallen out of scholars’ sight, even when their activities have had tangible international ramifications. Yet if these voices are not part of the discourse, how can we recover them? And how does writing their stories change the history of internationalism at large? These were questions we explored in our 2025 ‘New Methods for New Histories’ workshop, which the articles in this series are based on.
The historical narrative so far has some hints. Well-established international principles were often embraced for ends other than those that their most famous proponents intended. A well-known example is Wilson’s call for self-determination in his famous Fourteen Points in 1918, encouraging Anglo-American style representative government in the nations born out of the collapse of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires in Europe. Wilson was presenting an idea that contrasted sharply with Lenin’s far more radical ideas of self-determination, which carried a distinct anti-imperial message. Wilson’s antidote was this version that underpinned the creation of the new international order of the League of Nations.
Self-determination did not remain confined to polished hallways trod by Allied leaders or even within the bounds of socialist anti-imperialist Petrograd. The principle gained a new vigour as it was adopted by anti-colonialists across the world, whether those of the Pan African Congress or those trying to establish how the vast land mass of the British Indian empire could stake its claim as a nation-state. Rather than buying into the civilisational claim that cast the peoples of Asia, Africa or the Pacific as incapable of, or unready for, self-governance, these voices set about redefining the terms of nationhood, and consequently independent statehood and economy, that could be manipulated to fit within these new international understandings. Histories of twentieth century internationalism are just as about Wilson as about those of non-Western nation-states and activists.
Places like Paris, Berlin and Brussels were fertile ground for many alternative views of internationalism because of the constellation of activists, artists, political exiles, trade unionists and intellectuals of all races and creeds they drew. Many anti-colonial nationalists were amongst their number, but so too were those who held different views about radical anti-imperialist networks, of the nation-state, and of the nature of solidarity. In later decades, cities such as Shanghai, Bandung and Cairo similarly brought together diverse groups of activists at crucial moments in the 20th century. Not only are the papers of those who gained prominence in their national stories important; think, for example, of the interconnected and multifaceted histories of Black Internationalism that accommodated Pan-African sentiment, feminism, national liberation, and civil rights.
Moments such as Paris in 1919 were simultaneously about the re-introduction of old hierarchical principles in new nationalist language and new ideas and possibilities of intervention by formerly excluded actors. As the articles in this series demonstrate, international questions of disarmament, decolonisation, pacifism, educational co-operation and environmentalism drew the attention of a variety of people, for a variety of interlinked goals, ranging from self-determination to the granting of individual political rights.
The creation of new political forums prompted unexpected awakenings of individual internationalist consciousness. Historians of the League of Nations have observed how mechanisms employed by bodies such as the Mandates Commission, like petitions, allowed both persons and communities lacking in official representation to lobby for their rights and beliefs. So a religious leader in mandate Palestine, which was governed by the British on behalf of the League of Nations, wrote to draw the League’s attention to the ways in which British troops undercut the rights of people who were not their colonial subjects but a nation in their own right. Nor were approaches to internationalism always organised through such formalised procedures. They could also creep into peoples’ consciousness as it infiltrated their everyday worlds. Pilgrims travelling for the Hajj to Mecca in the early 20th century often did so by steamship, their journeys bringing them into contact with internationally circulating capital, industry and even quarantine.
Others openly defied new international norms. They extended their political dissidence into challenging the international processes introduced by the 1920 Convention on the Passport’s requirement of standardised travel documentation. To the consternation of many Western powers, communists and anarchists in the Middle East criss-crossed mandate territories and the new states formed from the break-up of the Ottoman Empire with forged passports. Consciously, inadvertently, or defiantly, individuals – and not just networks or putative nation-states – also became international actors solidifying or altering these new ideas through the way in which they put them into practice.
This series focuses on farmers, ashramites, activists, and educationists to form a picture of diverse and sometimes unexpected internationalists, giving insights into what prompted their activities. The doings of such international actors take us outside of embassies, presidential palaces, and the hallways of international bodies in Geneva and New York. They force us to see beyond the official records and archives of states and supranational bodies. In some cases, official archives, like those of the League of Nations itself, testify to a plethora of interactions with individuals, groups and associations, making it possible to use them as starting points to explore heterogeneous, multivocal histories of internationalism. Yet there is a rich, ‘unofficial’, in some cases yet-to-be-built archive beyond these records, whether piecing together activists’ stories or seeing bodily intervention as an expression of internationalism. In other cases, method offers a balm, such as the new visualisations offered by digital history.
The authors of this series were asked, how can we write histories of internationalism that acknowledge the instrumental roles played by postcolonial, grassroots, marginalised, or simply unconventional actors, organisations and places? Does the meaning of internationalism itself change depending on where, when and how we look for it and which voices in the archives we listen to? Who gets to write the history of internationalism, and who doesn’t? How can hitherto hidden or invisible connections be foregrounded? What are the risks and strengths of a ‘scavenger’ approach to finding sources? Which blindspots remain?
Histories of internationalism offer solace at a time of uncertainty, reminding us that ordinary people outside of the halls of power wield the means of transformational change. These marginalised internationalisms have the power to become mainstream; mainstream internationalisms can evolve. The twentieth century has been testimony to that, whether we consider that anti-colonial radicals claiming self-determination for themselves in the era of the League became world leaders at the United Nations, or that interwar women’s solidarity networks produced representatives who shaped the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.